SmartWatch support found in Windows Phone 8.1 Update 1s new APIs

[George P Global Moderator]

For a few months now, you may have heard us mention that smartwatches and smart accessories were on the horizon for Windows Phone, especially towards August and September. The FitBit app announced last week is the first in that volley, and more are coming later this month.

 

Developer Jeremy Sinclair has now gone through the Update 1 for Windows Phone 8.1 that is rolling out today for Preview users and documented all the new APIs available. It is quite telling, as many of these APIs are to handle background and telephony tasks for those connected devices.

 

Posted at Pastebin, the data makes it is clear developers can write apps to handle phone calls (accept, reject, make a call with video, etc.), alarms (snooze, dismiss), reminders (snooze, dismiss), and to handle notifications. Some other examples of added functionality include:

 

Apps can check the status of Quiet Hours and Driving Mode

 

Support for video phone calls

 

GetApps() will return a list of apps installed

 

These APIs are not yet defined in the SDK for public developers. Instead, they are for OEMs and hardware manufacturers e.g. if a company like Pebble wanted to make an app for Windows Phone they now have the tools to do so. Pebble could create an app that pulls up notifications from the phone, respects the phone's defined Quiet Hours, and pullup a list of phone apps that control things like which ones send notifications to the smartwatch. Presumably smartwatches with video cameras can handle incoming videophone calls as well.

 

Whether or not Microsoft is planning to open these APIs up to third party developers is not clear, though we are trying to learn more. Nevertheless, at least those companies who make smartwatches or smart accessory hardware have the tools now to do so on Window's Phone.

 

More at : http://www.wpcentral.com/smartwatch-support-windows-phone-81-found-gdr1?utm_source=wpc&utm_medium=twitter

 

Update 1 is looking like a nice size update the more people look into it.  Good stuff.

[Brandon H Supervisor]

here's hoping that Pebble does take advantage of this and makes an app for WP :)

[George P Global Moderator]

here's hoping that Pebble does take advantage of this and makes an app for WP :)

 

 

Yeah, I also hope they can keep up with this new release schedule, update 1 isn't a small update from the looks of things so update 2 should be a good size one as well.   If they can these releases every 4-6 months then the feature gap with the other platforms is going to be gone in no time, it closed quite a bit with vanilla 8.1 already.