Google today released the second developer preview of Android Wear 2.0. Announced at the company's I/O 2016 developer conference, the update will add support for standalone apps, complications, and quite a bit more.
Here's what's new in today's build:
Platform API 24 - We have incremented the Android Platform API version number to 24 to match Nougat. You can now update your Android Wear 2.0 Preview project’s compileSdkVersion to API 24, and we recommend that you also update targetSdkVersion to API 24.
Wearable Drawers Enhancements - We launched the wearable drawers as part of the Android Wear 2.0 Preview 1, along with UX guidelines on how to best integrate the navigation drawer and action drawer in your Android Wear app. In Preview 2, we have added additional support for wearable drawer peeking, to make it easier for users to access these drawers as they scroll. Other UI improvements include automatic peek view and navigation drawer closure and showing the first action in WearableActionDrawer’s peek view. For developers that want to make custom wearable drawers, we’ve added peek_view and drawer_content attributes to WearableDrawerView. And finally, navigation drawer contents can now be updated by calling notifyDataSetChanged.
Wrist Gestures: Since last year, users have been able to scroll through the notification stream via wrist gestures. We have now opened this system to developers to use within their applications. This helps improve single hand usage, for when your users need their other hand to hold onto their shopping or their kids.
You'll notice that the new Preview supports Platform API 24, which is the same as Android 7.0 Nougat; however, it would appear that Nougat and Android Wear 2.0 are not on the same release schedule.
Google recently released the fourth Developer Preview for Nougat, which offers finalized APIs. The company will offer one more Preview build before a final release in Q3.
Where Nougat promises monthly Previews, Android Wear 2.0 promises new milestones every six weeks. It also promises final APIs in milestone 4, and it has the same schedule of five milestones followed by a final release.
As with the first Developer Preview, today's build is only available for the Huawei Watch and the LG Watch Urbane 2nd Edition LTE. You can download the images right here.
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