DroidScript Wear future?

[Kieran Mason]

A while back I got a new smartwatch, LG Urbane, which uses the renowned Android Wear OS. This lead me to thinking about how I could develop with DroidScript for my Sony Smartwatch 2, but not my new one, hence this post.

I have seen a few posts regarding Android Wear, stating that you were hoping to add support, "but it's complicated" - that is completely understandable. Also, you released an Android Wear application, was this anything in relation to DroidScript?

Is there anything in store for DroidScript and Android Wear in the future? If so, what can we expect?

From this post I hope to get more of an up-to-date perspective on the situation, as I'm eager to find out what is upcoming for DroidScript :)

[Dave Smart]

Hi Kieran,

Because Android Wear apps need a wear APK embedded into the main APK as a resource + special manifest entries it makes creating them very complicated within DroidScript.  We created our Wear Apps using a 'special' build of DroidScript which was simply acting as a template android project. ChrisH created that template project and he would be in a better position to determine how easy it will be to implement a more generic solution in the future.  

It would probably be fairly easy to create an Android Wear App which was capable of launching a choice of DS Apps though (Like on the SW2), this might be useful for those experimenting with their own projects but this would not allow users to build their own Wear APKs.

We do however have a Pebble plugin in the works (Pebble is much easier to work with :)

Regards

David

[Chris Hopkin]

Hi Kieran

We would love to support Android Wear with DroidScript, however it is not as straight forward as Sony SmartWatch 2 or Pebble. The Wear app was written using a combination of Android Studio for the watch app and a special build of DroidScript for the phone app. This was a pretty cumbersome approach, but there are certainly parts of this we would reuse for a more generic solution. A more ideal approach would be to support creation of Android Wear apps using DroidScript in a similar way to Sony SmartWatch 2 - requiring the Android Wear app launcher approach Dave mentioned.

The future for DroidScript Android Wear support, is likely to take the form of a separate version of DroidScript, which would come with the Android Wear app launcher, and potentially a specialised version of the APKBuilder for building and packaging up the phone and watch app APKs. Achieving this will take some time, and it is not a high priority right now, but it would be good to hear how many would be interested in this?

Thanks

Chris

[Kieran Mason]

Thank you both for you replies. It sounds like you've got your work cut out for you!
My intent with Android Wear DS was solely to use it for personal projects, so the launcher sounds good, and I am relatively sure that many others would support this as well.
It's always nice to see DroidScript expanding and I shall look forward to this!
Thanks again!