What’s New In Wear OS Android P Developers Preview

Google recently released the first beta build of Android P for the Pixel smartphones. Similarly, the company has now released an Android P  Wear OS developer preview for the Huawei Watch 2, as there is no official Google smartwatch. Here are the top five features from the latest Android P beta preview for Wear OS.

Dark Theme

This is one of the features, that was long due. As most of the smartwatches have an OLED display, a dedicated dark theme will increase the battery life of the device. This feature will also increase the visibility of the content in low light conditions, without straining user’s eyes.

Limited Background Activity

As smartwatches come with a smaller battery, running multiple applications in the background can drain up the juice quickly. With this feature, no application will run on background, except for watch face and settings. Additionally, the watch can run multiple applications in the background when it is charging.

Turn off radios when off body

Most of the smartwatches are capable of connecting to a smartphone via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. In fact, some of the high-end watches do support LTE for standalone functionality. Being connected to an external network will consume a lot of power. With this update, the watch will get disconnected from a network as soon as the user removes the watch from his wrist.

Wi-Fi will be off when Bluetooth is off

If the watch is not connected to a smartphone using Bluetooth, then it cannot connect to a wireless Wi-Fi network. However, the device can connect to a Wi-Fi network while charging, without being connected to a smartphone. This means, most of the software updates happen, when the watch is charging or when it connected to a charging station.

Restriction to non-SDK methods

This feature is applicable for Wear OS app developers. Starting with the Android P based Wear OS, the app developers have to use official SDK to create newer apps. This will help optimise and increase the compatibility across the smartwatches running on Wear OS.