Samsung Galaxy Gear Support

[philmair]

I guess it will be a small target audience, but it would be great if you could develop a Galaxy Gear app so I could read my Aquamail emails on my smartwatch.

[Kostya Vasilyev]

Development for the original Gear was by invite only, and I was not invited The Gear 2 is completely new.

In theory, I'm interested.

However, it would require writing a complete (albeit small) app to run on the watch itself, to actually show notifications pushed from the Android device.

This is complicated by the Gear 2 using an entirely different operating system, called Tizen, not Android.

[pyler]

I think you should rather look on Android Wear

[scanno]

Yeah Android Wear could be the way to go.

[Kostya Vasilyev]

I'm going to look at that too -- it's much easier, since the API is high level ("push this text with this icon") and builds on Android notification APIs for the status bar, with some "extra" bits of info.

I am also quite happy with Sony's API for LiveView (the original) and the newer MN2 and SW2, it's also high-level ("push this text with this icon"), so very easy to add.

Samsung, on the other hand, requires a whole app running on a wholly different operating system.

Oh, and their development tools made my Windows 8.1 blue screen -- first time I've ever seen one in many years (from Vista till now).

[Kostya Vasilyev]

I spent a couple of hours looking at Android Wear last night, using emulator images.

Looks good. There is an easy way to interact with the watch right from an Android app (no surprise there), and -- and this is important -- I won't have to write my own app that runs on the watch (wouldn't be a problem anyway, since these watches run a flavor of Android).

However, creating a good experience, I mean better than just mirroring status bar notifications from the "main" device (which the system already does automatically), is going to be a bit of work.

At the very least, I'd like to implement the "Card Stack" UI:

https://developer.android.com/design/wear/patterns.html

I'm going to try to work on this after "swipe stuff to do stuff" that I've got planned, and I'm giving it higher priority than supporting Samsung's Gear 2 / Gear 2 Neo.

Reasons:

- For the Gear 2, it's necessary to write an application that runs on the watch itself, using an as yet unfamiliar to me Tizen OS

- Samsung now has an Android Wear device too. Is Tizen even going to be around much longer?

Supporting both would be great, but I've got to prioritize.