Bridging options for notifications

By default, the system bridges, or shares, notifications from a phone app to any paired watches. If you build a watch app and your app also exists on a paired phone, users might receive duplicate notifications—one that the phone app generates and bridges, and one that the watch app generates. Wear OS includes features to control how and when notifications are bridged.

Avoid duplicate notifications

When you create notifications from an external source, such as from Firebase Cloud Messaging, your phone app and your watch app can each display its own notifications on the watch. To avoid duplication, programmatically disable bridging in your watch app.

Use bridge tags

To bridge some of the notifications that your phone app creates to the watch when your watch app is installed, set bridge tags.

Set a bridge tag on a notification by using the setBridgeTag(String) method, as shown in the following code sample:

val notification = NotificationCompat.Builder(context, channelId)
    // ... set other fields ...
    .extend(
        NotificationCompat.WearableExtender()
            .setBridgeTag("tagOne")
    )
    .build()
BridgingConfiguration.kt

Disable bridging

You can disable bridging for some notifications or for all notifications. We recommend that you selectively disable bridging.

Disable bridging for only some notifications

You can dynamically disable bridging and, optionally, permit some notifications through based on their tag. For example, to disable bridging for all notifications except those tagged as tagOne, tagTwo, or tagThree, use the BridgingConfig object as shown in the following example:

// In this example, bridging is only enabled for tagOne, tagTwo and tagThree.
BridgingManager.fromContext(context).setConfig(
    BridgingConfig.Builder(context, isBridgingEnabled = false)
        .addExcludedTags(listOf("tagOne", "tagTwo", "tagThree"))
        .build()
)
BridgingConfiguration.kt

Disable bridging for all notifications (not recommended)

To prevent bridging of all notifications from a phone app, use the <meta-data> entry in the manifest file of the watch app, as shown in the following example:

<!-- Beware, this can have unintended consequences before the user is signed-in -->
<meta-data
    android:name="com.google.android.wearable.notificationBridgeMode"
    android:value="NO_BRIDGING" />
AndroidManifest.xml

Set a dismissal ID to sync similar notifications

When you prevent bridging with the bridging mode feature, dismissals of notifications are not synced across a user's devices.

However, if similar notifications are created on both the phone and the watch, you want both notifications to be dismissed when the user dismisses either one of them.

In the NotificationCompat.WearableExtender, you can set a global unique ID so that when a user dismisses a notification, other notifications with the same ID on paired watches are also dismissed.

The NotificationCompat.WearableExtender class has methods that let you use dismissal IDs, as shown in the following example:

When the user dismisses the notification, all other notifications with the same dismissal ID are dismissed on the watch and on the phone. To retrieve a dismissal ID, use getDismissalId().

In the following example, a globally unique ID is specified for a new notification, so dismissals are synced:

val notification = NotificationCompat.Builder(context, channelId)
    // ... set other fields ...
    .extend(
        NotificationCompat.WearableExtender()
            .setDismissalId("abc123")
    )
    .build()
BridgingConfiguration.kt

Local-only notifications

To prevent duplicate notifications, you can also use setLocalOnly() to make notifications local to the phone.

However, use this method only if the notification must appear only on the device that created it. This includes not only Wear OS devices, but other wearables and any other connected devices. A local-only notification does not bridge, even if your app is not installed on the watch.

When building a Wear OS and phone app that both create notifications, don't use this approach to avoid duplicate notifications. Instead, use the bridging options.

For example, use a local-only notification when a user downloads a file on a phone and the notification indicates that the download is complete.

When notifications aren't bridged

The system doesn't bridge the following types of notifications:

Implementation considerations for bridged notifications

It takes time to push or remove bridged notifications from a wearable device. As you design your notifications, avoid unexpected behavior caused by this latency. The following guidelines help ensure that your bridged notifications work with asynchronous notifications:

  • If you cancel a notification on the phone, it might take some time to cancel the corresponding notification on the watch. During this time, the user might send one of the pending intents on that notification. For this reason, continue to receive pending intents in your app from notifications it has canceled: when canceling notifications, keep those notifications' pending intent receivers valid.
  • Don't cancel and retrigger an entire stack of notifications at one time. Only modify or remove the notifications that have actually been modified. This avoids the latency on updating the wearable device and reduces your app's impact on battery life.

Design considerations

Wear OS notifications have their own design guidelines. For more information, see the Wear OS Design Guidelines.