Explore new features

Wear OS 5 Developer Preview introduces several new features to help enhance your Wear OS app experience. Before you add these features to your app, test your app for compatibility with Wear OS 5 Developer Preview.

Grid-based app launcher

Wear OS 5 Developer Preview introduces a built-in, system-provided app launcher that resembles a grid. This grid-based app launcher is visually similar to several launchers that device manufacturers already offer on Wear OS.

Within this grid-based app launcher, your app's launcher icon appears. For this reason, make sure you're using an adaptive icon as your launcher icon.

In system settings, users can choose between this new grid-based app launcher and the list-based app launcher.

Let user choose media output device

Wear OS 5 Developer Preview provides a system UI that lets users choose which device should play media and show information about the currently-playing media content.

If your app detects that there isn't a Bluetooth headset connected when you want to provide audio playback on devices running Wear OS 5 Developer Preview, offer to take the user directly to media output switcher. To maintain compatibility with previous versions of Wear OS, also add support for invoking the ACTION_BLUETOOTH_SETTINGS intent action, which takes the user to the Bluetooth page in system settings.

The launchOutputSelection() method, part of the Horologist project on GitHub, demonstrates how to let the user choose their media output device on a variety of Wear OS versions, including Wear OS 5 Developer Preview.

Enhancements to Watch Face Format

A newer version of Watch Face Format—version 2—is supported for devices that run Wear OS 5 Developer Preview. This version includes several enhancements, including the following:

  • Flavors: Preset configurations for your watch face that users can browse in a companion app.
  • Goal progress complication type: Useful when users can exceed a goal such as step count.
  • Weighted elements complication type: Useful for showing discrete subsets of data.
  • Weather conditions: Show the current weather, as well as forecast conditions for hours or days into the future.
  • A new heart rate system data source.

Learn more about the Watch Face Format. In the XML reference, look for items that changed in version 2.

Screenshot detection

Android 14, and by extension Wear OS 5 Developer Preview, provides a privacy-preserving screenshot detection API.

Updates to Health Services

Wear OS 5 Developer Preview includes the following additions to help you measure health and fitness data more precisely and effectively:

More detailed running metrics

Health Services now supports more data types related to running. These can help you provide additional insights on runners' form and economy.

These metrics include the following:

  • Ground contact time: The amount of time, during a single step that a runner's foot is in contact with the ground.
  • Stride length: The distance covered by a single step.
  • Vertical oscillation: The distance that a user's center of mass moves up and down with each step.
  • Vertical ratio: Vertical oscillation divided by stride length.

As with all data types that Health Services supports, you should check exercise capabilities to confirm they are supported on the device running your app.

Debounced goals

Health Services now supports debounced goals to help improve the user experience for people who want to maintain a specific threshold or range—such as heart rate—throughout their workout.