Prepare for Wear OS 6

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This page explains how to set up the official emulator for testing, and how to upgrade your app to target Wear OS 6.

Set up an emulator

The Wear OS 6 Developer Preview lets you do the following:

• Test behavior changes in Wear OS 6.
• Explore the new features that are available in Wear OS 6.
• View the watch faces that you create using Watch Face Studio.

Using the emulator, you can test different screen sizes and watch faces.

Download and install the emulator

To set up a virtual device to run the Wear OS 6 Developer Preview, follow these steps.

1. Download the latest preview release of Android Studio.

2. In Android Studio, click Tools > SDK Manager.

3. In the SDK Tools tab, select the latest version of Android Emulator and click OK to install the latest version if it isn't already installed.

4. In Android Studio, open the Device Manager by selecting Tools > Device Manager. Click Create device.

5. In the Category pane, select Wear OS and choose a hardware profile. Click Next.

6. Select a Wear OS 6 Developer Preview system image to download, which is the image with API Level 36.0 and the Target Android 16.0 ("Baklava") (Wear OS 6.0 - Preview). See the following image for an example.

   If you don't already have a system image installed that matches your device definition, click Download next to the Release Name to get it.

7. Click Next and then click Finish.

Test your app on the emulator

After creating the virtual device, run and test your application on a emulator that runs the Wear OS 6 Developer Preview:

1. Go to the Android Studio toolbar and select the virtual device you just created.
2. Click Run .

Apps available on the emulator

The following user-space apps are pre-installed onto the official emulator:

• Find My Phone
• Flashlight
• Media Controls
• Phone
• Play Store
• Settings

In addition, the following system apps are available in the emulator:

• Android Accessibility Suite
• Bluetooth
• Credential Manager
• Download Manager
• Emergency information
• Google Play services
• Health Connect
• Health Services for Wear OS
• Speech Recognition and Synthesis from Google
• Wear Services
• Wireless Emergency Alerts

Update your app to target Wear OS 6

After you update your app to prepare it for Wear OS 6 Developer Preview, you can further improve your app's compatibility with this version of Wear OS by targeting Wear OS 6 (API level 36), which is based on Android 16.

If you update your target SDK version, handle the system behavior changes that take effect for apps that target Android 16 or higher.

Update your build file

To update your target SDK version, open your module-level build.gradle or build.gradle.kts file, and update them with the following values for Wear OS 6 (Android 16):

android {
    compileSdk 36
    ...
    defaultConfig {
        targetSdk 36
    }
}

android {
    compileSdk = 36
    ...
    defaultConfig {
        targetSdk = 36
    }
}