Wear OS prepares support for third-party application cards

Wear OS prepares support for third-party application cards

In 2019, Google added cards – or Tiles, in English – to Wear OS, a new mode of customize the watch interface with information screens to see the weather, news, events, daily activity and the like. Later, the card limit to be activated was increased to five.

In all this time, these cards were limited to the applications pre-installed in Google’s Wear OS, such as Google Fit or the weather, but the AOSP code indicates that Google would be preparing to open the ban on cards to other developers, with the creation of an API for it.

Cards for everyone (developers)

Wear OS cards work similar to widgets on Android. They are customizable screens that you can place on your mobile to access information such as time, activity or the stopwatch, sliding with your finger to change from one to another.

Since its introduction in 2019, Wear OS has a handful of cards available, although all of them belong to pre-installed Google apps. Developers have no way of creating their own cards, but this could be about to change, with the creation of a API for Wear OS Cards, unofficially disclosed in the AOSP code.

At the moment, there is no more information about it, except that this API may be part of the AndroidX library, which is in turn part of Jetpack. Impossible to predict when we will know more about the Wear OS card API and when we can see the first cards from third appsAlthough, as always, this year’s Google I / O could be a good showcase.