Android wear beta launched: What's new

Google has announced the launch of beta of the next Android Wear update. As the company mentioned at Google I/O, this will mainly be a technical upgrade to API 26 with enhancements to background limits and notification channels. LG Watch Sport users can go to the webpage to sign up and the factory image will automatically be downloaded to the watch you enroll. As this is a beta, please be sure to review the known issues before enrolling. If you don't have a watch to test on, you can use the Android emulator.

In this update, users can choose the types of notifications they receive via an app through notification channels. This gives users finer-grained control than muting all notifications from the app. For notifications generated locally by Android Wear apps, users will be able to customise the notifications channel they want to see, right on their watch.

There are increased restrictions on background services. Developers should assume services can no longer run in the background without a visible notification. In addition, the background location update frequency will be reduced. Battery-saving best practices such as usingJobScheduler should be adopted to ensure your app is battery-efficient and able to perform background tasks when possible.