By Jeremy Walker, engineer
With the help of Tiles, users can quickly access and manipulate information by swiping across the dial’s home screen. This gives smartwatch users more control over what they want to know and do. There is no doubt that magnets have become one of the most practical features of Wear OS smartwatches.
We’re excited to announce that tiles can be shared with your smartwatch users. You can create custom Tiles by downloading the latest Alpha version of the Jetpack Tiles API. Users can download and use your tiles to open a new experience after you upload your creation to Google Play. You can also upload screen shots of the tiles to preview resources in the Play Store from the Google Play Administration.
Apps such as Calm and Sleep Cycle have started to create custom tiles.
Use the new Tiles API to view Wear applications with a simple swipe on the watch face.
— Samo Kralj, Senior Android Software Engineer at Calm
The API was easy to understand and well documented, allowing us to build our first tiles with real data in a matter of hours. It feels like a very modern API and is very easy to use.
— Viktor Akerskog, Technical director of Sleep Cycle
Thank you very much for all your feedback on the Alpha release, we have incorporated many of the requests and improvements into the latest API. You can submit more feedback to help us prioritize API improvements in future releases.
If you haven’t had a chance to try out the API, check out the guide, or explore Tiles Codelab for a demo.
Please click here to submit your feedback to us, or share your favorite content or questions. Your feedback is very important to us, thank you for your support!