Today the Android team in Google released a new Android Wear SDK and emulator update for developers. The new tools bring the SDK to version 2.2.0 and with it come several new watch face elements to the platform.
Those elements are aimed to be in the next consumer version of Wear, version 2.9. Perhaps the biggest news of those new face elements will be unread notification indicators that can be coded into the watch faces.
Notification is a vital part of the Wear experience. As a result, starting from the next consumer release of Wear (version 2.9.0), a dot-shaped indicator will be displayed by default at the bottom of the watch face if there are new, unread notifications.
Developers of watch faces will have several options on how to implement the new feature.
Developers can use the default settings or can change the accent color to match the theme of the watch face. Further, they can use a counter indicator to show the number of unread messages if it works within the flow of the watch face.
Android Wear 2.9 Unread Notification Indicators
With version 2.8 of Android Wear still making its way out to devices, don’t expect to see 2.9 for a while. It will likely be a mid-Summer launch if all goes well before we see it released.
For those that are curious, you can read the announcement over at the Android Developers Blog.
