Android Wear APK Installation Guide for Emulators

If logcat displays that data has been loaded/sent but the User Interface of your application has not loaded this data, uninstall the APK from your mobile device. Then, using the file manager, reinstall the same APK.

  1. Using Android Studio, click on generate signed APK for YOUR-MODULE-NAME. Use any keystore you want and then click on release under build type

  2. Connect your phone to your computer via USB cable

  3. Copy both of the recently generated mobile and wear APKs onto the phone using Android File Transfer. These APKs will be found later by a file manager on the phone.

  4. In Android Studio, navigate to Tools>Android>AVD Manager>Create...

  5. Make sure you select a device with the prefix Android Wear

  6. Check the CheckBox titled Use Host GPU and then launch the emulator

  7. Download and install Google's Android Wear connector app on your phone

  8. Open up the Android Wear connector app and follow the instructions to start setting up the connection between your phone and the Wear emulator. The most notable instructions are: Turning on Bluetooth, Location, and pair with a new wearable which is found by clicking on the menu button for Samsung phones. Make sure that when you pair with a new wearable, you select the gear on the top right corner which says Pair with emulator. Once that has completed, you will be back at the main screen and the top left will say Not connected right under Emulator. To start actively listening for the emulator, click on the Android Wear button to the left of the two gears on the top right of the screen.

  9. Once the connection is set up and listening for the emulator, go onto your development machine's console and type adb -d forward tcp:5601 tcp:5601. This will establish the connection between your mobile device and the running emulator. To confirm the connection has been fully established the Android Wear connector app should say Connected on the top left part of the mobile device's screen under Emulator

  10. Using a file manager on the mobile device, install the YOUR-MODULE-NAME-mobile-release.apk that is located in the directory you copied the APKs to

Development Environment

This installation guide has been tested for Android Studio 0.8.1 using Macintosh OSX 10.9

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