Is WearOS v. 3 Compatible with Old Apps?

Question

I've created an app that runs on WearOS, but my customers report that they can't see the app in Play Store after upgrading their smartwatch to WearOS ver. 3.

Is this new version compatible with the old apps? If not, are there any guides or samples showing how to make old apps compatible with the new WearOS version?

The smartwatch that they use is Ticwatch 3 Pro

Answer 1

After long and painful research and not finding anything more or less useful in Google docs (not a surprise) I came to an empirical solution that made my app visible for devices running WearOS 3.

The first step that will drive all your other actions is to comment out old WearOS support library in your gradle build config:

dependencies {
...

//    implementation 'com.google.android.support:wearable:2.9.0'  

After that you'll most likely get many unresolved imports and you'll need to work on replacing all classes from that imports with the new classes coming from Android's jetpack lib which is compatible with WearOS 3 devices.

Your dependencies can be different from mine, but I had to change the following things. Note that it's not only about changing the class names, but also about rewriting code, because the functionality of new classes could be quite different, thanks to Mr. Google who trashed our old working apps with a new version of their libs again.

WearableActivity -> ComponentActivity for my main activity
WearableActivity -> FragmentActivity for other activities
PhoneDeviceType - removed
RemoteIntent - removed
Installing companion on phone logic - removed, because it's very different now. Rewriting is is a pending task for me.
AmbientLifecycleObserver - I had to use this one to replace just one enableAmbient call in the old API's
WearableListView -> RecyclerView
WearableListView.ViewHolder -> RecyclerView.ViewHolder

Yet another thing that you'll need to avoid being rejected in Play Store is to implement a splash screen according to their new requirements. This new req is described fairly well in the Google docs and that's why I'll save my breath on this one, even though I think that it has zero value for the customers, while adds more work for developers.

Probably I missed something, IDK, but it'll give you an idea about the scope of work you need to do to support the new WearOS 3 version. Since all of that is happening more often than not with ALL new Google releases, the question pops up: is it worth it? Probably we should limit our apps to iOS and iWatch platforms only where I didn't see such a mess