Posted by Jeremy Walker, Engineer
Tiles provide quick access to information and actions with a simple swipe from the watch face home screen. This gives smartwatch users more control over what information and actions they want to see, and it’s no surprise that Tiles have become one of the most helpful and useful features for smartwatches that run on Wear OS.
Today we’re announcing Tiles can be shared with your smartwatch users. You can start creating your custom Tile by downloading the latest Alpha release of the Jetpack Tiles API. Once you upload your experience to Google Play, your users will be able to download your Tile and starting using it. Let your users know they can try out the new experience. You can also upload a screenshot of your Tile to your Play Store preview assets within Google Play Console.
Apps such as Calm and Sleep Cycle have already started building custom Tiles.
“Using the new Tiles API, we were able to easily expose our Wear app features to be just a swipe away from your watch face.” -Samo Kralj, Android Staff Software Engineer at Calm.
“The API was easy to understand and the documentation was quite clear, enabling us to have our first tile running with real data within hours. It feels like a very modern API that is easy to get started with.” -Viktor Åkerskog, Technical Lead at Sleep Cycle
We’ve appreciated all your feedback on the alpha library, and have included many of the requests and performance improvements into the APIs. You can add any additional feedback here to help us prioritize API improvements for future releases.
If you haven’t had a chance to try out the API, check out the guide, or if you prefer a walkthrough, explore the Tiles codelab.
Happy coding!
