14 DAY TRIAL // As Google made it quite clear during last week’s I/O keynote, Android Wear smartwatches (and implicitly smartbands) will be capable of doing more than just relaying notifications to your wrist.
Surely, notifications are the most popular and well-known smartwatch features, but as it turns out, users will be able to download native apps on their wearables, too.
Google already unveiled the LG G Watch and Samsung Gear Live, and the new devices will soon ship out to early adopters.
Before that happens, we should note the first standalone applications for Android Wear have already made an appearance in the Google Play Store, giving us a taste of what the wrist-bound wearables could be used for, as noted by 9to5Google.
According to Google, when it comes to its wearables, apps can either run on smartphone and send notification to the watch from there or have an APK they can run on both devices or just run solely on the Android Wear device. The last part applies to the new apps we’re telling you about right now.
Developer Marian Zorilla has submitted a bunch of native Android Wear apps and they are up for download as we speak.
One of them is called Wear Calc and is just a rudimentary calculating app designed for Android Wear. The second one goes by the name of Wear Compass, and there’s no need for us to tell you what it does, because you probably guessed it by now.
The caveat is that Android Wear already has a built-in compass, so we don’t really see the need for this particular app.
Users should be able to voice-activate both apps, but this process doesn't always go smooth because the watch might be prone to interpret “open Wear Calc” as “Where Calc.” The solution seems quite a simple one – changing the name of the app should eradicate the problem.
Since developers are just getting started with the Wear SDK, we can expect more interesting apps to appear in the following months. But the appearance of these simple native Android Wear apps tells us developers are interested, so we’re not far from seeing applications more akin to what Google showed during the keynote.
You might remember that Google demonstrated the Eat24 app, which was seamlessly integrated in Android Wear, on the beautiful round Moto 360. The piece of software allowed users to place an order at their favorite take-out locations, while keeping records of what was ordered in the past. Other demoed apps included All the Cooks and Lyft.
[Update]: It appears both apps have been removed.