Building Cloud - Powered Wearable Apps

LAURENCE MORONEY: Wearable computing is a massive growth area with an expected market share worth over $8 billion in the next four years. Now, that's a lot of people with a new way of interacting with your apps. But how do you get started? What does it take to build an app that you can use on your wrist? Hi, I'm Laurence from the Google Developers Relations team. And in this video, we're going to take a look at exactly how you can do that-- run apps on your watch. Now, building an app like this has three main architectural components. First, there's the cloud service that provides your app's backend. So for example, if you're building a service to watch stocks and you want it to notify you when one has changed by a certain amount-- say up or down by 1%-- this is the type of thing that you can build your backend service to do. Now second, there's a mobile app that interfaces with this service. The app can generate notifications that you can see on your device. And it can also be sent to any attached Android Wear device. And third, of course, is the Android Wear app itself. The Android Wear features are actually built into the mobile app, so that when it generates notifications that you see on the phone, they're also rendered to the Android Wear device. Now, there are also APIs that allow you to deliver these notifications so that the Android Wear user can do interesting things with them, such as triggering response actions. So, say for example in our stock trading application, if we get a notification that a stock we're interested in has dropped by more than 1%, we might want to buy in because it's a bargain. Now, how do we do all of this? Android Studio actually gives you everything that you need to do this. It includes tools for building the backend services as well as, of course, the Android phone app. And now you can get the extensions that you need for handling Android Wear. The cloud backend can be built with an exposed API. Android Studio's tools allow you to do this in Java, and it handles the fine details of the plumbing for you. You can write cloud backends that expose an API for your Android app using attribution. Now you can see some examples of this in the code here. These attributes tell the Android client what this code does, such as implementing an API called quotesApi, and providing a method called getQuote. OK, now once you've built your cloud service, and with the tools you can actually automatically create client libraries to access that. Now next, of course, you have to build your app. How do you access your API from your app? Well, the classes were downloaded for you into your Maven repository. So you can simply include them using your built up gradle file, like you can see here. Now, remember earlier when we attributed our API and we called it quotes API? That's exactly what you see here. Now, from your Android app, you can simply use these classes to talk to the API backend. Earlier, when we created the API, we used the attribute API method on a function and we called it getQuote. Now you can see there's a getQuote function in the client classes. And guess what they do? Yup, they get a quote for me. This is the typical cloud powered Android app. But now how do we extend that for Android Wear? Notifications on my phone will display on my phone, but let's update the code to generate notifications so that they display on my device. And they'll also display when the stock prices, say, change by more than 1%. When this code generates a notification, it'll show up on my Android device as you can see here. But they'll also show up on my Android Wear device with an optimized UI for the device's form factor. Now let's see how we can add feedback so that the user can tell my app to buy or sell stock based on the notification by interacting with our Android Wear device. You can see that code here. Now let's see what happens when I get a notification on my device. You can see that I now have cards that allow me to interact, to do things such as buying or selling. When I say buy, the command will be sent back to my phone where I can process it. Now, this is a stock trading application, so for something like this, I might access my portfolio to do an actual trade. And that's how easy it is to build a Cloud powered Android app. You first build your backend complete with an API using Cloud Endpoints. You then build your Android application that consumes this API. And then finally, you extend that application to handle the interface with an attached Android Wear device. If you want to see a full walkthrough of how to build the stock trader application I've been talking about in this video, visit the link shown here. And I can't wait to see what you're going to build for the wearable cloud. Thank you very much.