Wear OS doesn’t get the same amount of attention as Android for smartphones, but it still gets the occasional update. That slow approach matches the number of Wear OS smartwatches we see get launched every year. A recent change in Wear OS, however, should make watch faces run a little better as they can use hardware acceleration.
The advantage of hardware acceleration for watch faces is they can render at higher frame rates and have smoother animations/transitions. I’ve noticed Wear OS watch faces can sometimes stutter, especially right when the display wakes up. Hardware acceleration can help make the watch faces feel just a little silkier.
Wear OS apps have been able to take advantage of hardware acceleration for a while, but it hasn’t been available to watch face developers. Last month, Google updated the Wearable Support Library (version 2.7.0) to let developers request a hardware-accelerated canvas. Along with this, there’s more UI performance data by enabling Debug GPU profiling under Settings > Developer options.
There are a couple of catches that come with this change. First of all, Google says “hardware acceleration can greatly lower the battery life of a device.” This is especially the case if the watch face has “long-running animations,” which Google advises against. The second catch is hardware acceleration for watch faces is only available for Wear OS devices on Android 9 or later.
Like many features, it’s up to developers to implement this in their Wear OS watch faces. Hopefully, many do and we’ll see smoother watch faces.
Source: Google | Via: 9to5Google
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