just received WearOS 4 on my Pixel Watch 🎉

Curious what your take is. Anything obvious?

actually at the moment, the thing I notice the most is ... I don't see any difference 😅

Ooofff...

it's probably a good thing - I still remember going from Android Wear 1 to 2 back in the day, which rendered my watch unusably slow 🙈

For any developers, I'd still recommend the PW 2 for USB.

oh there's a difference with the first PW related to USB?

Got my PW2 it's a nice watch 🙂 Unrelated @yschimke but is there a plan for something in Horologist to easily detect when phone and watch are connected to same wifi network? Seems like the missing point to be able to download transcoded media from the phone to the watch in a more performant way than via BT.

PXL_20231027_100049362.TS.mp4

maybe it's "optimizing apps" in the background

My code based watch face was buttery smooth before the update. Now, it can't animate the seconds clock hand in time (set to twice per second, with adaptive frame rate as I update the value to not redraw the same thing where there's no change).

I bet it's gonna settle after a while (I'm an optimist 😄)

I just put it back on the charger, quite annoyed by that UX honestly 😣

I agree

BTW, I think it'd be best for the update to be advertised on the phone via a notification and a nice presentation about what's new rather than telling nothing but "update" on the tiny screen. I want to know what news things are coming on my watch as a user, I can't guess it!

also true 💯 . I don't know what this update brought.

Also, not just a push notification, I want the "What's new" to stick around in the Pixel Watch app until I read it.

to be fair, maybe despite the major number change, this is actually a small update feature-wise. Maybe there's nothing to tell the user

Same could be said about Android updates, though it's a bit better than the Wear OS situation, the "What's new" is not advertised in a very user friendly way, and it's very easy to miss. Apple is not the best at that game, but they're definitely better, and that makes users excited about updates.

@Tolriq "but is there a plan for something in Horologist to easily detect when phone and watch are connected to same wifi network" interesting idea. So basically, when on Wifi, likely same network, direct socket connections between them?

This is something that can be told to the user. It should make day-to-day use better, I'm excited about that simple thing :)

@bod https://twitter.com/joreilly/status/1712569270884810931 for USB

ahhh very cool indeed!

@yschimke yes exactly, my music player app can connect to many different media providers (self hosted) and many do not support transcoding, downloading flac to the watch is not nice, and the phone app support transcoding via ffmpeg, and everything is already working on phone app. Just need an easy way to detect when I can use the app webserver to serve the transcoded media to avoid slow BT. (Edit: But a complete native API to do that would be nice for a few other use cases I suppose to avoid having a webserver)

@Tolriq feel free to file a request on Horologist, it feels doable, but niche. But might help with other situations such as connecting to devices on the Wifi network, then releasing the Wifi request.

A request for expansion of the connectivity rule or a request for the global socket connection stuff?

Start by describing what you'd like and the API. It might just be something we work on with you. There is already code in Horologist for managing cell and wifi networks.

Out of curiosity, do the pins on the original Pixel Watch (behind the watch band) work when the watch is fully booted, or is that recovery only? I can’t remember…

Both, but you'd need the debug adapter mentioned here https://developers.google.com/android/images-watch

Mmmmmmm, or a sacrificial usb cable 🤪

Pixel Watch 2 is perfect for testing. With Galaxy Watch 4/6 it was so frustrating. Wireless debugging was turned off repeatedly after some time of inactivity.