<https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2022/01...

# compose-wear

[Austin Nelson]

https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2022/01/announcing-glance-tiles-for-wear-os.html?m=1

Is this relevant for this channel?!

[John Nichol]

Yes and no - Glance is providing a Compose like API for Tiles - but Compose for Wear OS is for Apps/Overlays. Tiles/Glance are like Android RemoveViews. Both Compose and Glance are from the same team.

[Austin Nelson]

Is there a difference between API for Tiles and Glance (from a Android Wear point of view?). Is there a better place to discuss building Tiles for Wear (using Compose)? I'm looking to add Tiles for my app!

[John Nichol]

Yes there is a difference between the Glance and Tiles APIs - the Tiles API is a Java based API that you can use now to build tiles. The Glance API is a cross platform effort to have a Compose like interface for building remote glanceable surfaces like tiles and widgets. Glance is in its early days of development. So if you want to build a product quality tile on a stable API then use the Tiles API. But if you want to experiment and see what the future direction is look at Glance

[John Nichol]

I terms of where is the right place to discuss Glance for Tiles let me see if there is another channel or if I can get some of the Glance Tiles developers to join this discussion

[John Nichol]

@Jamie Garside [G] You might want to weigh in here

[Jamie Garside [G]]

Hey 🙂

[Jamie Garside [G]]

I believe we have a Glance channel somewhere, I'll see if I can find it. In any case though, there's not much of a functional difference; most of the things supported by wear-tiles are supported in glance-wear-tiles (I think LoadAction doesn't work right now, for example).

On the flip side though, we have a bunch of helpers in Glance that don't currently exist for Tiles (e.g. cross-axis alignment in wear-tiles requires you to add a Box into the Row/Column, and set the gravity; Glance instead deals with this for you if you specify cross-axis alignment)

[Austin Nelson]

Thank you so much for the clarification. In any case, I’m super excited to try out Glance!