page.title=Notification Changes in Android Wear 2.0 meta.tags="wear", "wear-preview", "notifications" page.tags="wear" page.image=/wear/preview/images/expanded_diagram.png @jd:body
Android Wear 2.0 updates the visual style and interaction paradigm of notifications as well as introduces expanded notifications, which provide substantial additional content and actions in an app-like experience.
The visual and interaction changes make it much easier for users to read and interact with notifications from your app. Expanded notifications enable you to deliver Wear users an app-like experience even if you haven't built an Android Wear app.
Note: When developing for Wear 2.0, ensure that you have the latest version of the Android Wear app on your phone.
Notifications receive important visual updates in Wear 2.0, with material design visual changes.
Figure 1. Comparison of the same notification in Android Wear 1.x and 2.0.
Some of the visual updates include:
Android Wear 2.0 introduces expanded notifications, which provide substantial additional content and actions for each notification.
When you specify additional content pages and actions for a notification, those are available to the user within the expanded notification. Each expanded notification follows Material Design for Android Wear, so the user gets an app-like experience.
If the first action in the expanded notification has a {@code RemoteInput} (e.g., a Reply action), then the choices you set with {@code setChoices()} appear within the expanded notification below the first action.
The user can view the expanded notification by tapping on a notification when either of the following is true:
To decide when to use expanded notifications, follow these guidelines:
Expanded Notifications allow you to include additional content and actions for a notification. You choose the level of detail that your app's notifications will provide; however be judicious with the amount of detail you include in a notification.
Additional content pages are stacked vertically in the expanded notification and appear in the order they were added. These additional content pages can optionally use a style such as {@code BigTextStyle} or {@code BigPictureStyle}.
To specify additional actions, use {@code addAction()} or {@code addActions()}. The action drawer of the expanded notification contains all available actions.
If you have a chat messaging app, your notifications should use {@code Notification.MessagingStyle}, which is new in Android N. Wear 2.0 uses the chat messages included in a {@code MessagingStyle} notification (see {@code addMessage()}) to provide a rich chat app-like experience in the expanded notification.
Note: {@code MessagingStyle} expanded notifications require that you have at least version 1.5.0.2861804 of the Android Wear app on your paired Android phone. That version will be available within the next few weeks in the Play Store.
Wear 2.0 also introduces Smart Reply for {@code MessagingStyle} notifications. Smart Reply provides the user with contextually relevant, touchable choices in the expanded notification and in {@code RemoteInput}. These augment the fixed list of choices that the developer provides in {@code RemoteInput} using the {@code setChoices()} method.
By enabling Smart Reply for your MessagingStyle notifications, you provide users with a fast (single tap), discreet (no speaking aloud), and reliable way to respond to chat messages.
Responses generated by Smart Reply are shown in addition to those set using the {@code setChoices()} method.
To enable Smart Reply for your notification action, you need to do the following:
The following example shows how to create a MessagingStyle notification with Smart Reply responses.
// Create an intent for the reply action Intent replyIntent = new Intent(this, ReplyActivity.class); PendingIntent replyPendingIntent = PendingIntent.getActivity(this, 0, replyIntent, PendingIntent.FLAG_UPDATE_CURRENT); // Create the reply action and add the remote input NotificationCompat.Action action = new NotificationCompat.Action.Builder(R.drawable.ic_reply_icon, getString(R.string.label), replyPendingIntent) .addRemoteInput(remoteInput) // 1) allow generated replies .setAllowGeneratedReplies(true) .build(); Notification noti = new NotificationCompat.Builder() .setContentTitle(messages.length + " new messages with " + sender.toString()) .setContentText(subject) .setSmallIcon(R.drawable.new_message) .setLargeIcon(aBitmap) // 2) set the style to MessagingStyle .setStyle(new NotificationCompat.MessagingStyle(resources.getString(R.string.reply_name)) .addMessage(messages[0].getText(), messages[0].getTime(), messages[0].getSender()) .addMessage(messages[1].getText(), messages[1].getTime(), messages[1].getSender())) // 3) add an action with RemoteInput .extend(new WearableExtender().addAction(action)).build();