Monday, 25 July 2016

Why isn't there a PC app with Wear API support?



I live in a rural area where my best chance of getting service relies on having my phone shoved in a window. However, I carry a Samsung Gear Live on a daily basis, and it's very convenient and capable.

Because of where my phone is placed, I often have no access to it, and I do a lot of things at home that don't warrant wearing a watch, not to mention it's not exactly comfortable. Because of this, I've searched for various solutions to the problem of using my phone when I'm away from the phone. Thus far, there's obvious options like AirDroid, but that's unappealing since you need to leave this tab open at all times.

Yappy was an idea, but what made it most painful is it hardly ever sent my texts, and there was no configuration or history for the notifications when it passed through. Apparently, Microsoft's Cortana can integrate with the phone to allow notifications and texting from the PC.

What just baffles me is... why is there no app or extension that just uses the Wear API? Am I missing something, or is there just nothing out there that can connect via the Wear API, to offer as many features as a Wear watch, and not need to do much more than that? I imagine a simple app that connects like that would work just fine. I do understand the case of there being Wear apps that it would wanna use, but I also know that 4.4W was very rudimentary. So rudimentary, I couldn't even install much more than a Wear Bottle Spinner app. No new watch faces, no Skype or Music integration. It's so simple, I could imagine someone using the basic 4.4W framework to create an app to connect to Android Wear.

I'm unimpressed by the existence of apps that do their own thing, like Desktop Notifications, or Yappy, that ask you to use their apps together to achieve the best results. A Chrome extension, a Windows application, something simple that just connects with Android Wear over Wi-Fi. I think it's so simple, but so capable.

Have I just not searched enough? Am I missing something, a core aspect that makes it impossible to use the API in a simple Chrome extension, or has there just been no one who wanted to do it?



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