Connect with moto 360 without android wear app

Question

I am trying to develop basic applications on my moto 360 (synchronizing messages and notifications, sending sensors data..) connected with a mobile phone. My problem is that I wish not to install android wear application on the mobile phone and I would like to know if there is a way not to do so.

Thank you for your help !

Answer 1

I will try to be as specific as possible here :

You mentioned that you don't want to install the Android Wear application on you mobile. If this is the case, then your watch still needs to be paired with some phone if its running AW < 2 [which Moto 360 is, for now]. Without this, you will not be able to get the watch out of factory mode (unless you flash it with an already paired watch' data). Even then, it will not communicate with the phone since it's not paired with it.

If instead, your question was about opening up a low-level bluetooth socket with a mobile phone, or any bluetooth enabled device in general (atleast those that implement RFCOMM functionality), then yes, this is still possible, as long as you can sideload apps to your watch. In order to do this, you have to implement a BluetoothServerSocket or a BluetoothSocket, depending if you want your watch to be a client or a server. In either case, you can open a two-way communication socket, with throughput upto 50KBps, in real world scenarios.

Answer 2

It's probably possible, but it's actively discouraged. From the Wear communication API docs:

Warning: Because these APIs are designed for communication between handhelds and wearables, these are the only APIs you should use to set up communication between these devices. For instance, don't try to open low-level sockets to create a communication channel.

Given that a Wear device runs (nearly) full Android, I expect it's possible to roll your own communications layer using low-level Bluetooth, Wifi, or some such. But the correct answer is "Don't".