Android Wear isn't perfect yet: Nine things Google needs to fix right now

Android Wear isn't perfect yet: Nine things Google needs to fix right now

Android Wear is still a fundamentally good product, but there are still a lot of rough edges that need to be ironed out.

Not ready for full rollout yet

Google's smartwatch operating system is finally here for the masses, and Android Wear is the most remarkable wearable platform ever to hit the market -- but given the terrible smartwatches of the past, it may not be ready for prime time on its own.

Although it's still early in development, Android Wear still performs well in many settings, but there are still many usability issues that have not been resolved. From time to time, some stupid decisions made by Google will pop up to torture users, and we will face such troubles almost every few minutes. Here are nine serious shortcomings that Google needs to solve on Android Wear as soon as possible.

The app launch mechanism is ridiculous

Installing the corresponding mobile application on Android Wear is done automatically through Bluetooth connection. For developers, this mechanism does make it easy for us to add functions from existing applications to Wear, and you can also publish Wear applications separately through the Google Play app store. However, opening these applications on the watch often poses challenges.

In most cases, launching apps with voice commands is the best method, but if you're in a noisy environment, you might have to yell at your watch - otherwise you'll have to open the search screen and scroll through a long list of apps. This list is not intuitive and is quite laborious to use.

No card history available

Android Wear's main interface consists of a series of vertically scrolling cards -- essentially, notifications from your smartphone with Google Now prompts. But this is made even more annoying by the inherent shortcomings of the Google Now interface: there's no way to recall a card you've swiped away. Wear also doesn't offer a temporary "undo" pop-up.

Sometimes the loss of card history isn't too drastic. If you miss an email notification, you can always check your phone later to see it again. But if you accidentally swipe to dismiss the weather card, God help you. It may not reappear until a day later, depending on when Google Now plans to send the next reminder. Obviously, users really need a mechanism to restore dismissed cards, because these cards play an important role in defining the entire interface.

We can't start a new Hangout call

If someone sends you a message through Google's data-only Hangouts chat system, you can reply with a voice clip directly on Android Wear. However, you can't start a new Hangout call on the watch. This is illogical, but for some reason, the entire Google app ecosystem doesn't support sending Hangout messages via voice commands. Your only option is to send a new text message from the watch, which can be very frustrating depending on the app the other person is using.

The navigation is a mess

Android Wear automatically generates information cards when you dock with your phone and perform walking navigation, which is really neat. Just glance at your watch from time to time to keep track of the direction you should be taking.

However, when the screen is dimmed, the watch will not show the distance from the current location to the next turn - it only shows the current road and the direction to go. This mechanism makes it a very bad experience to use, and sometimes the current street name is too long, even the full-screen information card is not enough to show the distance from the current location. I know that many friends must be thinking of disconnecting the watch from the phone while walking - let me tell you, it doesn't work! When it is connected again, the watch will automatically initialize the navigation mechanism, and it cannot be changed in the settings.

Unable to select top card

When you look at a Wear watch face, the bottom of the screen always shows the top section of available information cards, which contain a portion of information that you can read directly or swipe away. This is a good place to display important information - such as who sent you a new email or the current weather conditions - but the worst thing is that you can't specify the content of the top information card.

Android Wear has a weird system for deciding which cards to put at the top of the list, and there's no setting to change how it works. It would be much better to have a weather card always on top, for example.

The message sending timer is too fast

This should be a major fix, and Google should make it right away. Despite having amazingly accurate voice recognition, the system still makes small mistakes from time to time. For this reason, Wear allows people to review the content of messages before automatically sending them.

The problem is that the review time given by the Wear system is too short: everyone only has about two seconds to read the words they read. If you want more time, you must touch the screen to pause and then send it manually, which undoubtedly destroys the advantage of voice input without the need for finger intervention.

No user-definable screen timeout option

Wear can display all messages from mobile apps and extracted to the notification panel, which sometimes means quite long text content. In order to read relatively long sentences completely, users basically need to keep swiping on the screen.

Unfortunately, the screen automatically dims to black and white every three seconds, and there's no way to change this through any user-configurable options. This is a feature that the Gear Live uses to prevent its AMOLED display from draining too much battery, but it's a little better on the G Watch. With this mechanism, you can only choose to always have the feature enabled or always have it off. Clearly, Google needs to provide flexible timeout options.

Watch face customization is not currently available

Developers have started to build for Android Wear, but the SDK is still incomplete. For example, almost all behaviors that use custom watch faces are not officially supported. These watch faces are not designed to work well, and there is no way to set the top card to "shorter" on the watch face screen. This means that the top card will always cover a considerable portion of the watch face content.

Stacked watch faces require the information card to be expanded before it can be used, so in this case we can finally see the time information in full. Google has made it clear that the watch face API is coming soon, but developers don't seem to want to wait any longer... although waiting is always inevitable.

Settings options are too hidden

If you want to change the display brightness on your Android Wear smartwatch, you have to tap into the search screen and then scroll down past several recommended commands before you can see the settings option. This is inconvenient and there are no shortcuts for common functions such as brightness adjustment. For a device that does not provide a light sensor, I can only say that this is too humane.

Original English text: http://www.greenbot.com/article/2455112/9-things-google-needs-to-fix-in-android-wear-immediately.html