Wearable Android: Android Wear and Google FIT App Development

Chapter 7Android Wear API

7.1 Google Services and Google Play Services

Google Services include a wide range of Google-powered features and functionalities such as Maps, Location, Drive, Wallet, Games, Google+, Google Cloud Messaging, Android Wear, Google Fit, authentication, and more. Information on Google Services is available at http://developer.android.com/google/index.html.

Both the Android Wear API and the Google Fit API happen to be a part of the Google Play Services and even though Google Play Services provides a wide range of APIs not limited to Android Wear or Google Fit, we will begin this chapter by covering Google Play Services.

Google Play Services helps Apps avail of the latest Google-powered features. Google Play Services also provides system level features such as a dynamic security provider, which provides an OpenSSL implementation that can be updated dynamically, thus helping Apps benefit from timely security patches independently from the OS updates. Google Play Services are available on most Android devices, but is not part of the Android OS.

There is a Google Play Services App available on the Google Play Store at:

https://play.google.com/store/app/details?id=com.google.android.gsm

Once installed on the user’s device, the Google Play Services App runs various services on the Android device some of which work closely with corresponding Google services on the cloud. You will notice that the Google Play Services App has a package name of com.google.android.gsm ...