Wearable Android: Android Wear and Google FIT App Development

Part IIFoundation Android

This part covers the Android operating system (OS) and Android development platform from the ground up. Although Android applications are written using the Java programming language, the runtime environment that Android applications execute in is not a Java runtime. Although the Android OS is based on the “Linux” OS, Android is not a standard Linux “distribution”—there are a number of modifications that are unique to the Android kernel or core of the OS. Gaining a little insight into Android’s underlying relationship with Linux and Java, as well as incorporating some of the vocabulary of its underlying building blocks into our technical dictionary, will go a long way toward understanding Android’s core concepts better. Such awareness and understanding can be useful in debugging and troubleshooting an Android application, when the root cause of a particular issue reveals itself from deeper down in the stack.

This section also provides a basic overview of the Android SDK as a foundation for covering the Android Wear and Google Fit platforms. Android Wear and Google Fit represent particular subsets of the Android platform. An Android Wear application is an Android application that is targeted to a particular API level, namely, API level 20, which represents the Wear platform. A Google Fit application is an Android application that uses the Google Fit (Fitness) API. In case you already have experience with Android application development on Android 5.0/Lollipop, ...