Android Wear 2.0 News, Rumors and Update

Google I/O is in full swing over in San Francisco and, on the wearable front, the big news (apart from the exciting Daydream VR platform) is that Android Wear 2.0 - "the most significant Android Wear update since its launch two years ago" - is coming soon.Landing in the fall, Android Wear 2.0 evolves the smartwatch platform beyond anything the handful of minor incremental updates have done so far.

The standout new function is standalone apps, meaning that your favorite applications - whether they be navigational, sports and fitness based, media players, or even games - can run on their own, on your smartwatch, without the need to be tethered to your smartphone.

Many Android Wear watches already have Bluetooth and Wi-Fi built in (and one, the LG Watch Urbane 2nd Edition even has cellular connectivity) so it makes sense to open up the gates to allow watches to make more use of their hardware capabilities.These standalone apps are the result of Google removing the Data Layer APIs - and it will also mean a lot more functionality for Android Wear users who pair their smartwatch with an iPhone - at the moment pairing iOS and Android Wear is pretty limited.Android Wear's UI will also see a big overhaul - with Google's Material Design standards a lot more prominent, and users will see big differences with menus, icons and even the ease of selecting new watch faces.

Complications, the same word Apple uses for widgets on its smartwatch, mean that developers can cherry pick small bits of information to display on their custom watch faces. For example, a user could pick a face that tells them stock prices, weather, track info for a streaming song and so on. And the big addition is that these complications will be able to pull data from multiple apps.