Coming soon to an Android Wear near you: iOS notifications?
Coming soon to an Android Wear smartwatch near you: iOS notifications? Photo: Motorola
As an iPhone owner, I’ve been curious about Android Wear, Google’s smartwatch platform, from the get-go. The problem is Android Wear requires an Android smartphone to work, leaving everyone out to dry.
That might be changing though. An independent developer has just released a tantalizing video, showing iOS sending notifications to an Android Wear smart watch.
In the video, Mohammad Abu-Garbeyyeh — a developer responsible for Cydia tweaks such as DoubleTapToSleep and SpotlightSiri, and the Xposed framework for Android — shows off an iPhone sending an incoming messages notification straight to a Moto 360, without an Android device to be seen.
According to Abu-Garbeyyeh, the tweak doesn’t require a jailbreak. All it needs is for a single APK to be installed on an Android Wear device, which allows the smartwatch to receive notifications by means of the Apple Notification Center Service, which is what the Pebble smartwatch uses to get notifications.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that, like Pebble, this functionality is actually much less sophisticated than what an Android Wear and Android smartphone combo are capable of. Anything more sophisticated will take a more concerted effort, possibly as a jailbreak tweak, but that will take time, and certainly won’t arrive before the Apple Watch makes Apple fans forget about Android Wear entirely.
