Time for another notable Google Play services update!
Google today revealed Google Play services 7.3, which includes new goodies for Android Wear, Google Fit, user location, and some other API stuff. Here’s a quick rundown of what’s included:
Android Wear
- Support for connecting multiple Android Wear devices to a single mobile device, a Capability API that’ll let an app find a node on a device that supports a certain capability, and a Channel API that supports sending large files and streaming data between devices.
Google Fit
- A new History API will gather a certain type of data for the current day, like how many steps you’ve taken so far, and easily put it on display without needing authentication. Google Fit’s also gaining improved nutrition tracking support for protein, fat, cholesterol, and more.
Location
- An update to LocationRequest will allow your device to gather location updates together to reduce battery consumption and possibly improve location accuracy.
Connecting to Google Play services
- The addition of “addApiIfAvailable()” will ensure that your process of connecting to APIs won’t be prolonged because you’re waiting to check for APIs that aren’t available on a particular device.
This is looking like a nice little update for Google Play services, and while it’s mostly aimed at developers, there might be some users out there that’ll get excited about the ability to attach multiple Android Wear devices to a single phone. Maybe now you can start wearing a smartwatch on each wrist so that if one hand is occupied, you can just check the other for an alert?
Google Play services 7.3 is available today.
