How to start a companion app from the watch?

Former Member over 9 years ago

Hello,

I'm developing a watch app that gets its data from a companion app running on an Android device. My question is: how do I start the companion app, once the watch app is started? Is there a way to make such a request?

I read that the companion app should be made to be a service if it is to provide background data, but how is that service started? Is the Garmin Connect app taking care of this?

Thanks!

Brandon.ConnectIQ over 9 years ago

Just to provide you some hope, we have plans to add features that may fill at least some of the requirements you mention. For example, we have considered a notification feature that will allow a companion app to display a notification on the wearable which the user can tap to launch the Connect IQ app.

Former Member over 9 years ago

The most detailed example I've found so far is the Garmin disc golf app on GitHub, but it seems that app is required to be up and running on the Android device, since all of the listeners are registered in onCreate. Thus, unless we want to implement always running service, it's necessary to have some way to send named broadcast to the phone from watch. I hope it's not a big deal to implement for Garmin dev team, since Garmin Connect is already running several continuous services, one of them can just listen to events from watch and fire system wide broadcasts on demand.