Since Android Wear is now upon us and watches have been steadily shipping out to excited buyers, apps have now hit the Play Store. While it’s early days yet, the first few watch faces are appearing and yes, a Flappy Bird clone has already arrived. Still, there has been an issue with the Play Store and how it handles paid apps when it comes to Android Wear. We reported a little while ago that Android Wear devices were currently unable to deal with encrypted APK files and thus unable to install paid apps. Now though, the Android Developers site has come through with a workaround for developers.
Announcing the little change on their Google+ page, the Android Developers team have come up with a pretty simple workaround that would allow encrypted APKs, and therefore paid apps, to make their way to Android Wear devices. Over on their blog, they detail this workaround, which is to essentially package the app a little differently, embedding the Wearable APK (the newly designed paid app for Android Wear) and placing it into ‘res/raw’. All the instructions that developers need can be found at the source link below, and we wish you happy app building.
It’s good to see a workaround like this put in place, as developers deserve to be paid for the work they put in and a lot of developers these days earn a living through developing apps we use every day. Apps are also going to be what makes Android Wear stand out as a viable platform. Google has also said that an update to the Android SDK will be pushed out at a later date making this much easier to do and documentation surrounding Wear will also be updated, too. So, while it’s not a perfect solution it’s at least nice to see one materialize at least.