It’s been quite some time since Android Wear launched on a number of different devices and since then, Google have updated Android Wear to Android 5.0 Lollipop. That brings with it the Watch Face API, which makes watch faces much better and easier to develop as well. Now, if you’re looking to get into developing a watch face – or any app – for that matter for Android Wear, you’re going to need to do some testing and you’ll need some screenshots as part of that. There’s also the likelihood that you just want to take a screenshot of a cool app or watch face to share with friends. Here I’m going to show you how to do just that. This method will work with every Android Wear watch.
First of all, you’ll need to have Developer Options on your phone turned on. You do not need to be rooted to do this. All you have to do is go over to your system settings, about phone and then just keep tapping the Build Number on your device (it’s usually towards the bottom of this list). Once you keep tapping you’ll see a pop-up that tells you “Congratulations! You are Now A Developer!”, mine tells me that I’ve already been there and done that.
Then, you need to make sure that “Developer Options” are turned on. Back out from your “About Phone” page and you should see “Developer Options” near it in your settings. Just make sure the flip-switch is set to ‘On’, and you’re good to go.
Now, you can go over to the Android Wear app, hit the menu button and select “Take wearable screenshot”
After that, you’ll see a notification, tap that to send your image somewhere. This is quite a bit different from just taking a screenshot of an app on your phone, as it doesn’t just save it as a PNG on your phone and instead you have to send it somewhere.
You do get some strange options in this list once you tap on the notification, but to keep things easy I just send myself an email.
If you go down the email route like I did, you basically just get a quick email with your PNG screenshot. Here, I just took a shot of my watch face, for those wondering what it is, it’s Pujie Black.
Being able to take a screenshot of your device is pretty handy with Android Wear, especially if you’re a developer of apps and watch faces. You can essentially do whatever you want with the PNG here, but I do wish Google used the same system as they did for taking a screenshot on your phone. All-in-all though, this isn’t too difficult to do and it can be a nice way of sharing a watch face design exactly as it appears on your watch, rather than taking a messy photo with your phone.