Feel The Wear 2 Beta Release
Published on March 5, 2023
After a period of more than five years with no updates, we are excited to announce the release of the new version of our Feel The Wear 2 application. On March 5, 2023, we launched an early open beta stage with Wear OS 3 support.
We developed the original app in early 2015 on the very first Android Wear (which was not called Wear OS back then) using the OG Moto 360, which has weak vibrations. After more than two years of active development the app had all the features we wanted and was stable. The last update was in December 2017, were we added option to read notifications aloud (TTS) and fixed outstanding bugs and crashes. However, it was getting outdated on the internal side as we used several Google libraries that were being deprecated at the time because of Android Wear rebranding, and now they are no longer supported. This makes it impossible to update the original app.
The original Feel The Wear was downloaded more than 280k times, and we are grateful for your support. Unfortunately, it is no longer compatible with the current generation of Wear OS watches and does not work on our Wear OS 3 watch. Thus, we started developing a new version.
We have begun a complete rewrite of the original Feel The Wear, using Material You design, and optimizing it for modern Android 13 phones and Wear OS 3 watches. The new version of Feel The Wear avoids potential compatibility issues by not integrating any billing library into the app, which was the main, but not the only, problem in the original. Instead, we made it a paid app that offers all features without in-app purchases. However, feature parity with the original is still far away.
We encourage you to try the new Feel The Wear 2 and provide feedback. We appreciate your support and hope you enjoy it!
