Michael Mahemoff once called screen capture functionality for iOS Apple’s Million-Dollar PR Gift to Developers. Written in 2011, Android still hasn’t learned that lesson.
Here’s how to take a screenshot on your Android Wear device:
- Starting from the watch face, navigate to the desired screen on your Android Wear watch
- Switch to your Android phone
- Open the Android Wear app
- Tap the overflow menu top right
- Tap “Take Screenshot” (Android Wear device now instantly reverts to the watch face)
- Tap notification on your phone saying the screenshot has been saved
- Email screenshot to yourself (attachment is named ‘screen.png’, no timestamp)
If you want to take another screenshot you have to repeat your entire process, including step number one because Android Wear reverts to the watch face after the screenshot command is sent from the phone. Don’t forget to send the first screenshot before taking another, because once you do the old one is lost forever. The entire process is infuriating.
Compare this to taking a screenshot on the Apple Watch. First you navigate to the screen you want. Then:
- Hold the digital crown and the other side button down together for an instant until the entire screen flashes white – screenshot is saved to your iPhone (file is named with a timestamp)
People may sometimes wonder how Apple is able to captivate a market so quickly with a new product and new OS patterns to learn. How is the internet awash in people sharing their favorite apps, posting them on Twitter, designers duplicating the interface on Dribbble? But they discount the value Apple adds by providing incredible support for designers and developers in functionality such as screen capture.
With nascent technology, designers wonder how can I make something that looks at home on this platform? How can I create an experience that won’t confuse my users? How can I deliver mocks that look exactly like what the developers should build? How can I then, after learning how this OS works, push it past what it was designed for to create something that still feels right on the hardware? Screenshots are crucial in terms of bridging that gap.
By making a series of sequential screenshots so difficult to achieve on Android Wear, it’s not only harder for designers and developers to start understanding the platform, but hard for bloggers as well, who want to talk about their favorite apps on their favorite platform.
Android developers should heed this lesson and make screenshots a first-class citizen of the Android OS.