Wednesday, July 15, 2015

Solved: Android Wear functionality not visible


Trying to publish my next Android Wear app Sun Compass I got the famous:
  • Your app does not have Android Wear functionality that’s visible to the user
feedback from the Play Store review team.

I checked all the usual suspects like:
  • Include all the permissions declared in the manifest file of the wearable app in the manifest file of the mobile app.
  • Ensure that both the wearable and mobile APKs have the same package name and version number. 
But the app still was rejected with the same error message.

Finally I found the reason. I used two different version of the Google Play Store library in the mobile and the wear part of the app. Setting them both to the same (latest) version solved the problem.

Why? I can only guess that different library versions require different permissions. This way my mobile app didn't include all permissions of the wear app and failed to install on the device (without any error message).

Summary:

Make sure you use the exact same version of the Google Play Store library in both the mobile and the wear app. 

4 comments:

craigp said...

Is compiling the Google Play Library into the Wear app mandatory? I only have it in my mobile app so the difference between them is that is isn't included. I'm not consciously using any Play functionality in my wearable but I'm still getting the dreaded "Your app does not have Android Wear functionality that’s visible to the user." I could recompile and uploaded but after half a dozen similar efforts I'm starting to get a bit jaded.

pixelig said...

I think the Wear part of Google Play is mandatory. For a quick test: Remove the developer version of the app from the watch and install the app store package via USB on the phone to test whether it finds and installs the Wear app on the watch.

Jhonty Srrauss said...

Well, I appreciate your efforts. I have some confusion which I want to ask you. Is it mandatory to use Google play store library in the app ? And could you please share the mandatory requirement list ?

pixelig said...

Yes, it is.