Your Wear OS-powered smartwatch may soon support the screen recording feature. In the latest version of the Wear OS companion app, we have found some new strings that suggest Google is preparing to add the screen recording feature to its smartwatch OS.
An APK teardown can often predict features that may arrive in a future update of an application, but it is possible that any of the features we mention here may not make it in a future release. This is because these features are currently unimplemented in the live build and may be pulled at any time by the developers in a future build.
Following are the new strings we found in the Wear OS version 2.45 (the companion app installed on your phone):
<string name="screen_recording_email_subject">Wear OS Screen Recording</string>
<string name="screen_recording_wearable_notification_text">Tap to send.</string>
<string name="screen_recording_wearable_notification_title">Ready to send watch screen recording.</string>
Looking at the strings, it seems that the user will be able to send or share the screen recording using the Android Sharesheet menu. Further examining the app's code, we learned that the file would be saved as "screen-recording.mp4". Wear OS has long supported taking screenshots of watch UI using the companion app, and this new feature will most likely be implemented in a similar way as well.
Other than UI demonstration and developer-specific use cases, I can’t think of a lot of scenarios where the screen recording functionality will actually be useful for average users. Nonetheless, it will be interesting to see how Google plans to utilize it on smartwatches.
It should be noted that the screen recording feature isn’t live yet for Wear OS users. We also don’t know how and when Google plans to roll out the feature to the masses. We'll keep an eye out for further development of the feature and will sure to let you know if we learn anything new.