blog/native-apple-watch-and-wear/

[giscus[bot]]

blog/native-apple-watch-and-wear/

The new native Apple Watch port runs real Codename One UI on watchOS through a dedicated Core Graphics backend inside a SwiftUI shell, while Wear OS rides the existing Android pipeline. The same code base, branched with CN.isWatch(), reaches both platforms, seamlessly!

https://www.codenameone.com/blog/native-apple-watch-and-wear/

[ThomasH99]

What is not clear to me is how the watch app and the iPhone app will communicate. In my understanding the watch app is typically lightweight and working on data from/on the iphone which then handles persistence, network and service calls. How should this be done? E.g. can the watch app access a singleton on the iPhone or call methods on the iPhone? Would be great if you could elaborate on this and maybe provide a small example?

[shai-almog]

They are physically separate apps running on physically separate devices with different network stacks. A singleton won't work and won't impact state on your phone since the watch app actually runs on the watch itself. You would need to communicate either via BLE or via a shared network backend.

This is something we're working on improving. We were postponing bringing BLE into the core since the cn1lib is already in a relatively good state and it's one of the harder things to test automatically but it just no longer makes sense as a standalone cn1lib with our current drive to consolidate the APIs. I also don't like the core architecture of the original implementation which was derived from Cordova and carries a lot of their limitations.

[ThomasH99]

Thanks that was what I suspected. However treating them as completely separated apps (except for distribution) means you have to pull a lot of heavy lifting into the Watch app (it more or less becomes a full stand-alone app, just with lighter UI). I haven’t looked into the typical approaches for Watch apps (I understand from your comment they use BLE) but I guess it would be safe to stay close to that. Looking forward to following this :-)