Bridging Mode for Notifications

By default, notifications are bridged (shared) from an app on a companion phone to the watch. If you build a standalone watch app and have a companion phone app, they may duplicate notifications. The Android Wear 2.0 Preview includes a Bridging mode feature to handle this problem of repeated notifications.

With the Android Wear 2.0 Preview, developers can change the behavior of notifications with the following:

• Specifying in the standalone app's Android manifest file that notifications from the corresponding phone app should not be bridged to the watch
• Setting a dismissal ID so notification dismissals are synced across devices

Preventing Bridging with the Bridging Mode Feature

To prevent bridging of notifications from a phone app, you can use an entry in the manifest file of the watch app (e.g. the standalone watch app), as follows:

com.google.android.wearable.notificationBridgeMode
    

Setting that entry to NO_BRIDGING will prevent bridging:

<meta-data android:name="com.google.android.wearable.notificationBridgeMode"
                   android:value="NO_BRIDGING" />

The default bridging behavior occurs if you do not include the entry or if you specify a value of BRIDGING instead of NO_BRIDGING.

Existing method of preventing bridging

An existing way to prevent bridging is with the Notification.Builder class; specify true in the setLocalOnly method.

However, this way to prevent bridging may not be preferable. For example, if a user installs a phone app but not the corresponding watch app, the setLocalOnly method could prevent the bridging of helpful notifications. Additionally, users may have multiple paired watches and the watch app may not be installed on all of them.

Thus, if bridging should be prevented when the watch app is installed, use the Bridging mode feature.

Using a Dismissal ID to Sync Notification Dismissals

If you prevent bridging with the Bridging mode feature, dismissals (cancellations) of notifications are not synced across a user's devices. However, the following methods of the NotificationCompat.WearableExtender class enable you to use dismissal IDs:

public WearableExtender setDismissalId(String dismissalId)
public String getDismissalId()
    

To enable a dismissal to be synced, use the setDismissalId() method. For each notification, pass a globally unique ID, as a string, when you call the setDismissalId() method. When the notification is dismissed, all other notifications with the same dismissal ID are dismissed on the watch(es) and on the companion phone. To retrieve a dismissal ID, use getDismissalId().

In the following example, syncing of dismissals is enabled because a globally unique ID is specified for a new notification:

NotificationCompat.WearableExtender wearableExtender =
new NotificationCompat.WearableExtender().setDismissalId(“abc123”);
Notification notification = new NotificationCompat.Builder(context)
<set other fields>
.extend(wearableExtender)
.build();
    

Dismissal IDs work if a watch is paired to an Android phone, but not if a watch is paired to an iPhone.