Notifications

Created OnAugust 9, 2019

bygreg

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In Android Wear 1.5 the system notified watch faces when so called peek-cards appeared and Bubble Clouds was able to reduce the size of the overlay to show the peek cards.

Peek cards are gone in standard Android Wear 2.0 and the notification pop ups appear only for a brief few seconds. If the ambient watch–face is shown or while using other apps you will be able to see the pop ups, but the active bubble cloud overlay covers it.

Possible workarounds

There are several things that can be done:

NOTIFICATION ICONS plugin

Exciting news: I have just finished working on this plugin for bubble clouds witch can add notification icons to your watch face (or app drawer / folder) to indicate active notifications on your phone. The number of these status icons can change dynamically as more and more notifications come in:

When tapped these notifications are displayed and can be interacted with:

You can install the notification icons plugin from the Bubble Cloud app on your phone:

I made several videos about this new way to manage notifications from Bubble Clouds:

PEEK CARDS in Android Wear 2.9

Bubble Clouds has a card-type complication which now allows you to display long-text complications (such active notifications!) in the peek-card format that Android Wear 1.5 used to have. You can add

If using Bubble Clouds as your watch face you can add the peek card using the “Add complication” menu item:

Make sure to select “Recent notification” under the “General” group:

Other possible solutions

If for some reason you don’t like the peek cards, you can still do some things:

1. Switch the “Notification preview” style to “Always show”:

2. place an “unread count” complication on the watchface to be able to tell when new messages are available:

(Screenshot shows 1 unread message with the little bell icon) [Theme from pack #7]

Open bubble cloud settings and tap “Add complication”

Select General → Unread notification count. Then press the star to move it to the watch–face (favorites)

It is also recommended to enable the wrist gestures in Wear OS, so you could check your notifications without touching your watch:

Version 9.37 brought full gesture support to the active watch face too, so if you use Bubble Cloud as your watch face, you will be able to show and hide even the peek card using wrist gestures.