► New experimental option: wrist gestures to show/hide peek card (under Expert options!)
► Workaround for WearOS bug where watch face is not notified to hide on wrist gesture notification access
► Improved transition between bubble cloud screens (avoid occasional watch face flicker)
► Do not tint Google Voice Search bubble
► Charging sound inhibition issues fixed
► WearOS app component updated to API 26 (Oreo)
► No more white circle at the bottom of the ambient watch face (notification indicator)

BIG UNDER THE HOOD CHANGES
It might not be obvious from the change log, but both highlighted updates involve major internal changes:

1) API 26 update. Android Oreo brings a lot of new restrictions for apps. These needed modification:
► detection of app installs and uninstalls for launcher
► charger detection
► stand up alert notification channels
► overlay type

2) Wrist gesture detection: I noticed WearOS on my Huawei Watch 2 no longer notified the watch face when the user flicked away from the watch face using wrist gestures. It still works on the Huawei Watch 1, but on the HW2 Bubble Clouds could not remove the active watch face overlay because the OS failed to report that the screen changed to show the notification cards and not the watch face.

Easy enough, let’s remove the active overlay when a wrist gesture is detected! Added advantage we can even show/hide the peek card on the wrist gestures.

Trouble: wrist gesture detection is only possible for Activities, but watchfaces run as Services…

Workaround: at the same time when the active watchface overlay appears we also start a blank/dummy Activity. This Activity can detect the wrist gestures and it can act as a controller for the active overlay. We kill this Activity when the user switches away from the Active watch face.

Side effect: Bubble Cloud Settings, Folders, Petal options, Bubble Edit screen, Contact Cloud, and even the Color Picker all use Activities. The new blank/dummy activity needed to be synchronized with all of these.

Side effect 2: Pressing the hardware button on the watch face now switches to the inactive watch face first, and only a second press will take you to the system launcher (app list). I think this is a small price to pay, if not an advantage over all.

Hence the beta label after this new Expert option. Once all tested and all the wrinkles ironed out I might even enabled this new option by default. But until then, you’ll have to deliberately turn it on, and know if anything breaks in the app, this could be the cause.