Announcing Wear OS App for openHAB

Apps & Services Android App
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61

What name and password does it need? I’ve tried all the ones I know of and nothing works.

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Thanks for all the fixes. I’m on these versions and I’m not able to see the tile on my watch. I configure and successfully test all my connections… I design the tile, then sync it to the watch. All I see on the watch is the little OH logo at the top of the tile, nothing else is displayed on the OH tile.

I can see the tile definition in uicomponents_wear_tile.json. There are 5 slots all of which reference switch items.

Is there any way to see what is happening (or not happening) when I do the Sync to Watch?

64

Did someone solve the password/user problem?

I face a similar behavior, using an API key the connections test works well. But designing tiles is not possible, just shows “Unauthorized Retry”.

Debug log stays empty, no further information.

Updates phone/watch to the latest versions without an effect.

65

Found it!
watch: 42 (1.1.0)
phone: 43 (1.1.0)

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openHAB Wear OS v1.1.0

New Features

  • WYSIWYG tile preview — The phone companion now shows a live preview of your tile layout with real-time item state updates
  • Double-tap actions — Tile buttons support double-tap with configurable state display behavior
    Voice commands — Send voice commands to openHAB from the tile mic button. Supports Gemini AI interpreter when configured server-side (requires openHAB 5.2.1+). Responses are read back if configured.
  • Read-aloud — Voice command responses are spoken back via Google TTS
  • Performance optimization — Parallel item fetch and configVersion-gated disk cache for faster tile refresh
67

I was having trouble getting this working on my Pixel phone and Pixel watch. I thought I should share my experience in case anyone else runs into this.

Initially I configured the watch to use openHAB cloud. I prefer this for the watch since it will work from home and away from home. However, openHAB cloud was very unstable for me. I kept seeing various errors in the openHAB wear phone app. I’ve since found at least one of the issues with openHAB cloud, where openHAB cloud was consuming all of openHAB’s SSE subscriptions. I don’t know if that was the sole cause of my issues, but I will try again when it gets fixed.

See my post here.

So then I switched the watch app’s config to use my local openHAB server instead of openHAB cloud. After entering the domain name/port of my openHAB server, the watch app was completely nonfunctional. I could sync to the watch from the phone app, but the buttons on the tile did nothing.

Looking at the debug log from the phone app, I saw constant DNS resolution failures from the watch app trying to resolve the domain name of my local openHAB server. How weird! My local DNS servers have no trouble resolving my openHAB server domain name from my phone, and the watch routes communication through my phone. So what’s up?

Next I disabled Bluetooth on my watch, forcing the watch to use a WiFi connection instead of going through the phone. All of a sudden the tile was functional. Sweet! But why?

So next I reenabled Bluetooth on the watch, and entered the IP address of my openHAB server instead of the domain name. Voila! It works!

What I learned is that the watch doesn’t use the DNS config from the phone even though it uses the phone for communication. Instead, it appears to use DNS servers that Google must’ve hard-coded into the watch (guessing it’s 8.8.8.8). Ugh.

I found a couple references that seem to confirm my suspicion. I haven’t tried the workaround described in the second link below. I’m happy to use the IP address for now. Once openHAB cloud is more stable, I’ll switch back to it.

BTW, thank you to @gbicskei for having patience with me as I worked through this!!

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openHAB Wear OS 1.2.0

New: Use openHAB as your watch’s voice assistant (an alternative for GA or Bixby)

Configure e.g. the Home button to send voice commands directly to your openHAB voice interpreter - no Google Assistant or Bixby needed.

See voice-assistant-setup.md for details.

phone: 50 (1.2.0)
watch: 49 (1.2.0)

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Some feedback (after writing I see it is more a wishlist) on the designer side of latest version from my my testing:

  • Much more user friendly (visual) for beginners than just the meta data. Good progress, thanks for your commitment and passion.
  • General remark: I understand why you headed for a companion app. But in the long run being able to configure in MainUI admin section could make sense. It is easier to handle because of screen size, keyboard and mouse support. At least I prefer to have langer interfaces when configuring bits and pieces. And you may benefit from the framework available. Currently it is easier with the app as you do not have to deal with the of the dependencies arising and potential API limitations.
  • Having a “code” tab like MainUI would be nice
  • I’m still not happy with the direct link of tiles to items, this requires to many items to be created/maintained. As we have display item and action item from an end user perspective being forced to select an item when creating a tile is not logical. Config/data/UI layers should become separated, better design I’d say.
  • Naming of pages: you can only name it once when creating, rename is not possible. I need to delete the whole page and restart from scratch instead.
  • Page name: first letter capital, everything else is forced to lowercase, spaces become underscores. Not good for displaying in the UI.
  • We should have attributes for pages themselves where e.g. you can set a label independent from the page name. Would it be posssible to set the color per page or even tile (currently affects the whole app)?
  • State and action item fields need a search functionality. Guess most of us have tons of items.
  • Copying of pages: Would help when one wants to rearrange the watch UI.
  • Tiles themselves: would be helpful because able to move them around on a page. Being able to move them to a different page would make life easier.
  • Being able to specify if the raw state or the display state would be good.
  • Saw that tiles do sometimes not start updating immediately in the config, need to switch pages to make it happen.
  • Finally on the app, guess this was mentioned somewhere before: The openHAB label does not really fit from design perspective. I vote for only showing the logo without the label.

I’m not so much into voice control, so I did not test it. Nice to have it, but not essential to me.

BR,

Thomas

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First let me say that I appreciate all the time and effort that everyone is putting into these Android apps. It’s really great to have all this functionality available now.

However, it seems to me that things are starting to get a little unwieldy with 3 separate Android apps, all of which I use, all of which have some overlapping functionality, and all of which have different user interfaces. Is this the best path moving forward?

  • the primary Android app,
  • the Android Auto app, and
  • the Android Wear OS app

I’m loving the ability to do things from my watch that are not used frequently enough to put on a tile.

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I don’t think so, but I don’t think it really is the plan either. For AA, the plan is to have AA support in the official app eventually (and I’m 70% there, just need to think about some difficult corner cases).
For Wear, I’d love to see the same thing (if only for trademark issues, as Gabor ‘impersonating’ OH for sure isn’t ideal), but for obvious reasons no one can prevent anybody from writing some app on their own (and it wouldn’t make sense either). The decision for app writers always is between flexibility for development (own app) vs. simplicity for users (everything in official app), and different people will come to different conclusions about that question.

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Hi there,

I try, and I try, and I try … but I don’t get it :frowning:

To bring me forward I even registered to myopenhab.org. That seems to work now - as I had problems with certificates.

Now the test-connections in the companion-App are successful.

I added a tile on my watch - and this one is empty. ’
BUT: The buttons in the companion app named “Tile design” and “Complications” are greyed out.

Tapping on “Reload items” on the watch-app says: “Loaded 0 items”.
(Even when I added “wearTile” on Metadata in two items in my installation).

Any help is appreciated - I use a Galaxy watch 6 and openHAB 5.2.1

Update: Now all of a sudden it works. Buttons in the companion-app are available and sync with the watch works as well. I fumbled around with connection authentication and realized I could not change back from API to Basic auth and saving without Passwort. So I simply provided a wrong password and now it seems to work wit API Token. Seems weird.

73

This is a concern I didn’t bring up before. The word “openHAB” is trademarked. Any project that isn’t actually a part of the openHAB project itself needs permission to use it.

Note: I received such permission for my openHAB-Rules-Tools library, but it wasn’t a sure thing. My understanding is the goal is to make this part of the OH project so it probably won’t be a problem. But if it is spun off, official permission will be needed or the name will need to change.

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I have no intention of impersonating the official app or shipping under someone else’s package name without agreement. I’ve created bindings before, but those went into existing repos. This is a different situation with a standalone app in a new repo. I wanted to validate the idea with the community first before approaching the foundation. These are just the first debug releases… If we think Wear OS has a place in the openHAB ecosystem, could you point me in the right direction? I’m not familiar with the process for proposing a new official app, who makes that decision, and what are the steps?
Regarding the companion app - the full tile designer should be moved to MainUI in my opinion. The only reason I created it on the phone was to help with configuration until this foundation transfer question is resolved. The tile editor migration should go to phase 2.
Of course if the decision is NO for the app I will rename it to something and stop publishing (keep it for personal use) - no impersonation there either…

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There 100% should be a WearOS app (IMHO at least)

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@gbicskei I haven’t heard anyone here say that there shouldn’t be a Wear OS app. Personally, I’m loving it very much. And I’m very appreciative of the work you’ve put into it and the help you’ve given me along the way.

My only comment, which I think started this, was to point out that there are now 3 separate openHAB phone apps, and that felt unnecessary to me, especially considering they have some overlapping functionality, primarily in the configuration area.

And, BTW, the max subscription issue with openHAB cloud has been fixed as of yesterday, so I’m hopeful that the myopenhab configuration will be more stable. I switched over to it last night and it seems to be working much better.

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Please keep your good work going, definitely we (and myself :smiley: ) need a WearOS app, highly appreciated.
For me your plan sounds reasonable, MainUI and “official app” in the long run is the way forward.
And as long as this is a test run for a closed audience it should be fine for evaluation and debugging purpose. You might rename it to “OH for WearOS” and drop the logo - just in case this is seen as highly important. Hey, why not keep the momentum before making things complicated.

Many thanks,
Thomas

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I think the only issue is coming up with a compromise approach that makes it fit with what’s already there already. Ideally, the companion app should be merged with the existing Android app at a minimum. It’s a pretty crummy UX to have to install two separate apps.

If this becomes part of the existing Android App, it’s just a PR. If it’s to be maintained in a separate repo, theoretically we should just need to ask to have a space created. However, if there is enough controversy over that the AC may need to be invoked.

I don’t think there is any trademark issue unless you decide to host this in your own repo.

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I still can’t use it. I only want to use a local connection and I still just get Invalid username or password when i try test connection. What username and password should I be using?

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For me this was resolved with one of the latest update of the companion, did you apply them? Sorry for the dumb question, but sometimes we forget things.