Capture Wear UI screens

Wear OS provides several ways to capture the Wear OS UI:

  • Android Studio: use Logcat to take screenshots.
  • Companion app: on Google Pixel Watch devices, use the Take wearable screenshot option to take screenshots.
  • Screen record for Wear OS: record a video of the screen.

Capture screenshots in Android Studio

Capturing screenshots of your wearable app's UI using Android Studio is similar to capturing screenshots on mobile. Use the following steps:

  1. Open your app in Android Studio.
  2. Run your app on a device or an emulator.
  3. Navigate to the screen you want to capture on the device or in the emulator.
  4. Open Logcat and click the screenshot icon. It might be beneath the overflow menu.
  5. Optionally, select Frame Screenshot and select a round chrome.
  6. Click Save.

Capture screenshots with the companion app

To take screenshots of a Google Pixel Watch device, you can use the Google Pixel Watch companion app. Follow these steps:

  1. On your UI, find the screen that you want to capture.
  2. On the Android phone, enable Developer options, if you haven't already, by going to Settings > About phone, and tapping Build number seven times.
  3. Open the Wear companion app on your phone.
  4. Tap the three dot overflow button in the upper-righthand corner to open the menu.
  5. Tap Take wearable screenshot. The following message appears: Screenshot request sent. Then you receive the following notifications: Ready to send watch screenshot and tap to send.
  6. Tap the notification to receive options for sending or sharing the screenshot using Bluetooth, Gmail, or other options.

Use screen record for Wear OS

If you develop on macOS, you can use the GitHub project Android tool for Mac to record a video from your Wear OS device.

Alternatively, record a video from your Wear OS device using the following steps:

  1. Record raw frames on the watch, as shown in the following: 
    adb shell screenrecord --time-limit 30 --output-format raw-frames --verbose /sdcard/video.raw
  2. Copy the raw file to your development machine, as shown in the following: 
    adb pull /sdcard/video.raw video.raw
  3. Use ffmpeg to convert the raw file to MP4, as shown in the following: 
    ffmpeg -f rawvideo -vcodec rawvideo -s 400x400 -pix_fmt rgb24 -r 10 -i video.raw -an -c:v libx264 -pix_fmt yuv420p video.mp4

Note: Refer to the FFmpeg website for download and installation instructions.