Wear OS provides several ways to capture the screen:
- Use Android Studio: Use Logcat to take screenshots of the Wear OS UI.
- Use the companion app: The Take wearable screenshot option in the app lets you take screenshots of the Wear OS UI.
- Use 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:
- Open your app in Android Studio.
- Run your app on a device or an emulator.
- Navigate to the screen you want to capture on the device or in the emulator.
- Open Logcat and click on the screenshot icon. It may be beneath the overflow menu.
- Optionally, select Frame Screenshot and select a round or square chrome.
- Click Save.
Capture screenshots with the companion app
You can use the companion app to capture screenshots of your Wear UI by following these steps:
- On your UI, find the screen that you want to capture.
- On the Android phone, enable Developer options, if you haven't already, by going to Settings > About phone, and tapping Build number seven times.
- Open the Wear companion app on your phone.
- Tap the overflow button (the three dots in the upper right hand corner) to open the menu.
- 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. - 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 a 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:
- Record raw frames on the watch:
adb shell screenrecord --time-limit 30 --output-format raw-frames --verbose /sdcard/video.raw
- Copy the raw file to your development machine:
adb pull /sdcard/video.raw video.raw
- Use
ffmpeg
to convert the raw file to MP4: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.