How do you start an Android Wear watch face using ADB?

Question

For testing purposes, I would like to stop and restart my Android Wear watch face service via ADB. Stopping it appears to work normally:

adb shell am force-stop com.package.name

but starting the service back up again has me stumped. Watch faces are not activities, so it cannot be started via am start. I attempted to use the monkey command on the package, but that didn't work. I tried starting the service manually:

adb shell am startservice com.package.name/.watch_face_service

but that doesn't seem to work; either the service isn't started, or the service IS started but is not the current wallpaper.

It MUST be possible, since Eclipse manages to start the watch face when I run or debug it. But how?

Answer 1

After many days of research, I have come to the conclusion that this is impossible.

All WallpaperServices are required to require the BIND_WALLPAPER permission:

String: BIND_WALLPAPER: Must be required by a WallpaperService, to ensure that only the system can bind to it.

...which means that only the system service has the ability to start a wallpaper.

The Android operating system probably has some hardcoded voodoo magic that will automatically start any watchface installed via Eclipse or Android Studio -- that's my best guess considering neither IDE runs any ADB commands to start the wallpaper.

Answer 2

Android Studio Dolphin builds can now launch watchfaces, complications and tiles via run configurations.

For watchface it runs the following command.

$ adb shell am broadcast -a com.google.android.wearable.app.DEBUG_SURFACE --es operation set-watchface --ecn component com.example.android.wearable.alpha/com.example.android.wearable.alpha.AnalogWatchFaceService
$ adb shell am broadcast -a com.google.android.wearable.app.DEBUG_SYSUI --es operation show-watchface 
Broadcasting: Intent { act=com.google.android.wearable.app.DEBUG_SYSUI flg=0x400000 (has extras) }
Broadcast completed: result=1