An Android Wear workaround now enables paid apps as well on Google's latest operating system for wearable devices.
Google formalized its Android Wear OS at its recent Google I/O 2014 developer conference, launching the software along with two new smartwatches: the LG G Pad and the Samsung Gear Live. The Motorola Moto 360 also starred in the show, but while the LG G Watch and Samsung Gear Live have already gone on sale, the Moto 360 will not launch until later this summer.
Android Wear has drawn a lot of interest so far and is expected to power many upcoming smartwatches and other wearable devices, as the industry is booming and more players are rumored to enter the arena. As exciting as Android Wear is, however, news recently surfaced that the OS had issues with paid applications, and only free apps would work on Android Wear devices.
The issues affected both the LG G Watch and the Samsung Gear Live, as a bug prevented paid apps from being installed on the devices. At the time Google made no comment regarding plans to fix the issue, but the company has now come up with a solution.
"We have a workaround to enable paid apps (and other apps that use Google Play's forward-lock mechanism) on Android Wear," the company announced in a blog post on the Android Developers blog. "The assets/directory of those apps, which contains the wearable APK, cannot be extracted or read by the wearable installer. The workaround is to place the wearable APK in the res/raw directory instead," the blog post explains.
It's worth pointing out that this new workaround is for developers, which means that end users will not be able to fix the issue themselves on their Android Wear device. Instead, the developers will have to follow Google's instructions and modify their paid apps in order to enable them to work with Android Wear devices.
Consequently, it's now up to developers to change their paid apps for the platform and fix the issue. With the workaround now available, however, it shouldn't be long before the paid apps currently available on Google Play for Android Wear are updated with the fix.
