Package Wear APK Manually
It's still possible to package the wearable app into the handheld app manually if you are using another IDE or another method of building.
1. Copy the signed wearable app to your handheld project's res/raw directory. We'll refer to the APK aswearable_app.apk.
2. Create a res/xml/wearable_app_desc.xml file that contains the version and path information of the wearable app. For example:
The package, versionCode, and versionName are the same values specified in the wearable app'sAndroidManifest.xml file. The rawPathResId is the static variable name of the APK resource. For example, for wearable_app.apk, the static variable name is wearable_app.
<wearableApppackage="wearable.app.package.name">
<versionCode>1</versionCode>
<versionName>1.0</versionName>
<rawPathResId>wearable_app</rawPathResId> </wearableApp>
3. Add a meta-data tag to your handheld app's <application> tag to reference the wearable_app_desc.xmlfile.
<meta-dataandroid:name="com.google.android.wearable.beta.app"
android:resource="@xml/wearable_app_desc"/>
4. Build and sign the handheld app.
Turn off Asset Compression
Many build tools automatically compress any files added to the res/raw directory of an Android app. Because the wearable APK is already zipped, these tools re-compress the wearable APK and the wearable app installer can no longer read the wearable app.
When this happens, the installation fails. On the handheld app, the PackageUpdateService logs the following error: "this file cannot be opened as a file descriptor; it is probably compressed."
Android Studio doesn't compress your APK by default, but if you are using another build process, ensure that you don't doubly compress the wearable app.