Android Wear and Notifications

[Hook]

I don't have a smart watch and am pretty ignorant at this point about how these things work. I'd kind of like to explore this world, but there's one thing I'd like to understand before I go in.

How do notifications work? Does a given smartwatch pull from the notifications on the smartphone so that those same notifications always appear on the watch? What I'm trying to figure out is, if I have a 3rd party (non-google) app that gives me notifications on my Nexus 5, will I get those notifications on my watch or does the third party app have to have something special coded in to send notifications directly to the watch.

I tried searching for the answer to this question but, probably due in part to my not knowing exactly how to word what I'm asking, I get mostly confusing results.

Thanks in advance for helping me understand this.

 

[Podivin]

Hmm... that's a toughy.
To start with, the watch doesn't pull notifications from the phone, the phone pushes notifications to the watch. I realize that almost sounds like hair-splitting, but it does make a difference.
All notifications that appear on your watch will also be on the phone.
Not all notifications on the phone will appear on the watch.
So yes, you may have an app that puts notifications on the phone but not to the watch.
For instance, I get notifications on my phone when there is an accident on the roads I travel to work - those never show on my watch. Now in truth I've never tried to dig around in settings to see if I could make them show up on my watch, so it could just be a setting that's wrong.
There are also a couple of apps where I've intentionally stopped the notifications from being sent to the watch because they don't need my immediate attention.
Does any of that help?

BTW, I've got a Note 4 paired with a Moto 360.

 

[electricpete]

All "Ongoing" notifications on the phone don't show on the watch.
As far as can tell, all other phone notifications do show on the watch.
Maybe there are some apps I haven't tried or watched closely, but certainly everything important to me gets through. I do filter a few of them out in the settings of the Android Wear app (which lives on the phone) as mentioned above.

 

[Hook]

Thanks, these answers go a long way to clearing things up, at least enough until I take the plunge and find out for myself, which I probably will.

 

[electricpete]

I just got mine two weeks ago. Very glad I did...It's a cool toy, and mildly useful too.

 

[lunatic59]

It will get more useful over time.

Maybe this will help ... Manage notifications

 

[Hook]

Wow, thanks. Ummm, why did that page never pop up on a Google search for Android Wear and Notificaions? They're messing with me, right?

 

[electricpete]

Yeah, google is sometimes good at hiding stuff. Don't feel bad, I've never seen that info myself weeks after having the phone. Good stuff.

The link says no watch vib occurs if the notification generates no sound or vib on the phone. Mine acts different and I think I know why. Last week I installed an app "feel the wear" which lets you customize vibrations (I like to assign multiple longer buzzes because one short buzz seems easy to miss on my moto 360). With that app installed, the rules above don't really apply. I tried a silent and nonvibrating (phone behaviour) notification from tasker and it still vibrates my watch with the custom pattern I set up for tasker notifications in feel the wear. As far as I can tell for my setup (with feel the wear), I get all notifications on my watch except ones that I specifically excluded and ones that are ongoing (cannot be swiped away). And my watch vibrates for every notification that makes it to the watch except google now cards. I didn't think about my special setup in my initial post. Sorry this is probably a little more info than anyone is interested in, but helps me to talk it through as I am still figuring things out.

 

[lunatic59]

Wow, thanks. Ummm, why did that page never pop up on a Google search for Android Wear and Notificaions? They're messing with me, right?

Maybe ... I found it using Bing.