Bring one-handed gestures to your Wear OS app

Posted by Chiara Chiappini, Developer Relation Engineer, Android Developer RelationsOne-handed gestures offer a convenient and touch-free way for users to interact with their watches, enabling them to perform key actions using only the hand on which the device is worn. First introduced on Pixel Watch with Wear OS 6.1, one-handed gestures made quick interactions effortless, such as starting and stopping a timer, accepting calls, and controlling media. Now, with Wear OS 7, we're expanding this functionality with a new Gestures framework that allows OEMs to map gestures to primary actions and dismissals, and an API to bring gesture control to the developer community. Starting with the 1.7 beta release of Compose for Wear OS, you can seamlessly integrate gesture control into your Wear Compose apps. To use this release, upgrade your Wear Compose dependency to: androidx.wear.compose:compose-material3:1.7.0-beta01 Designing for one-handed interaction The one-handed gestures framework is designed around two primary interaction patterns that allow users to take action without touching the screen: Primary action, which on Pixel Watch is mapped to a double-pinch gesture: this action should be mapped to the most important task in a given context. For example, users can perform this gesture to take a photo in a camera app, start/stop a timer, or accept an incoming call. Dismiss action, which on Pixel Watch is mapped to a wrist turn gesture: this action is mapped to system back by default and provides an intuitive way to close interruptive screens or get back to the watch face. It may be overridden for specific use cases, such as silencing an incoming phone call. These gestures are currently available on Pixel Watch 3 and newer, and the Wear OS gesture framework is available to all...

Original source: https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2026/08/one-handed-gestures-wear-os.html
Publisher: Android Developers Blog