I got my Moto 360 smartwatch in April of 2015, and since then, I’ve been pondering what kind of apps I’d want to make, for education, fun, and profit. Today, I’m releasing my first: SoundRemote, a simple Android Phone/Wear app combo that lets you remotely trigger sounds from your watch to play on your phone.

I got the idea while I playing animal sounds from my phone to mess with my cat, Sherman. He’s an indoor house cat, so I try to provide environmental enrichment to keep him (and myself) entertained. At the first hint of another cat’s meows, his ears would perk up and start roaming around looking for the source, even trying to dig under the sheets if the phone was hidden under them.

With this phenomenon in mind, I wanted to create a way to trigger multiple sounds remotely. And I figured — this could be a cool Wear app, and started in earnest to learn the Wear SDK and media frameworks. A few months of intermittent work later, SoundRemote is now published on the Google Play Store!

SoundRemote is my first Wearable app and second Android app generally (after the poorly-named, but still useful Life Counter). Though it took much longer than expected — for a total of perhaps a solid week of work over the course of a few months — I’m quite satisfied at the outcome with v0.1.

The app is pretty straightforward — you pick a few sounds from your phone’s Notifications directory, which can then be played directly on the phone or triggered via the companion Wearable app on the watch.

This being version 0.1, it isn’t the most pretty, but it does everything I need, and perhaps some more. Hope someone else finds it useful as well.

Per usual, I’ve uploaded the source code to Github for the world’s enjoyment. For v0.2, I hope to have two way-syncing of names between the phone and watch, and maybe prettify it a bit more. Both P2s, so it may be a while… 😛

In the meantime, happy cat-pranking!