How can I support Android Wear for Android >= 4.3 and at the same time mobile phones with Android < 4.3

Question

I have an existing app supporting 4.0 and above, but I'd also like to provide an Android Wear application for devices with 4.3 and above. At the same time I still want to support 4.0 devices. The mobile app needs to talk with wear app so 4.3+ apis would need to be used, that are not existent on 4.0. Is that even possible?

Answer 1

In short, the phone app can support any version you like and the wear app can support 4.4 and up even though you package them in the same apk. However, if the app requires newer API, I would recommend looking at how many of your users that are actually running anything below 4.4 and consider dropping support below 4.4.

Answer 2

Google provided information in their documentation on how to gracefully handle lack of wear capabillity. When creating Google api client, the google api creation will fail.

See paragraph Access the Wearable API in enter link description here