XE16.2 Not Compatible With Native Android Apps Anymore

Here at Google Glass Geeks we’ve got our hands on Glass around 12 months ago when we also decided to start this project. Our first Glass came with XE5 and shortly after we’ve obviously started to play around and pretty much test any compatibility capability the device had. Until XE11 we did not encounter any problems at all when trying to pair bluetooth keyboards (we tried at least 5 different ones, including an Apple one) or side-load a native Android app that caught our attention.

After the XE12 update we could still pair any device or side-load virtually any Android app but we were prompted with different queries that were lacking some text. No problem right? As long as we could still side-load pretty much everything we wanted, everything was still good. Here comes the good part:

Problems and compatibility issues started to really  pour in after we’ve updated the device to XE16, XE16.1 and yes XE16.2 also. Android apps that we’ve tried installing after the XE16.x updates simply lacked navigation options as the swipe and tap gestures simply stopped working. Pairing a bluetooth keyboard with Glass  after these updates proved to be a nightmare as well. The Android settings that a user should use to pair a bluetooth device to Glass could not be navigated anymore.

We initially thought the problems we’ve been encountering were somehow isolated but a recent post on reddit from jimrandomh confirmed these issues are not isolated events at all.  Below you can see the bug report from jimrandomh.

The most sad part is that once Google Glass has updated to XE16.2 or XE16.x users can not downgrade to any previous XE version even if Glass is rooted. The reason behind this being that XE16.2 wipes any undocumented firmware version and any older version will stop booting. Since XE is not open-source yet, there is no way to fix this until Google itself does something about it.

Bottom line we’re stuck with this “bug” until Google decides to change something in the XE16.x source code. Maybe we could make this happen by working together and Explorers start shooting Google support an email and report this problem.

Ourselves just like the reddit user mentioned above sent a message to Google asking for a fix but lacked any reply yet. We’ll get back to you as soon we got a response.