Google Glass Apps

I first saw Google Glass as a kid when Google unveiled Project Glass back in 2012, and I thought it was one of the coolest pieces of tech I had ever seen. As far as I knew, it never made it past the prototype stage, and it certainly never made it to Denmark. So when I randomly stumbled over a Danish listing for a Google Glass Explorer Edition for almost nothing, I had to pick it up.

There was a reason it was so cheap: most would consider it “e-waste”. The device was stuck in a boot loop, and with Google's services long shut down, it couldn't even make it through the initial setup. Reviving it meant flashing a custom firmware that strips out all of Google's proprietary software. The result was a working device, but one that could do little more than take pictures.

From there, I set out to build my own apps for it. The result is a collection of custom Glass apps: a Spotify player with playback controls, a live weather forecast, recent Danish news, and public transport directions from Rejseplanen.

Google Glass runs Android 4.4 (KitKat) and was discontinued years ago. The official SDK is no longer distributed, the build tooling depends on long-dead repositories, and the documentation only exists as deprecated archives. I dug through the old documentation to learn the Glass-specific design patterns, and rather than developing in the nearly decade-old Android Studio version the platform expects, I ditched the IDE entirely and built a streamlined command-line toolchain that builds and deploys apps to the Glass with a single command.

The biggest hurdle was networking. The device's outdated TLS stack can't connect to modern HTTPS servers, cutting it off from practically every API today. To solve this, I built a lightweight backend proxy that talks to Spotify, open-meteo, a Danish news feed and Rejseplanen, and serves simplified responses over plain HTTP that the Glass can handle.

The apps live as cards in the Glass timeline, so in theory a glance is all it takes to see what's playing, what the weather looks like, or when the next train leaves. In practice, this isn't something I'd actually use day to day. Walking around with a glowing prism strapped to my face doesn't exactly look great, and the battery struggles to last more than an hour. This project was driven purely by learning and curiosity, and seeing how far I could push a device most people would have thrown away.