My partner really likes Just Dance - I wasn’t aware of this game before tbh. But I quickly found it ridiculous that Just Dance doesn’t have a wearable application that acts as a controller. The only way to run the game on Xbox S is to wave your phone in front of your TV. What can possibly go wrong, right?

I found numerous examples of people running the controller app on wear os devices thus I decided to give it a try myself!

Here are my steps:

  1. I bought a cheap WearOS device - got a really good deal on TicWatch E2 (rather ugly and slow but good enough)

  2. Then I sideloaded Just Dance Controller APK v7.1.0 based on suggestions I found on Reddit threads linked above.

  3. I scaled the screen using adb command to see Just Dance controller app pairing screen - unfortunately it yielded the watch next to unusable - touch area within the app was so small that it was impossible to enter the pairing code.

  4. So I worked around the problem - I ran adb shell dumpsys input to grab touch events and created a simple map for each clickable element - then wrote a telegram bot in golang to send those touch events (for pairing purposes) that used gadb library to speak with ADB docker container and I ran both on my Synology NAS station within same VLAN (Xbox, watch and NAS device) - once you pass the pairing steps the rest just works.

Funny enough even tho the setup looks really fragile it actually works pretty well - see attached video: