Turn on/off Theater Mode on Android Wear Programatically

The simplest way is to leverage the adb shell to run settings put global theater_mode_on.

• settings put global theater_mode_on 1 will turn on theater mode
• settings put global theater_mode_on 0 will turn off theater mode

And the following is the java code to turn on theater mode.

Process su = Runtime.getRuntime().exec("su");
DataOutputStream os = new DataOutputStream(su.getOutputStream());
os.writeBytes("settings put global theater_mode_on 1\n");
os.flush();
os.close();

So we can automated the theater mode through scripts.

Notice that the total time to get it effective is about 2 seconds, and it will pop up a long toast, followed by the dark screen. The whole takes around 10 seconds. Afterwards, if ambient mode is on, the device will get into ambient mode.