Android : Android Wear app packing working in emulator?

Hello Stackoverflow community,

I am currently testing the Android Wear SDK and successfully developed my first wearable app using Android Studio. It is obviously part of a handheld app. This handheld app uses different product flavours for free and paid versions that have a different package names. In Android Studio the "development" package name is like com.abcde, while the flavours are com.abcde.free and com.abcde.pro. The connection between wear app (dev package name is also com.abcde) and handheld is working fine so far, but I have problems with the packaging testing on the wear emulator.

My question: I have packaged the wear app into my release apk using the Gradle wearApp style in the first attempt and the manual style in the second attempt. Using the second attempt increases my apk by the size of the wear app!

However, I cannot see the app on the wear emulator after installing the release apk on my physical device (which is paired via adb forward with the wear emulator). Is this generally possible, or do I also need a physical wear device to test the automatic packaging?

Looking forward to answers. Thank you in advance!