The smartwatch market is a graveyard of ambition, a monument to wasted engineering hours, and a decade-long demonstration of what happens when the richest companies on Earth decide that good enough is someone else's problem.
A note before we begin: This piece is not balanced. A beta reader raised this as a concern. They are correct that it is not balanced and wrong that this is a problem. Balance is a tool for covering genuinely contested ground. It is not a moral obligation to manufacture a counterargument when the counterargument does not exist. Google has had ten years, billions of dollars, and the most dominant mobile platform on Earth. The result is a wearable ecosystem where the flagship product from the company that makes the OS, the watch, and the phone cannot match the integration of its direct competitor. Partners who trusted Google's public commitments lost their businesses. Customers who bought devices on the strength of advertised update promises got nothing. Google apologised to no one, compensated no one, and is currently preparing its next developer keynote. If you can construct a genuinely balanced argument from those facts, you are a better rhetorician than this writer and a worse analyst. This piece calls the situation what it is. Readers seeking balance are advised to look for it in a market that has earned it.
Let's not pretend this is a close race. It isn't. It stopped being a close race around 2017, when it became clear that the Android smartwatch ecosystem was not having a slow start but a structural failure, and that the people responsible for fixing it were busy renaming things and scheduling press conferences. The competition has had ten years, hundreds of billions in combined market capitalisation, and every structural advantage that comes from running the world's most popular mobile operating system — and they are still losing to a company that charges four hundred dollars for a watch that only works with one phone.
Every year, a new parade of Android-adjacent wrist computers shows up to promise you the moon, deliver a pebble, and then get quietly discontinued eighteen months later when nobody bought them. Samsung refreshes its lineup with a new titanium grade and a processor nobody asked to benchmark. Google ships a Pixel Watch that demonstrates, for the third year running, that vertical integration is only an advantage if the company integrating vertically has any intention of doing the work. Garmin shows up at the wrong conference and wins anyway because its users have different questions. And somewhere in Cupertino, Apple ships another iterative Apple Watch update and extends its lead without appearing to try particularly hard, which is the most insulting part of all of this.
The problem was never hardware. It was never sensors, or displays, or battery chemistry, or processor efficiency. The Android manufacturers have matched or beaten Apple on every one of those dimensions at some point in the last decade and it has not mattered, because a smartwatch is not a hardware product. It is a software and ecosystem product wearing a hardware costume, and building the software and ecosystem requires something the Android camp has repeatedly proven it does not have: the willingness to treat a product as a long-term commitment rather than a launch event followed by managed decline.
Nobody except Apple has built that commitment into a wearable platform. Not for lack of time — Google has had a decade, which is an eternity in consumer technology and roughly nine years longer than Google has ever sustained attention on anything that didn't directly monetise your search history. Not for lack of money. Not for lack of engineering talent. For lack of will, and for lack of the organisational coherence required to translate will into a product that works the same way on a Tuesday in November as it did on launch day in September. Two things that are harder to ship than a titanium bezel, and two things the Android watch ecosystem has never once managed simultaneously.
What a Smartwatch Actually Does
Before tearing apart the competition, let's establish what we're actually talking about, because the industry has spent a decade trying to obscure a very simple product category with an avalanche of features nobody asked for and benchmarks nobody cares about.
A smartwatch, in practice, does this: it tells you the time. It buzzes your wrist when your phone buzzes. It tracks your steps with accuracy that oscillates between "probably fine" and "completely fabricated." Maybe you use it to pay for coffee. Maybe you glance at a notification and decide not to pull your phone out. That is it. That is the entire value proposition of a consumer smartwatch. There is no killer feature waiting around the corner. The category has been mature for a decade and it plateaued fast, because human wrists have not evolved new use cases.
Every brand that has tried to expand beyond this core loop — to make the smartwatch a standalone device, an independent computer, a health diagnostic platform, a fashion statement — has produced something worse at the core loop and only marginally better at the peripheral features that nobody actually uses daily. You know what percentage of Galaxy Watch owners have ever used their watch's built-in speaker to take a phone call in public? You don't know and Samsung doesn't want you to find out.
Apple understood this early. They built a watch that does the core loop better than anyone else, integrated it so tightly into their ecosystem that using it feels like a natural extension of your phone rather than a satellite device that has learned to tolerate your phone, and then layered health features on top as a genuine bonus. The result is boring, constrained, and dominant. That combination is not a coincidence.
The Wear OS Disaster: A Decade of Groundhog Day
Google's approach to Wear OS is one of the most sustained and inexcusable failures of execution in the history of consumer technology. Not a stumble. Not a tough market. A company with essentially unlimited resources, a dominant mobile platform, and a decade of runway somehow producing a wearable ecosystem that still cannot reliably deliver a notification on time. It deserves to be documented with the specificity it has earned, because Google has largely escaped accountability for it by moving on loudly to the next announcement before anyone finished writing up the last failure.
Cast your mind back to 2014. Android Wear launched with genuine promise — open, flexible, designed for a hardware ecosystem spanning multiple manufacturers. It was clunky, the apps were bad, battery life was terrible, and the UX had clearly been designed by people who had never worn a watch for a full day. But it was first. First to market, first with a platform, first with developer tools. Being first in a nascent category should count for something. Google had every structural advantage: the world's most popular mobile operating system, billions in cash, a developer community that would have built for Wear OS if Wear OS had given them any reason to. Google turned first-mover advantage into first-mover irrelevance. It takes genuine talent to squander a lead that large.
The platform drifted. Google released incremental updates while Apple quietly built watchOS into something genuinely useful — signing health research partnerships with hospitals, negotiating with payment networks, courting developers with a stable API and consistent release cadence. Google, meanwhile, was doing whatever Google does between product announcements: reorganising, deprioritising, abandoning Wear teams to subsist on whatever attention they could scavenge between the AI pivot of the week and the next ill-fated messaging app. If you worked on Wear OS at Google during this period, you were either not paying attention or had made a serious career miscalculation.
Then came the rebranding. Android Wear became Wear OS in 2018, because when you cannot fix a product, you rename it and hope nobody looks closely at the changelog. A new name, a new logo, the same underlying platform, the same problems, and a press event at which Google executives used words like "reimagined" and "reinvented" to describe software that loaded slower than it had in 2015. The sluggishness remained. The app selection remained anemic. Developers remained largely uninterested, because why would you build for a platform where the install base was too small to justify the effort, and the install base was too small because the app selection was too poor to attract users? Google sat in this death spiral for years with the serene confidence of a company that had never once faced a financial consequence for a failed consumer product.
The Samsung gambit was supposed to fix everything. In 2021, Google and Samsung announced a unified platform — Wear OS 3, co-developed, built on a shared kernel, launching on the Galaxy Watch 4. This was positioned as the end of the fragmentation that had plagued the ecosystem. The announcement was met with genuine, if cautious, enthusiasm from manufacturers who had been waiting years for Google to get serious. Companies publicly committed to the platform. Products were announced. Tooling was invested in.
Here is what actually happened: Wear OS 3 launched exclusively on Samsung devices for over a year. Fossil, Mobvoi, Montblanc, and every other Wear OS hardware partner were left stranded on Wear OS 2 while Samsung shipped the new platform. Google did not compensate these companies for the delay. Google did not provide a clear, actionable timeline to partners who asked. Google eventually confirmed — quietly, in developer documentation, not in a press release — that several Fossil and Mobvoi devices that had been explicitly promised Wear OS 3 updates would not receive them. Full stop. The companies that had trusted Google absorbed the support burden, the customer complaints, the review score damage, and the reputational cost of selling a product that didn't deliver what was advertised. Google absorbed nothing. Google issued no apology. Google moved on to Wear OS 4.
This is a pattern, not an incident. This is how Google operates when a product doesn't achieve escape velocity: not with a transparent post-mortem, not with financial restitution to partners who made good-faith investments based on public commitments, but with a quiet pivot and a new version number. Google Reader. Google+. Stadia. Inbox. Allo. Every time, the same structure: announce with fanfare, grow a user base or partner ecosystem, quietly pull support, move on. Wear OS isn't dead yet, which in some ways makes it worse — it's in the zombie state, technically maintained, functionally abandoned as a serious platform, kept on life support because Google needs Samsung to keep shipping Android phones and Samsung needs Wear OS to have a name brand attached to it.
Wear OS 4, Wear OS 5 — the version numbers increment and the press releases cite improvements that are real in isolation and inadequate in context. Notification handling remains inconsistent in ways that should have been resolved in 2016. Background processes get murdered by battery management algorithms that have decided your notifications are less important than squeezing out another forty minutes of standby time. Google's own applications — Maps, Assistant, Wallet — sit on Wear OS like software that knows it's at the wrong party, doing its best to seem comfortable while clearly designed for a different platform.
The Pixel Watch is where Google's Wear OS failure graduates from embarrassing to contemptible. Google makes the smartwatch. Google makes the operating system running on the smartwatch. Google makes the phone pairing with the smartwatch. There is no integration gap. There is no compatibility layer. Every excuse available to Samsung — different OS versions, different OEM skins, Bluetooth stack inconsistencies — does not exist here. This is one company controlling the entire stack, with a direct line between every component. The Pixel Watch 4 is genuinely beautiful hardware: excellent display, solid sensors, the best build quality of any Pixel Watch. It pairs with a Pixel phone and the experience is adequate. Noticeably worse than wearing an Apple Watch with an iPhone — two devices Apple treats as a single product that happens to come in two pieces, designed simultaneously by teams that talk to each other, running software that was built to be interdependent from the ground up.
Google's own watch, running Google's own OS, connecting to Google's own phone, cannot match what Apple achieves by designing both ends of the relationship together. There is no charitable interpretation of this. It is a comprehensive, public, years-long demonstration that Google is incapable of building a platform — that Google can build features, services, and hardware components, but cannot build the invisible connective tissue that makes a product feel like a single unified thing rather than a collection of parts that have been introduced to each other at a conference and are making polite conversation while privately waiting to go home.
Samsung: Close Enough to Make It Hurt
Samsung deserves its own section because they are the only Android watch manufacturer that comes genuinely close — close enough that the failure has texture, close enough that you can identify the exact points at which it comes apart rather than watching the whole thing collapse at once.
The Galaxy Watch hardware is, on its merits, often superior to Apple Watch in specific dimensions. The Galaxy Watch Ultra's titanium build is genuinely excellent. Battery life across the Samsung range doesn't just beat Apple Watch — it laps it. A Galaxy Watch 7 running hard gets you two days. A Galaxy Watch Ultra gets you four. An Apple Watch Ultra 2 gets you roughly two if you stay away from GPS-heavy workouts. Samsung wins this comparison without breaking a sweat, and it's a real win — charging a watch every night is a mild but persistent annoyance that compounds across years of ownership until it quietly reshapes your evening routine around finding the charger.
The rotating bezel on the Galaxy Watch Ultra is one of the best interaction paradigms on any smartwatch. Physical control of a touchscreen interface, tactile feedback, usable with gloves, usable without looking at the display. Apple Watch's digital crown is good. The rotating bezel is better. Samsung's health sensors are competitive in most categories and ahead in a few. Blood pressure monitoring, where it's been approved, is a genuine differentiator with no Apple equivalent. The displays are excellent.
None of this matters as much as it should, because the software integration is where it unravels, and it unravels in ways that feel almost deliberately perverse.
Galaxy Watch works best with a Samsung phone. On a Samsung phone, running Samsung Health, using Samsung Pay, the experience holds together — coherently, not seamlessly, and the difference between those two words is the entire ballgame. Coherent means things work most of the time through a series of data handoffs between applications. Seamless means you never think about the handoffs because they happen at a level below your awareness. Apple Watch is seamless. Galaxy Watch is coherent, and you notice the seams. Notifications occasionally duplicate. App installations require navigating a workflow involving the Galaxy Wearable app, the Galaxy Store, and a confirmation dialogue that appears on your phone for a change you initiated on your phone. Health data sometimes fails to sync until you open Samsung Health manually and stand there watching a loading spinner while you consider the life choices that brought you to this moment.
On a non-Samsung Android phone, the experience degrades further. Samsung and Google have a financial interest in appearing compatible and a conflicting financial interest in keeping users within their respective service ecosystems. These pressures push against each other and produce an integration that technically functions and experientially frustrates. Think of two colleagues who have been forced to share an office by management and have decided to be professionally civil while routing every possible task through their own preferred system. That is the Pixel-to-Galaxy-Watch relationship. It works. Nobody's happy about it.
Then there's the Samsung account wall, which is where any remaining goodwill evaporates. Samsung — the company that built its global brand on being the open, flexible, choice-respecting alternative to Apple — requires a Samsung account for full Galaxy Watch functionality. Samsung Health: account. Samsung Pay: account. The Galaxy Store, from which watch apps are installed: account. Bixby integration: account. Samsung has constructed an account requirement around its wearable ecosystem that achieves all of Apple's lock-in with none of Apple's reliability, none of Apple's software consistency, and none of the goodwill Apple has earned through years of delivering what it promised. It is the worst possible configuration: proprietary capture without proprietary quality. At least when Apple traps you, the prison is comfortable and the plumbing works.
The Galaxy Watch Ultra at five-hundred-plus dollars is the most instructive single product in this story. It is a watch priced on hardware credentials in a category where hardware stopped being the differentiator five years ago. The titanium is premium. The rotating bezel is satisfying. The battery life is excellent. The day-to-day experience of actually depending on it is the experience of a device that is perpetually one software update away from being great, in a product line where that update never quite arrives.
The Garmin Excuse
Garmin users will materialise in the comments of any smartwatch piece to explain, with the particular energy of someone who has calculated their lactate threshold using a wrist sensor, that their Fenix 8 has a forty-day battery life and validates its VO2 max estimates against clinical measurements. They are correct. This is not a counterargument to anything in this piece.
A Garmin Fenix 8 is a fitness computer that also tells the time and surfaces notifications. A smartwatch is a notification and ecosystem device that also tracks fitness. These descriptions sound like synonyms. They are not. They describe different tools designed for different primary use cases with different audiences, and conflating them is like saying a surgical scalpel and a bread knife are both knives so you could just use either one. Technically accurate at the category level. Operationally insane in practice.
The Fenix 8 is the right answer for a specific kind of person: someone who trains with genuine structure, who uses heart rate zone data and training load metrics as primary inputs to workout planning, who runs or cycles in environments where GPS satellite precision is a safety consideration, who needs a device that survives a week in the wilderness without access to a charging cable. For those users, the Garmin is not merely better than Apple Watch — it is a fundamentally different class of device addressing a need Apple Watch doesn't seriously attempt to meet. That is a completely legitimate product choice, and Garmin deserves credit for building it well.
It is not a rebuttal to the smartwatch argument. It cannot be a rebuttal to the smartwatch argument because the Garmin is not a smartwatch in the way the rest of this piece is using the term. Pointing at a Fenix 8 and saying "Garmin beats Apple Watch" is answering a question that wasn't asked. Nobody shopping for a smartwatch should be making this comparison unless they are also willing to say "I am primarily a serious athlete who wants notification support, not a notification user who does some fitness tracking." That is a genuinely different sentence and it implies a genuinely different purchase.
For everyone else, the Garmin comparison collapses immediately. Garmin Connect is a closed ecosystem. Connect IQ, Garmin's third-party app platform, makes Wear OS's app selection look like the App Store by comparison. Smartwatch features — payments, calendar integration, messaging apps, music control, third-party service support — are present on the Fenix 8 in the way that a sleeping bag can technically function as a coat. The battery life argument is real and lands cleanly. If charging every night is a genuine dealbreaker, Garmin has your answer. Just don't pretend the Fenix is a smartwatch alternative. It's a category of one, and it should stay there.
Fossil, Mobvoi, and the Third-Party Graveyard
A moment of silence — extended, proportionate, earned — for the companies that built businesses on Google's promises and paid for the trust.
Before the eulogy, some context on why this matters beyond a business school case study in platform risk. Every company that died in the Wear OS graveyard took real jobs with it. Real engineers who built real things. Real customer support teams that fielded real complaints about update promises that Google made and didn't keep. Real consumers who made purchasing decisions based on publicly advertised commitments from a manufacturer acting in good faith on a platform commitment from Google. All of them paid a price. Google paid nothing.
Fossil was the most credible non-Samsung Wear OS manufacturer for several years, the one name that gave the platform a veneer of mainstream credibility outside Samsung's orbit. The Fossil Gen 6 launched in 2021 on a Snapdragon 4100+ processor with explicit, public, marketed promises of a Wear OS 3 upgrade. Fossil put those promises in press releases. Fossil put those promises on product pages. Customers bought the watch, in meaningful numbers, partly because a company staking its reputation on a promise is supposed to mean something.
The upgrade never came. In early 2023, Fossil announced it was exiting the smartwatch business entirely, dissolving its smartwatch team, and walking away from years of product investment. Not because the market didn't exist. Not because the hardware wasn't good enough. Because the platform underneath it had been yanked away by a company that had moved on to its next announcement cycle and couldn't be bothered to honour a commitment it had made in public. The customers who bought Fossil watches in good faith got a device that aged faster than its hardware warranted because the software controlling it was abandoned by the company that owned the software. Fossil's name took the damage. Google's didn't. Google was already three strategy documents ahead.
Mobvoi built their entire TicWatch business on Wear OS. TicWatch watches were the affordable entry point to the platform, the devices that sat on the bottom shelf of Best Buy and converted curious customers into the ecosystem. Mobvoi is still technically in business, still technically making watches, still technically running Wear OS. The operative word throughout is technically. They are not a growth business. They are a company that bet on Google's platform commitment and is now managing the slow wind-down of that bet.
Montblanc thought luxury branding could survive the software. They released the Summit 3 at a price point that assumed the brand premium would paper over the platform deficiencies. They were wrong. When your flagship product is a watch that costs more than an Apple Watch Ultra and runs an OS with fewer usable apps and worse integration, the brand premium evaporates the first time a notification arrives six minutes late. Montblanc has not released a successor.
Skagen. Diesel. Kate Spade. Fashion brands that licensed their aesthetics to Fossil's Wear OS hardware, extending the platform's reach into segments Samsung couldn't crack. Gone. The entire third-party Wear OS ecosystem is dead. Not struggling. Not contracting. Dead. It did not die from market forces or technological disruption or a better competitor. It died because Google made promises it didn't keep, repeatedly, to partners who had no recourse when those promises evaporated.
Google has never acknowledged this directly. Google has never apologised to the customers who bought devices on the strength of update commitments Google failed to deliver. Google has never compensated the partners who built businesses on platform promises Google abandoned. This is not because Google doesn't know it happened. It's because Google has calculated, correctly, that there is no meaningful consequence for doing it. The tech press moves on. The consumers move on. The dead companies cannot fight back. And Google's next developer conference will feature another platform announcement, another stage commitment, another round of manufacturers being invited to build on Google's ecosystem — and the manufacturers who are still standing will have to decide whether to trust them again.
What remains of the Wear OS ecosystem is Samsung and the Pixel Watch: a duopoly held together by mutual financial interest between two companies who don't fully trust each other, built on the wreckage of every partner Google decided was no longer convenient. This is not an ecosystem. It is a bilateral arrangement wearing an ecosystem's clothes.
What Apple Gets Right That Everyone Else Gets Wrong
watchOS is not an ambitious operating system. It is important to say this plainly, because the temptation is to frame Apple's dominance as the product of some towering technical achievement. It isn't. watchOS is deeply boring, carefully constrained, and meticulously integrated — and that is precisely why it works where everything else doesn't.
When your iPhone receives a call, your Apple Watch shows that call within a second. Not within a few seconds when Bluetooth cooperates. Not usually, except when something in the notification stack decides to take the day off. A second, every time, because Apple wrote both ends of that communication channel and designed them explicitly to work together, then tested it until it was reliable, then shipped it and kept it reliable across software updates. This sounds like table stakes for a device whose entire purpose is to surface notifications faster than your phone. In the Wear OS ecosystem, it remains a competitive advantage.
When your AirPods switch from your Mac to your iPhone, your watch knows. When you tap Apple Pay at a terminal in another country, it works — because Apple's NFC payment implementation is compliant and consistent in a way that Samsung Pay is not, in a way that Google Wallet on Wear OS is not, because Apple controls the implementation end-to-end and treats reliability as a feature. When you lock your Mac and walk to another room, your watch maintains your authentication. When you install an app on your iPhone that has a watch component, the watch component appears on your watch without you doing anything. These are not features. They are infrastructure — the unglamorous connective tissue that determines whether a device feels like part of your life or an accessory that is always asking you for something.
The health platform is what the competition's health platforms are trying to become and haven't. Apple Watch health data flows into the Health app, which aggregates data from third-party applications, which can share structured data with healthcare providers through standardised APIs Apple spent years negotiating and documenting. The data moves in formats that clinical systems understand, because Apple built those formats with interoperability as an explicit goal and then invested in the partnerships required to make interoperability real. Samsung Health is a data silo with a sharing button. Garmin Connect is a data silo with better sports analytics. Apple Health is approaching genuine health infrastructure, and the gap between those three things is not a matter of opinion.
Software support closes the argument. Apple supports Apple Watch hardware with software updates for years — six or more years for recent models. The security vulnerabilities that accumulate in any connected device get patched. The features Apple adds to watchOS get delivered to your existing hardware. You are buying a watch that will be maintained. Every Wear OS manufacturer outside Google itself provides meaningful updates for two to three years before quietly redirecting resources to the next product cycle. You are not buying a smartwatch from Samsung; you are acquiring a three-year lease on a smartwatch, with an option to purchase a new one when the lease expires and the software stops moving.
The Uncomfortable Conclusion
Here it is, as plainly as possible: if you are not in the Apple ecosystem, there is no smartwatch worth buying in the same way Apple Watch is worth buying. Not because Android manufacturers haven't produced capable hardware. Not because they haven't tried. Because a smartwatch is a software and ecosystem product wearing a hardware costume, and software and ecosystem is the fight Apple has consistently won for a decade while everyone else was arguing about processor benchmarks and bezel materials.
If you're on Android and want something on your wrist, buy the cheapest Galaxy Watch that fits your budget, set your expectations to "notification mirror with decent health tracking and good battery life," and accept that you're making a pragmatic compromise rather than the best available choice. Then charge it twice a week and sit with the knowledge that you are paying Samsung money for a device that works best on a Samsung phone with a Samsung account and Samsung apps, which is a form of lock-in that at least Apple had the decency to make pleasant.
Or — and this is the option the industry does not want discussed — buy nothing. A good mechanical watch tells the time better, looks better in ten years, never requires a charging cable, and does not ping you about your activity rings at 9 PM like an anxious PE teacher who has decided your personal wellness is his professional responsibility. The case against a mediocre smartwatch is also, quietly, the case for no smartwatch at all. Not every problem requires a wrist computer. Some problems require a watch. Watches have been solved for centuries.
The smartwatch industry spent a decade trying to dethrone Apple and produced, collectively, an expensive lesson in why sustained execution beats hardware specification. Better processors, better materials, more sensors, longer battery life — and still losing, because the thing that makes a smartwatch worth owning is not on the spec sheet, cannot be bought from a component supplier, and cannot be shipped in a software update if you never built the platform foundation to deliver it on. Google had the time, the money, the developer relationships, and the mobile platform dominance to build that foundation. Google chose not to. That is the only honest description of what happened. Not bad luck. Not a hard market. A choice, made repeatedly, to treat Wear OS as a secondary priority until it was too late for it to be anything else.
Until someone builds a platform as cohesive as watchOS — and nobody is close, nobody is even facing in the right direction — the title stands.
Apple Watch or don't bother.
A final note on intellectual honesty: this piece is arguing that Apple made the right architectural decisions and Google didn't — that a closed ecosystem executed with obsessive consistency beats an open one run by a company that treats its partners as launch event props and its own products as quarterly deliverables rather than long-term commitments. That's not a comfortable conclusion for those of us who prefer openness on principle. It is still the correct conclusion. The open ecosystem argument wins when someone builds the open ecosystem well and defends it seriously. Google had every opportunity to be that company. Google decided, year after year, that something else was more important. The watch market is the result. When someone finally builds a Wear OS-class platform with Apple-level commitment — and that someone will probably not be Google — this piece deserves to be revised. Until then, it stands.