Hacker News Reader

Comment by sorenjan | Hacker News Reader

Your statements about Samsung reminds me of Wear OS 3, that Google is said to have developed together with Samsung. Does anyone know how much of that is Wear OS, i.e. Android, and how much is Tizen from Samsung? Wear OS 3 seems to differ quite a bit from previous versions, it's been Samsung exclusive for a year, and it doesn't work together with the Wear OS companion app on Android.

View on HN

With the Wear OS 3 the licensing terms have more flexible, I believe it is to get Samsung on board. OEM's bring their own companion app. OEM's also can skin the UI as long it follows Android Wear UX. OEMs also can release their own companion app on iOS. Samsung isn't supporting iOS at the moment, but Fossil and Montblanc are.

There is no "Tizen" inside WearOS 3. Samsung contributed their own UI skin on top of WearOS like they build their own UI skin on top of Android for phones.

Samsung switched to WearOS because they realized their Tizen OS was a failure on smartwatches just as it was on smartphones. Growth was stagnating, their app ecosystem was dead and the development environment was a nightmares.

So Samsung did what Samsung does best and saved face by convincing Google to say WearOS 3 was a collaboration between Google and Samsung. Samsung probably did contribute code, but there is no Tizen in WearOS nor were these OSs "merged" like some people claimed. Samsung abandoned Tizen because they saw the writing on the wall. They were spending millions developing an OS that wasn't growing for an app ecosystem that was dead.

>Does anyone know how much of that is Wear OS, i.e. Android, and how much is Tizen from Samsung?

Nobody really knows, as Wear OS remains closed source.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com