Wear OS's most consistent OEM quits: Fossil stops making smartwatches
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
> Google lured Samsung away from its in-house Tizen OS with preferential treatment, including exclusive rights to the new "Wear OS 3" release and exclusive apps. That year, 2021, featured head-to-head August Wear OS releases of Samsung's Galaxy Watch 4 and Fossil's Gen 6 smartwatch. Samsung's watch had a faster, Samsung-made SoC, ran Wear OS 3, and cost $250, while Fossil was stuck with Wear OS 2, a slower Qualcomm chip, and a $300 price tag.
It sounds like Google really did sabotage them and they have a right to be upset.
They’re a company that any businessperson would throw under the bus to court Samsung.
It doesn't help that Google continued to have no fucking clue what they wanted to do with Fitbit in the meantime and still feels like they don't have a clue.
Sounds like Google for the past decade.
Lack of updates, not treating it as a first class platform, etc
(Ironically Tizen was open source)
A new version of Android was built that required newer chips, and that's what it took for Qualcomm to finally release something worth it.
The first Pixel Watch had a Samsung Exynos, Pixel Watch 2 a Qualcomm chipset.
I have a Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 and it's.. alright. I mean, the software works smoothly, I don't have any complaints to make in terms of defective behavior or UI. But past the time of novelty I barely use it as a smart watch. Just a watch I charge every day and which I won't replace once the battery ages too much or it breaks. I'll go back to a regular casio at that time.
It works for checking notifications but in many cases I'll want to do something after a notification (like, if I get a message, most likely I'll want to answer it, at which point I am going back on the phone where typing is comfortable, and what value did the watch provide?)
It doesn't add anything to some of my physical activities the phone didn't do - like tracking my bike rides on a map, and when I want to look at past results I'll also be using the phone - a bigger screen is always better. Tracking my heart rate - one of the watch exclusives - hasn't changed anything to my life. Anyhow, I will always be taking my phone with me anywhere I go, so the watch feels quite redundant. It can do things without having to take my phone out of the pocket, but do them worse for the most part.
I'm sure Fossil's bad deals with Google and the rise of Samsung contributed to their ills, but I also have a feeling this is a market that will have very little user retention in the long term. People buy their first smart watch and then might not decide to get another one ever. Unless they find a way to severely ramp up the utility in a way that can convince a large amount of people.
Not life-changing, but adding enough convenience to be worth it.
Obviously, a smart watch is strictly better than a regular watch in the sense that it has more features, but I think the downside of having to charge it so regularly makes the value-add not worth it. I am always sad about the downfall of Pebble watches, because the e-ink screens were excellent and gave you a watch that rarely needed to be charged and still gave the benefits of a smart watch (however small they may be).
The apple watch, for me, was too distracting. Too many notifications, too much temptation to glance at the watch during meetings, during dinner, etc. I ended up selling the latest one I had and going back to dumb watches for a while. I felt phantom notifications on my wrist for about two weeks after I got rid of the Apple Watch.
So, when I decided to get a Garmin, I bought the dumbest smart watch they had (Instinct Solar 2) that could do activity/GPS tracking and never turned on message notifications, etc. I did enable their Garmin Pay thing and linked it to a card, because I usually run without my phone, and figured it might be handy to be able to stop by a coffee shop or something.
Anyway, smart watches are terrible.
It may not be super accurate at monitoring HRV, and might not even really be monitoring HRV, but it is monitoring something that correlates highly to how I feel and am likely to perform.
I'll elaborate a bit: current smart watches seem to work a bit like a remote control for my phone: There's a Spotify app for wear os, but it only works if the watch is connected to the phone via Bluetooth, which means I have to bring the phone. Similarly, I can take phonecalls from my watch, but only if the phone is within Bluetooth reach.
I'm not sure why I need a remote control for something that has to be in my pocket anyway..
If the watch was more independent, it would be more useful. There are times when I don't want a bulky phone in my pocket, but a watch on my wrist is acceptable. Mostly various sport activities.
What would make a smart watch useful in my opinion is the following:
1. SIM card(preferably digital) so the watch has it's own data.
2. The ability to "disable" my phone so that all notifications and calls are forwarded automatically to my watch, even when the watch is not within range of the phone(this is gonna be a challenge technically, godspeed any engineer who tackles this)
3. "Full" apps, that work independently from the phone, so that my watch can in standalone do things like play music(probably via Bluetooth headphones) accept phonecalls, and bonus points if it can make phonecalls via voice control.
Once I can leave the phone at home and replace it temporarily with my watch, the watch will be useful to me.
Navigating with a phone always feels a clumsy. I find that also more convenient with a watch.
When it comes to heart rate, it is just convenient that the watch can constantly monitor heart rate, stress, etc. Sometimes you feel a bit off an wonder why. If HRV is suddenly lower then it might be good to avoid a hard training session.
Eg. Someone Whatsapps me 'Can I get that bag back I left at your house", I want to reply with "Sure, I'll be home around 6pm".
I could get my phone out to reply. It will take about 10 seconds (1 to get phone out of pocket, 1 for finger unlock, 1 to open the notification tray, 1 to tap the notification and wait while the tray slides closed and the keyboard slides up, 5 to type the message and hit send, 1 to return the phone to my pocket).
Or... I could use my watch with voice typing. But the watch still takes around 10 seconds when you deal with the fact I need to confirm the message and the voice typing is laggy and sometimes needs to be done twice.
Just fix the UX so common tasks can be done in 4 seconds or less and I'd use it. It should be a physical button I press and hold, say "reply saying I'll be home at 6pm", release the button, and it should automatically reply to the notification that just came in and should be all done within 4 seconds (3 seconds of speaking, 1 to lift the watch to the mouth and press the button).
Same here... I really don't understand why everyone cares about their heart rate or how many steps they've done today.... Like how is that helping my life? I might as well start measuring how many millimeters my fingernails grow each week and have a fingernail-growth-race...
Running in the background of my phone, doing whatever. Constantly monitoring where I am, etc. *HATE IT*.
But Fossil hardware with JUST wearOS would be great! I hope it comes in the future.
(Ye gods I hate their software. Was it obvious I hate their software?)
Fossil Group’s traditional watches including vanity labels like Michael Kors are completely lacking in prestige and desirability.
I would also throw them straight under the bus with Samsung as my alternative. That’s a no-brainer.
The other problem is that the smartwatch market isn’t robust enough for a lot of players. A good smartwatch needs a lot of tech that only a large company can produce. At the same time, it’s not really a product with a lot of future potential above and beyond what it does right now.
It’s Siri whenever Siri gets hooked up to a LLM, which will probably happen within the next year or two. I’m not sure why this idea would take the form of a watch.
The reason why watches still have faces is:
1. To be fashionable
2. To see the time and other information quickly without speaking
Otherwise, there is no reason to buy one. The “smart” in the smartwatch is frosting on top of the cake. The “cake” is the watch’s main function as jewelry that tells time.
https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/watch-ma...
https://www.statista.com/outlook/cmo/accessories/watches-jew...
Of course it’s jewelry. If it wasn’t there wouldn’t be a gazillion different band and finish colors. Apple switches watch bands out seasonally and changes the available metal finishes of the device with every iteration.
It might not be jewelry you like, but it’s jewelry.
The utilitarian market was all people wearing cheap Casios and Seikos just to see the time. These people stopped wearing watches when they started carrying mobile phones (not even smartphones, this happened in the 00's).
The Apple Watch brought these people back for utility - either seeing notifications on their wrist, or health/sports tracking. People still don't really need to see the time on their wrist, phones even have always-on OLED screens now.
Now that you've decided to wear an Apple Watch, of course you're going to choose a band that looks nice, sure that part is jewelry, but not any more than a smartphone case. But nobody goes "oh wow that Apple Watch band is gorgeous, I'm going to buy and start wearing an Apple Watch for it"
I don't think there is much to glean from the industry revenue because there's so much noise going on (the massive growth of the Chinese luxury market from zero)
And yes, I would argue that a smartphone case is jewelry. I would argue that the phones themselves are also jewelry!
The fact that Apple brought back people who had stopped wearing watches just shows that there was demand for that sort of thing, and it was being unmet by traditional watches. People still want to see the time quickly but they now demand more than that.
Yes, we segment out the luxury watch and commodity watch markets. Both of those markets are growing as a whole.
Seems like a no brainer move.
Bummer all around. I would never give Samsung my money. They're too slimy.
I see this article is written by Ars' Ron Amadeo. He's nothing more than a clickbait muckraker.