Nah. Garmin smartwatches work fine with Android phones. Apple could have just done the same, regardless of what Samsung or Google wants. Platform boundaries aren't a legitimate concern in this space.
Sure apple could have likely brought the baseline functionality of Apple watch to Android, however apps would have likely been much much more complicated, and are a key part of apple watch.
As for issues with the Garmin ecosystem, that's totally irrelevant. The basic fact is that nothing is stopping third-party smartwatch vendors from building good integration with Android phones. Garmin is just one example. Others such as Suunto and Coros have done the same thing. There are no significant technical obstacles.
If anyone involved in it could explain to me why they chose to force an OO language on people on a platform where some targets have so little memory that you’ll find yourself cutting lines of code to save memory used by the code itself, not even when it’s executing, thus throwing away a bunch of bytes supporting objects when there’s not enough space to even really take advantage of inheritance—I’d love to know the story. It’s such a weird choice.
So, Garmin may be bad but at least they are a lot cheaper and work with more things. At any given price point, they are a lot better as sports watches too.
Anyway, I stopped caring because there is no real compelling use case for a smartwatch, my next one will be a sport watch from Garmin or another competitor. Problem solved.