Report Type:
Week In Review
Overview
Rumor has it…
There is a suggestion that Samsung may choose Wear OS for its next generation smartwatches, rather than its homegrown Tizen OS. Samsung did originally use Wear OS in the Gear S and Gear Live ranges before developing Tizen. And that proved to be a smart decision as Wear OS wallowed and failed to keep up with competing (er, Apple!) developments. But that is slowly changing and now that the Fitbit acquisition is complete, it’s a fairly safe bet that Google will be putting ore focus on Wear OS. For Samsung, a leap back into the Wear OS world comes with the benefit of a larger developer market, is lower overall development costs presumably.
The NPD Take:
- With Fitbit now firmly part of the Google world, there will be a far greater focus on developing Wear OS. As the second largest smartwatch provider, Samsung should have a significant say in that development path if it adopts Wear OS
- Wear OS used to be a fairly inflexible solution with limited ability to modify and enhance. Google appears to have softened that stance over the past couple of years with companies such as Oppo and Fossil adding to the base OS with their own custom solutions.
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