Samsung and Google made a pretty big announcement at the Google I / O conference yesterday when the duo confirmed that they would be working on Wear OS together. It’s a pretty surprising announcement on one level given that Samsung has its own competing smartwatch platform in Tizen.
The Korean company will switch to Wear OS for new smartwatches as part of the deal, although it will continue to provide updates to its Tizen watches for up to three years. What do you think of Samsung dropping its own platform for Wear OS? Let us know via the poll below.
Although Google has largely neglected Wear OS for a number of years, the platform offers better third-party support compared to Tizen. Watches based on the Samsung platform generally have a reputation for providing more frequent updates, more sophisticated software, and a wide range of features. In fact, we’ve named the Galaxy Watch 3 the best smartwatch for Android users.
However, Google made many promises for Wear OS yesterday, including offline music support via Spotify and YouTube Music (finally), faster system performance, and longer lifespan. The search giant is certainly saying the right things, but we hope both parties deliver on this for the benefit of the smartwatch segment.