The Smartwatch Wars Are About to Heat Up
Google and Samsung's Wear OS/Tizen merger and early Apple Watch Series 7 leaks are setting up a busy second half of 2021 for wrist wear.
Wrist-worn hardware has been the sleepy corner of consumer tech for a couple of years now — Apple Watch quietly dominating, Wear OS limping along, Fitbit doing its own thing. That’s about to change, and the seeds were planted back in May when Google and Samsung announced they’re merging Wear OS and Tizen into a single, unified platform.
If you’ve followed Samsung’s watches at all, you know why this matters. Tizen has actually been decent — snappy, efficient, good battery life — but it’s been an island, cut off from the broader app ecosystem that Wear OS, for all its faults, at least nominally offers through Google’s backing. Wear OS, meanwhile, has spent years feeling stalled, propped up mostly by fashion brands slapping smartwatch guts into their existing designs rather than any real hardware momentum from Google itself. Combining the two makes sense on paper: Samsung brings the polish and chip efficiency, Google brings Play Store integration and (hopefully) more consistent software support.
The first real test of this merger is expected to be Samsung’s Galaxy Watch4, which is rumored for an August unveiling. That’s a fast turnaround from the May announcement, which suggests Samsung and Google were already deep into this collaboration well before making it public. If the Watch4 actually ships on the new unified platform with Samsung’s hardware chops intact, it could be the most competitive Android-adjacent smartwatch we’ve seen in years — assuming the software transition doesn’t introduce the kind of rough edges platform mergers usually do.
Apple isn’t sitting still either
On the other side, early leaks about the Apple Watch Series 7 point to a redesigned case with flatter edges — a look that would bring the watch in line with the flat-sided design language Apple has been rolling out across iPhone 12/13 and the latest iPad Pro. It’s a smaller change than a new platform merger, sure, but Apple Watch redesigns are rare enough that any case change gets attention. Apple has owned the smartwatch category almost by default for a while now, mostly because nobody else has fielded a serious, sustained challenger.
That’s really what makes the back half of 2021 interesting. For the first time in a while, there’s a plausible reason to think the smartwatch market might actually get competitive again instead of just being “Apple Watch, and then everyone else.” A unified Wear OS/Tizen platform backed by Samsung’s hardware could finally give Android users something worth choosing deliberately rather than settling for.
Worth flagging: none of this is confirmed. Samsung hasn’t officially announced a Watch4 launch date, and Apple leaks this far out are always noisy. But between the platform merger, the rumored August Samsung event, and whatever Apple has planned for its usual fall hardware cycle, it’s shaping up to be the most consequential few months for smartwatches since the original Apple Watch launched. Worth keeping an eye on.