How Samsung and Google reunited to save Android smartwatches
How Samsung and Google reunited to save Android smartwatches Samsung and Google have buried the smartwatch hatchet to create Wear OS 3 together. We speak to Samsung's Patrick Chomet and Google's Sameer Samat as to why the time was right to reunite Robert Leedham Forget about "Bennifer" for just one second. The year of our Lord 2021 has played host to another major recoupling that few would have predicted come the turn of the year. Alas, Liam and Noel are yet to kiss and make up, but Samsung and Google's smartwatch reunion for Wear OS 3 is just as significant in tech terms.
Need a reminder of the story so far? Samsung started making wearables in 2013, a year before Google unveiled its own Android Wear platform for smartwatches. The widespread assumption at the time was that, as with its Android operating system for smartphones, any smartwatch-maker not named Apple would run their wrist-bound hardware off Google's platform. As things turned out, Samsung stuck with its own Tizen OS, inspiring other companies such as Fitbit and OnePlus to create their own smartwatch platforms and give developers a giant headache as to which operating systems they should support with their limited resources.
While Samsung currently ranks as the world's second best-selling smartwatch brand, it still has some work to do to catch up with the Apple Watch's considerable market dominance. The solution? In an almost unprecedented move, Samsung and Google have collaborated to create Wear OS 3: a smartwatch operating system that combines the best of both companies' learnings and innovations in the field. Or, in slightly less hyperbolic terms, you can finally get a Samsung smartwatch that runs Google Maps and mirrors your smartphone settings on your wrist. As of the newly announced Samsung Galaxy Watch 4, all future Samsung watches will be running on Wear OS 3, albeit with a customised One UI skin that mirrors the aesthetic found on Samsung phones à la the Galaxy S21 Ultra and brand-new Galaxy Fold 3.
To mark the occasion, we spoke to both Patrick Chomet (EVP, head of the corporate office and customer experience office at Samsung) and Sameer Samat (vice president of product management at Google) about how the two companies renewed their smartwatch vows, what this collaboration means for the average consumer and the joys of the Casio Databank. The conversation below was edited for brevity and clarity...
So how did this kind of collaboration come about? Are you calling up Patrick to cut a deal, Sameer?
Sameer Samat: You know, we've been partners in the Android ecosystem and beyond for over a decade and over the years we've built quite a bit of trust between the two companies. So there have been many instances where we've gotten together and told each other what we think the future looks like and why we need to either work together or do something different to get there. In this case, the future of smartwatches was very high on the list and we weren't going to make that happen without a partnership together that could bring better battery life, higher performance and access to a robust catalogue of apps that everyone could use.
Obviously, you guys had gone your separate ways in terms of smartwatch operating systems and now you've got the band back together. Why do that now?
SS: You know, it wasn't about Samsung saying, "Oh, we can't make it on our own," or Google saying, "We can't be successful like that." It was more, "What can we actually do together?"
To be honest, for Patrick and I and for our teams it took a little bit of time to get to that point of realisation and push us over the edge. The big one was seeing the growth in smartwatches and asking, "At what point is it too late to do that collaboration?" We felt like this is a perfect moment where both teams are thinking big.
It's rare in your career you get to work across multiple different companies with this kind of level of deep engagement. Our engineering teams on the watch meet almost on a daily basis, and when we could travel around, it wasn't at all strange to have the Samsung and Google engineers working together in one building for extended periods of time.
Patrick Chomet: Yes. It could have happened earlier. But this question started a couple of years ago, right? It takes a lot of time and effort to fully solve it. We've been working deeply on it for more than 18 months.
I saw the watch yesterday and it looks good. Its user interface is a mash-up of Wear OS and Samsung's Tizen OS. Were there any particular challenges in terms of melding the two together?
PC: Maybe it was different from our point of view… There were many technical challenges and many complexities, but it wasn't strategically difficult once we made the decision. There was just a lot of work to be done.
SS: I think one area that comes to mind that was particularly exciting was health. A smartwatch has all these amazing sensors and it's attached to your wrist 24/7, but we weren't really realising the full potential of that. So we worked together with them to design a new layer of the platform that provides a set of APIs for applications so that they can get really good sensor data from the watch and deliver awesome experiences. And that layer is really important, because previously a lot of these applications needed to write that layer themselves.
So obviously this makes a bunch of sense from a business and a strategic level, but the average consumer doesn't care about your smartwatch market share. What's the benefit to them?
PC: It's fair to say that the scale of the ecosystem was a bit lacking before and we were hearing that. A lot of people love Strava, so they'd say, "Why is there no Strava?" Or "You guys work with Google on the phone, why can't I have Google Maps on the watch?" We'd also have people ask, "I chose a setting on the phone. Why does it not carry over to the watch?" Now it's going to be seamless and simple.
Google recently acquired Fitbit for $2.1 billion. Have there been any learnings from Fitbit which have been drawn into Wear OS 3's design yet?
SS: Having the Fitbit folks here at Google has been awesome. They're leaders in the space and we chat with them quite often about how to make great health experiences. Over time, not at the launch of the Galaxy Watch 4, they'll be bringing the Fitbit app experience to the ecosystem and when they make a smartwatch, they will also be using this combined platform that Samsung and Google have built together. That helps to give all this collective effort a tailwind.
Just for clarity, though, are there any specific Fitbit technologies which have been brought into this setup?
SS: No, not particularly that I would point to. Especially not on the hardware side. This has obviously been led by Samsung innovation.
One of the problems a lot of smartwatch platforms have had in the past is that they haven't kept pace with innovation elsewhere. How are you guys going to be able to remedy that?
SS: This is not a one-time endeavour. I think it took us a while to get our two companies on the same page to work together in this way, but that also means it's not something that we quickly jumped into and are going to jump out of. We are already starting to work through what the next iteration looks like. We have a multi-year vision and roadmap around where we think all this can go and I think that was something we had to begin with because it's what got us so excited.
PC: Going forward, you can expect to see the continuation of the deeper collaboration between Samsung and Google with openness and innovation at a faster pace. We welcome the competition, we welcome the ecosystem and we want to enable the developers to innovate beyond us.
Is this depth of collaboration a "one and done" for smartwatches or should we expect it to continue to other product areas as well?
SS: You know, Samsung and Google have been partners for over a decade in the Android ecosystem – the partnership actually even predates Patrick and I – so it's a legacy that we have together. I think that you will see more collaboration between the two companies, as you've already seen, on things like foldables. Big-screen devices that can also be phones are just a huge opportunity for the Android ecosystem to innovate.
Finally, we're fans of all kinds of watches at GQ. I wonder if you guys have a "traditional" watch that you wear with your smartwatch?
PC: I have an IWC Portugieser Chronograph, which I quite like. But what I've found is I tend to wear it at distinct events. Ninety-nine per cent of the time I'm wearing this [points to his Galaxy Watch].
SS: When I started wearing a watch it must have been sixth or seventh grade. It was a Casio Databank and I love that device, because we actually got to a point where you could almost programme it. So it didn't make me very popular, but it was very functional. Somebody gave it to me as a gift, just a couple years ago. I don't wear it much. I mostly keep it as a souvenir.
PC: You really are a geek.
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