Google and Samsung Wear OS Deal: Samsung Exits Tizen, Galaxy Watch 9 Gets 5-Year Updates, Pixel Watch 5 Gets

Google first proposed the Android Wear concept in 2014 and collaborated with smartphone makers including Samsung, LG, Sony, and Motorola to develop the first generation of Android smartwatches. Because these manufacturers lacked experience in watch industrial design, the initial products had crude appearances and low market acceptance.

Google then shifted its approach and partnered with traditional luxury watch brands such as Montblanc, TAG Heuer, and Fossil to create a second wave of Wear OS products. Those brands handled the exterior design, while Google was responsible for hardware selection, system adaptation, and feature iteration. However, because Google long neglected to update the hardware platform and its system push cadence was sluggish, the collaboration ultimately failed to sustain.

In 2021, Google and Samsung reached an agreement under which Samsung permanently shut down its Tizen smartwatch operating system and merged its underlying scheduling, power optimization, and health algorithm code into Wear OS, restructuring the system's core architecture. In exchange, Samsung secured exclusive first-launch rights for each new version of Wear OS, with the Galaxy Watch series receiving priority adaptation of new features.

Samsung has continued to invest in developing new features on Wear OS, equipping the Galaxy Watch 9 and Galaxy Watch Ultra 2 with a Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear Edition main processor built on a 3nm process, and becoming the first in the industry to promise five years of major system version updates. In contrast, Google's Pixel Watch 5 retains the older exterior design and previous-generation main processor, with a system update cycle of only two to three years. Currently, Wear OS relies mainly on Samsung's research and development capabilities for iterative improvements in motion tracking, energy-saving battery life, and other core code.

Across the entire Android smartwatch ecosystem, only Samsung, by virtue of its own scale, can independently optimize both hardware and software. Other manufacturers, facing outdated hardware options and limited software solutions from Google, have partly turned to the lower-engineering-barrier market for light smartwatches. Samsung smartwatch users often do not realize the direct connection between their devices and Google's system, while usability issues with other Android smartwatches are attributed to the original Android smartwatch ecosystem.