14 DAY TRIAL // Samsung is investing aggressively in wearables, and needless to say, smartwatches are an important part of this category of devices for the South Korean firm.
So far, however, Samsung has been insisting on Tizen, its very own operating system also powering smartwatches and which the company has tried to grow as much as possible with support for third-party app developers across the world.
For 2021, however, the company could eventually change its mind, and instead of releasing a new Tizen smartwatch, Samsung could end up installing Android.
So in theory, if a leak from Ice Universe is anything to go by, Samsung could launch its very own Android smartwatch at one point in 2021, thus replacing Tizen for at least one product.
Launching later this year
At this point, it’s not yet clear if Tizen is supposed to eventually get the ax, but on the other hand, this seems rather unlikely, especially given all the effort Samsung has put into getting this operating system right.
At the same time, Wear OS is seriously lagging behind rivals like Apple’s watchOS, with most devices currently on the market coming with important shortcomings, often caused by the OS itself.
On the other hand, Google has recently completed the takeover of Fitbit, one of the leaders in the smartwatch and activity tracking market. So in the long term, Google could be planning some pretty big improvements for Wear OS or even end up developing a new version of the operating system from scratch, thus rebooting its smartwatch efforts completely.
For now, however, there’s a lot we don’t know about the direction not only Google but Samsung too plans to use in the smartwatch market. If Ice Universe is right, we should hear more about Samsung’s upcoming Android smartwatch rather sooner than later.