Google was working on a new health and fitness assistant called 'Coach' in mid-2018, which would have monitored food nutrition, recommend workout routines, and all the usual tracking functionality. Really, it's one step below actually dumb. Google's acquisition of Fitbit makes it clear that this isn't an easy problem to manage, and to date, Google's one fitness product, Fit, has been painfully slow to evolve, and is far from what I'd call a "smart" fitness platform. Many people are highly interested in data about their health and activity levels, and I think Apple is at the forefront of the movement to visualize and interpret that data in ways that are more actionable and more relatable to those of us who aren't obsessive stat-keepers. Fall detection, mindful breathing exercises, and automatic workout detection (that actually works) confirm to me that Apple's interest in holistic wellness are more than fleeting: this is a company that wants to understand what it can do to make managing your health and lifestyle more informed, more fun, and like less of a chore. Its ECG tech is legitimately innovative, and potentially lifesaving, stuff. The watches were supposedly retooled into the previously-mentioned LG Watch Sport and Style, neither of which could be described as much of a success.Īpple's fitness tracking "rings" are a thoughtful approach to monitoring your activity levels. The company nearly released its own line of watches in late 2016, according to a report from Business Insider last year, but Google's hardware VP Rick Osterloh was allegedly unhappy with both the physical design and the functionality. In other words, the lack of any first-party smartwatches from Google is part of why Wear OS is in a poor place. And then you can see it’s tough to guide an ecosystem to what your vision of it is, just building the underlying platform. And I look at areas maybe where we haven’t done opinionated - maybe watch is a good example where we haven’t. I can point to Chromebooks - all along, we did our original hardware to kind of bootstrap it. Pretty much everything we’ve done well, you can go all the way back and Android’s early days, Samsung Galaxy Nexus, which we worked together, was a pivotal phone. When asked why Google develops hardware (Pixel phones, smart speakers, etc.) instead of just software, Pichai said this: Google CEO Sundar Pichai talked about how the company failed to maintain its smartwatch ecosystem in a recent interview with The Verge. Even the vast majority of Google's own applications haven't received much attention over the past couple of years. Our last roundup of Wear OS apps was over a year ago, because there literally haven't been enough releases since then for us to release another collection. There have been essentially no new Wear OS apps from major developers in a long, long time, and the existing collection of third-party applications are being abandoned or discontinued at a steady pace. Before that, there were a string of minor system updates.īut it's not just the OS itself we have to consider - the app ecosystem on Wear OS has slowly deteriorated as well, if it could have ever been described as vital in the first place. The feature started rolling out in May of last year.
#Moto 360 web browser update
The last significant update to Wear OS was the introduction of Tiles, large widget-style pages that provide helpful information without opening a dedicated app. However, development on the platform has obviously stagnated, and core issues with Wear OS from a few years ago are still present with no fix in sight. I still wouldn't call Wear OS "dead," because there are still Wear smartwatches being released, and obviously all of the services that are required to keep it running are still functional. This kind of thinking has been used frequently used over the years to describe Wear OS - even during periods where the platform received major updates. One train of thought I frequently see online is that if a product or service hasn't received any major changes in a while, then it could be regarded as dead, even if the product is still being supported and maintained by the creator. Verizon's Wear24 watch lasted a whopping four months until it was discontinued, and more recently (as I mention above), eBuyNow licensed the brand of Motorola's old watches to produce a sequel. Mobvoi's TicWatch line is fairly popular, though the company has yet to make any models with Qualcomm's newer Snapdragon Wear 3100 processor.
A handful of other manufacturers have also tried to produce Wear OS watches, to varying degrees of success.
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