At the Google I/O conference, Google and Samsung made a joint announcement that they would “partner” and “bring the best of both Tizen and Wear OS together,” “unified platform” and other corporate double-speak phrases to essentially hide that Samsung has given up on Tizen for future Samsung Galaxy Watch models.
In a blog post, Janghyun Yooon, EVP and Head of S/W Platform Team at Samsung opened up with five paragraphs of complete drivel before any details that matter were found.
Our hope is that this platform will ignite innovation in spaces like the Galaxy Watch Studio and inspire third party development, bringing a bigger and better network of apps to benefit Galaxy users around the world. This is the chance for developers to take advantage of Samsung’s powerful network of connected devices and the growing set of global Galaxy smartwatch fans.
Janghyun Yoon, EVP and Head of S/W Platform Team at Samsung
To sum all of this up simply, developers did not pay enough attention to Tizen for watches, it’s the same reason Microsoft ditched Windows 10X on Surface Duo for Android. There is a mobile duopoly between Apple and Google and developers do not want to spend time and resources on developing apps for small user bases, thus nothing outside of iOS and Android have the biggest and most popular apps.
As a consolation, Samsung did extend continued support for existing Galaxy Watch owners:
At Samsung, we always put customers at the heart of everything we do. That’s why we are committed to bringing them the best possible smartwatch experiences. For customers who already own the Tizen OS based Galaxy smartwatches, we are continuing to provide at least three years of software support after the product launch
Our hope is that this platform will ignite innovation in spaces like the Galaxy Watch Studio and inspire third party development, bringing a bigger and better network of apps to benefit Galaxy users around the world. This is the chance for developers to take advantage of Samsung’s powerful network of connected devices and the growing set of global Galaxy smartwatch fans.
Janghyun Yoon, EVP and Head of S/W Platform Team at Samsung
