Google cuts ground to Apple in the smartwatch world: the Wear OS share shoots up in a year and has WatchOS very close

Wear OS hasn’t had much traction since its launch And there have even been times when Google seemed to have abandoned the operating system to its fate. Far from being this way, the Mountain View giant signed an agreement with Samsung a few months ago to, between them, promote the third generation, Wear OS 3.0, which arrived on board the last Samsung Galaxy Watch 4.

It seems that the movement has had an effect because in a market such as smartwatches, a market that Apple dominated with pretty overwhelming clarity with WatchOS and its Apple Watch, Google’s system has taken a strong tug in the last year. So much so that now only 4.5 percentage points separate the two systems and Google went from fifth to second place at the end of the third quarter of 2021.

Apple leads, Google pursues closely and Huawei collapses

With data from Counterpoint Research in hand, one of the most common consultancies when it comes to presenting market figures, the push that Wear OS has given in the last year has been more than remarkable. We talk about shipments, not sales as such, but the data is still significant to obtain a rough picture of the state of the smartwatch market.

The consulting firm says that in the last year the smart watch market has grown by 16% in the last year and that Google has been the company that has best known how to capitalize on the increase with a very notable increase in its market share. Wear OS has gone from a 3.2% share in 2020 to a 17.3% share in 2021. Slightly more than 400% growth to be 4.5 points from Apple’s 21.8%, which last year had a 28% share that left its rivals far behind.

What’s more, in Google’s share we could count Fitbit’s, the company that is already owned, and that has signed a stable 4.4% compared to 4.2% last year. The rest of the manufacturers have also signed a fairly regular season, such as the 5.8% of Amazfit that grows from 5.4%, or like the 2.9% of Garmin compared to 3% in 2020.

And the great disaster of the last year stars it Huawei, which goes from 11.3% to 4% in one year, facing the figures of the third quarter of 2021 with those of 2020. Thus, the market grows and manufacturers stabilize while Google cuts distances with Apple at a brisk pace. We will see what happens next year as we are in the middle of Black Friday and the figures for the fourth quarter can give us an even more accurate picture of the traction of each manufacturer.

More information | Counterpoint Research

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Google cuts ground to Apple in the smartwatch world: the Wear OS share shoots up in a year and has WatchOS very close

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Engadget Android

by Samuel Fernández.