Some interesting and valid points raised concerning WearOS.

🔗 https://www.xda-developers.com/relaunch-wear-os-failure/

I share the sentiment to a degree. It's a decent platform marred by at least some self-imposed fragmentation. Feature lock-in, mandated OEM apps and more make it, to me, a frustrating platform to really fully invest in.

I don't want to use TicHealth, Samsung Fit, Fitbit, or really anything outside of Google Fit and occasionally Strava for health and sport tracking, but each brand forces their bloatwear in order to get the full breadth of functionality offered, and it's annoying. More so when you have more than one WearOS device; I have collected a few over the years, so I've done the migration between OEM apps and suffered the loss of some historical data when switching to yet another walled garden one too many times.

Health Connect sounds promising, but it's several years late and not yet fully baked (IMO). It also doesn't necessarily solve the problems, just assists in helping it suck less.

The largest missed opportunity with Wear I think though was getting a foothold in the enterprise space (surprise!). Wear could have followed closely as the Android team built out Android Enterprise and thoughtfully baked in enterprise functionality from the get-go rather than only starting to look at management for the platform more recently. The enterprise wearable market is decent, and also dominated by AOSP where Android is used due to Google's restrictions with Play Protect (GMS) certification.. which means big, fat, rarely well-optimised Android builds (or completely unoptimised Android Go builds!) running on feature/size restricted hardware and all the disadvantages that come with it.

The opportunity is still there obviously, wearables are probably more in demand today than ever before, but the platform needs far more flexibility around form factors and enterprise use cases than is currently on offer (as far as I know). I have more thoughts on this, but I'll reserve them for an article another day.

#androidenterprise