For some of us here at Ausdroid, the Huawei Watch is our favourite Android Wear device. I own one myself and am extremely happy with it, partly because it runs Android Wear and integrates so easily with my Nexus 6P. Unfortunately rumours are circling about Huawei, along with other manufacturers are looking to ditch Android Wear in favour of Tizen in upcoming smartwatches.
According to a report from the Korea Herald Huawei has recently joined forces with Samsung, a major Tizen alliance member, to “deploy the operating system in its next smartwatches”. A local daily newspaper also quoted a Samsung official as saying:
Huawei was looking for an OS other than Google’s Android as the US firm had not been very collaborative.
Samsung of course are more than willing to provide all the support required to get Tizen to more devices making it attractive to manufacturers such as Huawei. We have heard rumblings of manufacturers being unhappy with Google’s stronghold over the Android Wear ecosystem and user interface with very little customisation possible.
Remember though that this is all just a rumour at this stage. Samsung are officially denying that any such collaboration or advances have been made. We have also reached out to Huawei for a comment and will update this posts accordingly when we receive something.
I for one hope that Huawei, who make amazing hardware in many of their devices, stick with Android Wear. If their efforts at customising Android on their phones and tablets are an example of their design prowess I suggest they stick with Google’s vision of how Android Wear should look and interact.
Tizen sucks. I returned my Gear S2 Classic for the Huawei Watch simply because of the OSs.
I have a Gear S2 and coming from an LG G Watch R, I find Tizen is a much nicer watch OS. I hope this results in more app development.
Glad to see it. It’s disgraceful that Android wear still has issues that have plagued it since launch. I feel Google also seem to have out it on the back burner as well, with it barely mentioned these days in most media releases.
Agreed. Look at how few Android Wear watches were announced at IFA. It’s clearly not an attractive proposition for manufacturers at the moment. Something has to change to provide a product customers actually want to buy.
Worrying development.