Wear OS shoots up the market-share charts, now in striking distance of Apple - Ars Technica

Counterpoint Research has a new report detailing the smartwatch market, and Wear OS is a huge winner.

Counterpoint's latest data has the partnership down as a resounding success, with Wear OS market share rocketing from 4 percent in Q2 2022 to 17 percent in Q3 2022.

Qualcomm was the main SoC provider, and while Apple was revolutionizing the power you can get from a smartwatch SoC, Qualcomm wasn't really putting in a full effort and strangled the Wear OS market for years with sub-par chips.

Counterpoint says: "Thanks to the launch of the Galaxy Watch 4 series, Samsung achieved its highest quarterly shipments, narrowing the gap with Apple and reclaiming second place from Huawei." Samsung's market share is up from 9.9 percent to 14.4 percent, year over year.

Apple is still in first place with the Apple Watch, but Counterpoint says Apple's smartwatch market share is down 10 percent year over year in Q3, to 21.8 percent thanks to the delay of the Series 7 watch into Q4.

It's a good bet that Apple's market share will go back up with the release of new hardware, but currently, Wear OS is within striking distance of the No.

Right now Wear OS 3 is exclusively available on Samsung's Galaxy Watch 4, and with Google saying partners should have updates available in the second half of 2022, it seems like Samsung has a one-year exclusivity deal for the new OS.

Google also needs to do something with Fitbit, which is currently 4.4 percent of the smartwatch market.