Long live to Full Android watches

Hello today I would like to express myself about what I see is a great development opportunity for our beloved watches.

I have used full Android watches for several years, my first watch was a zgpax with Android KitKat and I was immediately amazed because in addition to having an affordable price, I could use my applications on my wrist, play games, watch videos and customize it.

Since then I have continued to buy more watches, however my last purchase was the Kospet optimus pro.
Why? The reason is that I saw a stagnation in the development.

My job is to identify the problems and find them a solution, I am a UX Lead in one of the main Retails in Latin America (I mention it just to add context, not to brag :sweat_smile:) But in this case the problem seems some obvious.

After my Kospet broke, I decided to try a Galaxy Watch Active 2 (using Tizen), I liked it but it was not the same, so after I tried the new Ticwatch pro 3 (using Wear Os), I did not like it either. although the watch is very good.

What I find is that the Wear Os community is desperate and disappointed with Google, there are many bugs that have not been addressed for a long time and the community has not done much because of how closed the operating system it is.

If to this we add the few new applications of the last 2 years and that those that already existed, continue to disappear.

A hypothesis has arisen, Google may abandon Wear Os because they do not find commercial value in it.
This is where Android Full comes in, Chinese companies need to stop their idea of ​​"bigger better" that has worked with cell phones but it is different for a watch, we all interact differently with them.
When they affect the physical design (make it fat, heavy and big) the market is more limited and therefore its development.
They should also open up to developers to use their native features. (The community here has done a great job with what they can) this will help develop apps that exploit the hardware of the watch.
And finally, a leading company must begin to establish itself and one that is differentiated, no more copy & paste (although I understand that this is the chip of companies in China). They have the whole market ready Lemfo and Kospet.

Finally, in this way, companies will no longer need to make 2 applications for different systems and with functions limited by the hardware (like Tizen and Wear Os). They will simply optimize existing ones for small screens. In addition to that, Google can turn to see Android Full commercially.

Anyway thanks for reading and I hope that the future for the smart watches it could be more than a simply smartband.

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I am new to this community, and I love this idea. I think another problem that needs to be addressed if we want the market to grow is exposure to the product. It is surprisingly difficult to find out about these watches, maybe it is my poor searching skills but I have been searching for a product like this for a week or so and it took a few days to find out it existed. I’m not suggesting a full on advertising campaign, but I think the idea of full android on a watch needs a bit of spreading (maybe a blog post or two if someone has a blog or a few reddit posts could help get the idea out to more people, I honestly don’t know. An official discord server would be cool to, the forum is great but for more casual conversations maybe a discord server could do? Or maybe I don’t know what i’m talking about at all and these are all terrible ideas).

Regardless, what do you suggest we can do to change the market for the better

I understand that people here have a good relationship with the companies manufacturing these? What difficulties do the companies face when designing and manufacturing these watches? Is most of the trouble related to software compatability or hardware (or both?). These watches are fantastic, but a bit of competition as far as chipsets go would be great, but that most likely would require a larger user base to get companies interested in developing better suited technology for these watches.

What are your thoughts? Am I just talking rubbish or do you agree with any of the points I’m putting forward? I think almost everyone on this forum has plenty more experience than me when it comes to retail, and especially to these watches, like I said I barely know anything. These are just some thoughts from an outside perspective of a rather typical consumer.

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I totally agree that it can be difficult to find out about these watches, could be worse than one week though. Myself I had been looking for a suitable smartwatch for more than a year before I found the finow x5 back in 2016. It’s not like I was actively searching for one all the time, but I read all the news about new smartwatches and did some active searching every now and then.

I think the reason for making big watches like the prime 2 is because they sell better than the small ones, not because the companies has an idea of bigger is better.

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I’m part of the OpenWatch Project team. We aim to build a custom firmware for our watches that not only provides a nice UI/UX, but also allows developers to hook with our custom software, like the launcher or the phone sync app.

We also have considered to try and reverse-engineer and re-implement Android Wear functions so that Android Wear apps can be installed and runned on our platform too.

Right now we have Android 10 booting and working almost perfectly on the watches, but nothing is adapted to the round form factor yet. I’m currently trying to fix an issue with the battery charging, which is driving me crazy.

If you want to take a look at the project, we have all our code up on https://github.com/OpenWatchProject

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