Fossil was once the one logo conserving Google’s Put on OS alive for years, however now the trend logo is quitting the smartwatch marketplace. Simply ahead of the weekend, the corporate showed to The Verge: “We’ve got made the strategic determination to go out the smartwatch trade.” The corporate says present smartwatches will proceed to get tool updates “for the following couple of years” whilst it refocuses on conventional watches and jewellery.
Put on OS is out of the darkish ages now, however for years Fossil was once the OS’s best lifeline. Again within the days when Qualcomm was once strangling the OS with lackluster SoC updates, Fossil was once the one corporate that saved the dream alive. Fossil jumped into the Android Put on/Put on OS marketplace in 2015 and has been the one stable supply of Android smartwatch {hardware} since then. The entire giant firms like Samsung, LG, Sony, Huawei, Motorola, and Asus made watches for just a 12 months or two and give up.
In 2021, in spite of years of loyalty, Google dropped Fossil like a rock when Samsung introduced to come back again to the Put on OS ecosystem. Google lured Samsung clear of its in-house Tizen OS with preferential remedy, together with unique rights to the brand new “Put on OS 3” unencumber and unique apps. That 12 months, 2021, featured head-to-head August Put on OS releases of Samsung’s Galaxy Watch 4 and Fossil’s Gen 6 smartwatch. Samsung’s watch had a sooner, Samsung-made SoC, ran Put on OS 3, and price $250, whilst Fossil was once caught with Put on OS 2, a slower Qualcomm chip, and a $300 ticket. Fossil would slightly have the ability to compete with Samsung if the taking part in box had been stage; however upload to that Samsung’s unique chips and Google’s preferential remedy, and Fossil’s watches by no means stood a possibility. The Gen 6 would be the corporate’s closing smartwatch unencumber.
The ones years of releases for Fossil by no means ended in massive gross sales. The IDC’s VP of Knowledge & Analytics, Francisco Jeronimo, printed that Fossil peaked at 6.7 p.c smartwatch marketplace proportion in 2015 and best bought 19 million gadgets, or 2.2 p.c of the full marketplace from 2015-2023. Right through that eight-year run, Jeronimo says Apple shipped 248 million watches.