Google thinks smartwatches are the future again – are you buying them?

 Google has been right about wearables for almost a decade. Now the company swears it's serious about them, too.

The Pixel Watch is mostly a Fitbit — but that’s just the start of the plan.

Why did it take Google so long to make a smartwatch? When I asked Rick Osterloh, Google's SVP of hardware and in charge of all things Pixel, his answer was one word: Fitbit. He couldn't make a smartwatch without the Google-killer health and fitness platform, and until very recently, he simply didn't have one.

"We wanted to make a watch first," Osterloh told me over Google Meet, days before the official launch of Google's new Pixel Watch and Pixel 7 phones. He wears a Pixel Watch on his left wrist, and both a Pixel 7 and the upcoming Pixel tablet sit at his desk in front of him. "And maybe we would have, if not for the fact that we didn't have what we thought had the right capabilities for health and wellness." So Google agreed to acquire the fitness tracking company in 2019 for $2.1 billion -- but the deal didn't close until early 2021, and Google couldn't do anything to integrate or improve Fitbit's features until then.

However, once Osterloh and his team were able to start working with the Fitbit team, things came together quickly. “The Pixel Watch proposition was actually quite simple,” he says. "It's like this, Fitbit delivers incredible health and wellness insights through the app, brings the best of Google and native Google apps into tools, and then puts it all together in a beautiful design." The Pixel Watch is meant to be a great fitness device, a style and fashion item, and a Google Assistant on your wrist — in roughly that order. "The killer app on watches today is definitely health and fitness," says Osterloh.

But in the long run, Google sees smartwatches as much more than that. In Google's vision of ambient computing, all your devices work together in perfect harmony to make your life easier. A wearable computer -- one that knows where you are, what you're doing and how you're feeling -- is needed for the system to work. Even AR glasses won't grasp you like a device like the Pixel Watch. Over time, Google watches smartwatches are becoming as important as phones.

If you already understand sneaky language, there's a good reason for this. We've heard a lot about this story — about the potential of smartwatches and Google's belief in the more personal future of computing — before. Google had a lot of big ideas about smartwatches about a decade ago, and those ideas have proven to be largely true. But it was Apple that proved it, as the Apple Watch became a hit, while Android-powered watches largely failed, and Google never made its flagship device.

We've heard a lot about this story — about the potential of smartwatches and Google's belief in the more personal future of computing — before.

Now Google swears it's really serious about smartwatches. The sight is still big and exciting. But Google products have been known to hit with reckless abandon, many of which vociferously defend until the ax is swung. Will anyone be good enough to believe Google this time? Do they need it too?

Osterloh says yes. And he is desperate to prove it. He expects he already has a market share in the smartphone market as the company prepares the seventh generation of Pixel phones. No one asks him if Google is serious about phones anymore, he says, but "some of these categories are new to us, and we have to share the same determination in those categories. And we intend to." "

Google needs more than anything for the Pixel Watch to succeed, which is the best Fitbit ever. Maybe Google will have enough time to build the smartwatch it envisions.

The future, again of Google

Google's first foray into smartwatches got off to a relatively promising start. In early 2014 — when there were rumors of an "iWatch" but an Apple Watch that didn't exist yet — the company introduced a software platform called Android Wear. Almost immediately, LG, Motorola, Samsung and others said they planned to make Android-powered smartwatches.

At the I/O developer conference that year, Sundar Pichai, the then head of Android, explained why wearables were part of the future of computing. "Users increasingly live in a multi-screen world," he said, and Google had a unique opportunity to "create a seamless experience across all your connected devices." He outlined four principles for Google's approach to this ecosystem: everything is contextually aware; Voice is a main input device; Everything must be seamless; And your phone is the center of the universe.

David Singleton, then director of engineering at Android, spent the next 20 minutes explaining how Android Wear would work. He called the smartwatch "a powerful computer to wear comfortably on your body all day" and told developers that they'll have "access to the exact same tools we already rely on on Android phones and tablets." He showed off three new devices from Motorola, LG and Samsung and promised that many more would be coming soon.

It was just like a Google-powered smartwatch. For the next half-decade, Google followed a pattern: seemingly forgetting about the platform entirely, only to come up with a few updates and a promise that the company still cared about wearables. Then forget it. In 2018, Android Wear became Wear OS, and later that year Google released Wear OS 2.0. But until then, there were few new Wear OS devices of note, few new feature updates worth noting, and little evidence that Google was investing in its smartwatch business. In 2021, Google made another gesture towards care with the introduction of Wear OS 3 with Samsung's Galaxy Watch 4, which made it appear that Google was completely satisfied with Samsung's hardware to be Apple's main competitor. Heck, it looked like a company wanted to make that hardware.

Let me tell you all this history because it's important to understand that the only thing that has changed about Google's smartwatch strategy is how much Google cares about it. Pichai's ideas about context and spontaneity, about the power of voice – all that are as true and central to the plan as ever. One thing that has changed is how Google sees your phone; Google now sees the Assistant and its cloud services as the connective tissue for all your devices, rather than a plate of glass in your pocket. But for all intents and purposes, Google was largely right about smartwatches from almost a decade ago. And while Apple proved Pichai's theories to be true, Google couldn't be bothered to try any longer.