In October 2016, at its first 'Made by Google' event, Google was supposed to launch its first-ever proprietary smartwatch. Those plans changed at the eleventh hour.
One employee on Google's early smartwatch team told Business Insider that Android creator Andy Rubin seemed to be in favor of the company releasing a Google-branded watch. Rubin, however, left the Android division in March 2013 to lead the company's robotics efforts .
"Replicating what we did with the phones was more in the wheelhouse of the Android team than trying to push a new hardware product," the former employee said."There is no developer community that I'm aware of" Even worse for Google, Samsung, decided in 2014 to create smartwatches with its own operating system instead of using Android Wear. Today, Tizen — the name of Samsung's watch software — is the number two player with 15% market share. Google meanwhile has a paltry 6% market share according to IDC .
Official channels for developer support have also fallen by the wayside. When Google officially shut off its fledgling social network, Google+, in April 2019, it effectively killed the only thriving Android Wear developers' forum. In Lockheimer's view, the time had come for Google to become more serious about its own consumer electronics hardware, more so than it had been in years past with its Nexus-branded devices. The Android boss made his case in a series of impassioned speeches at mobile team all-hands meetings, one former marketing employee recalled.
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