Gadgets
Google's new smartwatch app has missed its own Apple watches.
YouTube Music was released yesterday on the Apple Watch, coming in advance of the official Wear OS edition and just further highlighting Google's continued troubles with its rival wearable platform. The app — available to YouTube Music Premium and YouTube Premium subscribers — reflects all the features it introduced on iOS, except now in a portable watchOS style. Users can download, monitor replay, and even cast music from their wrist, with a nice complication for Apple Watch watches.
First, Landing on Apple Watch reveals Google's contribution to rising the audience of YouTube Music. Apple already dominates half of the smartwatch market, so turning up is ultimately in Google's favour. Yet missing Wear OS at launch underscores how Google's app has been hobbled from the outset. A weak install base and poor processor production from Qualcomm's partner has contributed to Wear OS lagging behind Apple and Samsung 's competitors for years to come.
The arrival of Qualcomm's newest processors, Snapdragon Wear 4100 and 4100 Plus, aims to fix the speed problems that have hurt previous Wear OS products. Paired with the Wear OS upgrade this fall, which focuses on simplified design features, it is hoped that Google partners will be able to build applications that are best positioned to cope with Apple's market domination. Google has also been working for quite some time to get its own internal smartwatch hardware off the ground following a failed effort back in 2016.
That may be where Fitbit, bought by Google last year, comes in. Fitbit 's squad makes an impressive complement to Google's own, but collecting health data from the former is another matter. The challenges to the completion of the EU agreement and the long-term future of the convergence of the hardware departments of the two firms mean that the introduction of a genuine "Pixel Smartwatch" will take longer.
Google hasn’t given up on Wear OS, but the path ahead is unclear — and the platform isn’t growing fast enough to be of bigger use to YouTube Music than the Apple Watch.
