Samsung's wearable market share explodes, Wear OS still a drop in the bucket

According to a new report from Canalys, the North American wearables market just hit a new milestone: a $2 billion total valuation. In the second quarter of this year, wearables sold exceptionally well, setting the stage for smartwatches and fitness trackers to continue being a big market for many companies.

As compared to the second quarter of 2018, the big winner this quarter was Samsung. Likely based on the success of the Samsung Galaxy Watch and Galaxy Watch Active, Samsung was able to increase its market share by an astounding 121 percent.

However, that still leaves Samsung in third place in the wearables market overall. Ahead of it are Fitbit and Apple, the latter of which is still the all-around king of the industry with its Apple Watch. That device is essentially the gold standard against which all other smartwatches are compared.

Fitbit, though, is still doing very well based on the success of the Fitbit Versa. However, the company did have a significant misstep with the Fitbit Versa Lite, which fared poorly with consumers according to Canalys.

Check out the chart below for more data:

Unfortunately, the only company in the top five that uses Google’s Wear OS as its platform — Fossil — is last on the list. Granted, there are likely some other Wear OS-based companies in the “Others” category, such as Mobvoi and more. But compared to the heavyweights of the industry, Wear OS is dragging behind the pack.

Since Google just bought a large chunk of Fossil’s resources, it’s possible the search giant is finally going to put some of its considerable weight behind its stalled wearables platform. We’ll need to wait and see!