Damn, i just bought one of their hybrid watches I hope this doesn’t mean an early EoL for it… I know the article spells out the wearOS models specifically, but if they kill off the hybrid line too that would spell the end of smart watches for me.
I had a fossil before I bought my Samsung, and it was a god awful mess. Barely functional, slow and honestly kind of ugly.
Still, a shame to lose more competitors.
Same, I had the Carlisle and it was a worthless piece of trash. It was painfully slow, and it would vibrate with a notification, but then there wouldn’t be any notification to be found. I eventually just stopped wearing it and figured I’d wait for the Pixel Watch to be released, but even then, knowing how horrible Google’s first attempts at hardware usually goes, I still waited an extra year for the Pixel Watch 2. So far I’ve been happy with it, and I’ll never buy another Fossil watch again.
I’ve had 4 Fossil watches over the past 30 years and they’ve all turned out to be garbage. Beautiful garbage.
I was aesthetically a fan of the Fossil watches, and was using a Fossil Sport (1st gen) for quite a while. Unfortunately the layers of proprietary-Fossil required software/watchfaces on top of the layers of proprietary-Google WearOS hampered the software experience a tiny bit, and the frankly poor hardware quality marred the experience significantly. My charging band coil in the watch completely dislodged itself (it appeared to be held in with glue), rendering the watch unusable.
Fossil’s customer support was excellent, replacing the device fully when this happened, though that was when that model was still on store shelves. I recently inquired about getting a replacement battery and was told I can just trade it in for 50% off a current-gen model, which while being far more generous an offer than I expected, still leaves me hesitant to upgrade to another device that suffers from the same problems and is in danger of being outright discontinued.
At this point I don’t really need/want a WearOS device specifically, and would actually prefer something that’s less tied to Google’s whims, the hardware OEM’s whims, and whatever the interplay is between those two companies. I’ve been eyeing more hobby-oriented projects like bangle.js or the PineTime smartwatch, but the fact that I’m even looking in that space shows that it’s become a device I would get for tinkering, not one I strictly “need”.
I like my Galaxy Watch, been holding up for over 3 years now
Android 14 has finally made using my Pebble with the phone a bad option. I’m happy with the Garmin that I replaced it with.
“ceded victory”
Less competition means everyone loses. They made Wear OS better by existing.
I love the look of fossil watches. Sorry to see them go!
