Samsung's latest announcement marks the beginning of the end for Tizen Watches

Update 05/06/24 03:56 pm (IST): In an effort to get Tizen-powered watch owners to upgrade, Samsung has boosted trade-in offer for the old watches, as highlighted by 9to5Google. You can get up to $100 for your Galaxy Watch 3, Galaxy Watch, Galaxy Watch Active 2, and Galaxy Watch Active towards a new Galaxy Watch 6 which runs on the improved One UI Watch system. This is a significant jump from the $5 you’d normally get and is much better than trade-in offers from other retailers.

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In a detailed termination schedule notice dated May 31, 2024, Samsung’s Galaxy Store Operations team laid out the plan to discontinue support for their legacy Tizen wearable operating system and content ecosystem. The screenshots of the announcement (attached below – click to zoom) were shared by a Reddior who goes by u/Seaweed_Maximum.

The key milestones outlined in the notice are:

September 30, 2024 – The Galaxy Store will cease selling any paid apps, watch faces, or other content for Tizen devices.

May 31, 2025 – Users will no longer be able to download any new free Tizen apps or content from the Galaxy Store.

September 30, 2025 – The “My Apps” section in the Galaxy Store will stop allowing re-downloads of any previously purchased Tizen items. This effectively ends the ability to access paid or free Tizen content.

The notice specifies that this termination schedule applies to all Samsung Gear and Galaxy-branded watch models running Tizen OS, including the Gear, Watch1, Watch3, Active1, and Active2 released before August 2021’s Watch4 series switched to Wear OS.

While existing Tizen apps and content can continue running until cut-off in September 2025 if already downloaded, Samsung states core “services related to this watch will stop everywhere except Galaxy Store” after May 2025.

Samsung cited their “internal service operational policy” as the reason, noting “We are no longer applying Tizen OS to watches after Galaxy Watch3 in 2020.” This aligns with the company’s strategic shift to exclusively using Google’s Wear OS starting with the Watch4 models.

However, the drawn-out termination schedule leaves Samsung’s once-heralded Tizen smartwatch platform on life support for another 16 months at least. Many recent Tizen watch owners could feel hamstrung by the uncertainty around maintaining full device functionality during this transition period.

The South Korean tech giant is also asking developers to start creating any new apps for Wear OS, instead of Tizen OS. Here’s a snippet from the official notice on Samsung’s developer page:

We ask that you create your new watch apps for Wear OS Powered by Samsung and distribute them from Google Play Store so that they can be used on the latest Galaxy Watches. Note: Apps that are currently sold in Galaxy Store continue to be sold in Galaxy Store. However, they can no longer be updated.

But that’s not the full picture! Samsung has even decided to drop support for Tizen-powered smartwatches on its Galaxy phones that come with Android 14 and later out-of-the-box, such as the S24 series. I, however, managed to find workarounds to pair watches like the Gear S3 with the Galaxy S24.

Overall, the writing is on the wall that Samsung is decisively moving on from Tizen to the Wear OS ecosystem for all future smartwatch development and heading towards a hard cut-off date less than two years away. Customers with Tizen watches have a limited window to prepare for migration. And those who bought new Galaxy phones will also have to ditch their perfectly functional Tizen watches if they want to pair them to their new phones. Hopefully, the backlash results in Samsung reconsidering their stance or at least giving users better incentives to upgrade.