Original Samsung Galaxy Gear (SM-V700) now being updated to Tizen
The time has come for owners of the original Galaxy Gear to say goodbye to Android and welcome Tizen onto their smartwatch. Samsung has begun rolling out an update to the Galaxy Gear that will bring over Tizen, the company's in-house OS, to the smartwatch.
Context & Ripple Effects
The writing was on the wall since February, when sources first reported the next Gear smartwatch would run Tizen rather than Android, and again when Samsung shipped the Gear 2 in April on Tizen with better battery life. What today's update does is retroactively pull the original Galaxy Gear — sold from late 2013 as an Android device, and patched as recently as November to show notifications from more apps — onto the same in-house platform.
The move is unusually broad for an OS swap: eight major outlets picked up the story within a day, reflecting how closely the Android-versus-Tizen question is being watched as Samsung's wearable line consolidates. It also lands just weeks before Samsung's confirmed summer plan for a standalone smartwatch that calls and takes photos untethered from a phone.
First-order effects
- Owners of the original Galaxy Gear get a working device but lose the Android-based app environment they bought into, with Samsung's in-house Tizen stack replacing it via over-the-air update.
- Samsung's wearable lineup — Galaxy Gear, Gear 2, and the coming standalone model — now runs one OS it fully controls, eliminating a two-platform split across its own catalog.
Second-order effects
- Developers targeting Samsung watches no longer choose between Android forks and Tizen: with even the legacy hardware migrated, Tizen becomes the single required target, concentrating third-party wearable app investment on Samsung's stack rather than Google's.
- The update sharpens Samsung's differentiation against Android Wear rivals like LG and Motorola, whose watches remain tied to Google's platform and its update cadence.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Samsung is building vertically integrated wearable hardware-plus-software the way Apple does with iOS — reducing its dependence on Google at the category level even while Android still powers most of its phone business.
- A successful migration of existing customers onto Tizen gives Samsung a proven playbook for forcing OS transitions post-purchase, which lowers the risk calculus for the rumored VR headset and other in-house-platform devices it is developing.
The trend: Samsung is migrating its entire wearable line from Android to in-house Tizen, using over-the-air updates on legacy hardware to consolidate a proprietary software stack ahead of its standalone-watch push.