Samsung Galaxy Watch4 review: snappy interface, improved app support, and expanded health tracking, but Bixby is still bad and Samsung's ecosystem is limiting
Dieter Bohn / The Verge :
Context & Ripple Effects
The Verge's Galaxy Watch4 review lands at the end of a three-review arc of the same complaint: the 2018 Galaxy Watch was called out for a terrible Bixby, the Galaxy Active paired poorly with non-Samsung phones, and the Watch Active 2 still demanded too many Samsung apps while Bixby remained annoying. Watch4 finally moves on the software half of that ledger — snappier interface and improved app support — but keeps the other half intact.
That matters beyond the score because Samsung kept this design language alive: the later Watch7 inherits the circular look, and the Watch FE ships with the Watch4's internals, so the trade-offs Dieter Bohn flags here echo through at least two subsequent generations of Samsung wearables.
First-order effects
- Buyers deciding between Samsung and rival smartwatches get a genuinely faster, better-supported Watch4 — but only if they accept deeper commitment to Samsung phones and services to unlock it.
- Bixby remains a live liability inside a flagship product cycle, forcing Samsung's marketing to sell around its own assistant rather than through it.
Second-order effects
- Every improvement in Watch4's health tracking raises the baseline competitors must match on sensors and app catalogs, pushing rivals toward their own ecosystem bundles to keep parity.
- By making non-Samsung pairing the weak path, Samsung converts watch sales into phone-retention leverage — the watch becomes a reason to stay in the ecosystem, not just an accessory.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds across the Watch7 and Watch FE lineage, Samsung's wearable strategy structurally favors long-lived designs recycled into cheaper tiers over radical redesigns, with software openness as the recurring unsolved problem.
- Persistent cross-generation assistant failures like Bixby's point toward voice AI becoming a make-or-buy decision for device makers that can't build their own credible assistant.
The trend: Samsung's watch line has spent years converging on strong hardware and health tracking while its own assistant and ecosystem lock-in remain the unresolved constants across every generation.