Although Apple has not released the sales figures for Apple Watch and neither has any of their competitors, it is widely assumed that Apple Watch is dominating the general purpose smartwatch segment (excluding dedicated fitness trackers).
At this point, Apple’s competitors, the Android Wear camp and Samsung Tizen have two choices. They can try to incorporate the good ideas of Apple Watch into their own designs, but at the same time keep themselves distinct in appearance in UI. The other choice is to not give a damn and make themselves as similar to Apple Watch as possible, essentially copying the design.
Samsung has essentially proven with their smartphones, that the latter choice works tremendously well, and if you have the money to wage a long legal war, you can essentially escape serious punishment.
Samsung has just shown off a teaser for their new Samsung Gear S2 smartwatch based on Tizen, and to no one’s surprise, they have chosen to copy Apple.
The great thing about Tizen is that Samsung is not held back in any way by Google, and it is completely free to copy Apple any way they wish. Google is much more likely to shy away from this approach and try to use their own Material Design, regardless of which approach results in more sales.
So here, Samsung has clearly found a way to differentiate Tizen from the Android Wear camp. Tizen will copy Apple Watch while Android Wear OEMs will use Material Design. I’m pretty sure that Samsung’s approach is going to work better.
Naofumi Kagami 