End of an era: Samsung puts Tizen smartwatches on life support

Samsung is one of the biggest pioneers of smartwatches and one of the few manufacturers that has been around since the start and is still going strong. Samsung’s entry into the smartwatch space started a long time ago, and the Galaxy Watch lineup started with the original Galaxy Watch back in 2018. It ran Tizen, which many would strongly argue provided a better user experience than Wear OS at that time. Samsung jumped to Wear OS with the Galaxy Watch 4 (to help save Google’s wearable OS), but this jump came at the cost of Tizen. Samsung has now put Tizen on life support, and in the coming months, your Tizen watch’s functionality will become increasingly limited until its eventual demise.

Reddit user Seaweed_Maximum (via Techissuestoday) brought to light Samsung’s termination schedule for Galaxy Store access for Tizen smartwatches. According to screenshots of the notice posted purportedly by a member of the Galaxy Store Operations team, here is the timeline for various termination dates for Tizen watches:

• September 30, 2024: The Galaxy Store will stop selling paid Tizen watch content, including apps, watch faces, and more.
• May 31, 2025: Galaxy Store will stop allowing new downloads of free Tizen watch content.
• September 30, 2025: The “My Apps” section in the Galaxy Store will stop allowing re-downloads, effectively ending the ability to access any further paid or free Tizen content.

Samsung also mentions that “core services related to this watch will stop everywhere except Galaxy Store” after May 2025.

The announcement mentions that this termination schedule applies to the following smartwatches:

• All Samsung Gear smartwatches
• Samsung Galaxy-branded watches that run on Tizen OS, namely the Galaxy Watch, Galaxy Watch 3, Galaxy Watch Active, and Galaxy Watch Active 2.

We could not locate the announcement pictured. However, the Tizen developer portal no longer allows new Tizen watch apps or updates.

If you are still using an older Galaxy Watch running on Tizen, you will soon face restrictions in how you can enjoy your functional hardware. You still have a generous year of functioning left for core services and some more months after that for the Galaxy Store.

The last Tizen product from Samsung was the Galaxy Watch 3 in 2020, so most of you who have purchased this or another Tizen smartwatch are probably looking to upgrade to a newer smartwatch anyway. Samsung’s Galaxy Watch 6 is a great upgrade option, but keep in mind that the Galaxy Watch 7 is probably some weeks away too.

For clarification, note that this does not impact any Wear OS smartwatches, namely all the smartwatches that Samsung has released since the Galaxy Watch 4 in 2021. So, if you have the Galaxy Watch 4 or newer, this announcement does not apply to you.

Are you still using an older Tizen Galaxy Watch? How is your experience these days? Does this news worry you, and are you ready to upgrade? Let us know in the comments below!