Not surprisingly, American connected watch users who own an iPhone wear an Apple Watch on their wrist: they’re 80% in this case, argues a Counterpoint poll. More interestingly, 71% of Pixel smartphone owners who own a connected watch have chosen a Pixel watch.
It’s a great achievement for Google, but the company has come a long way. In fact, the market shares of Pixels and the Pixel Watch remain quite modest: Canalys said the search engine accounted for 8% of the wearables segment in the last quarter of 2022, versus 5.9% for Samsung and 27.5% for Apple. Counterpoint adds that over the past year, more than one in two connected watches (56%) was an Apple Watch.
It bodes well for Google, however, which, like Apple, is trying to bring its customers together in a more or less closed ecosystem. What Samsung is still missing: Only 40% of users of the Korean manufacturer’s smartphones who own a Connected Watch have a Galaxy Watch. In the fourth quarter of 2022, one Apple Watch was sold for every three iPhones sold, compared to one Galaxy Watch for every ten Galaxy smartphones (at least in the US).
“Apple and iOS dominate the US smartphone market, and iPhone users are more likely to adopt other Apple products due to superior interoperability,” notes Counterpoint. Good for the Apple Watch, less for the competition that has to fight for the crumbs. Another lesson to be learned is that more than 70% of Connected Watches users, regardless of the band, say they are “very satisfied” with the overall experience their wrist devices provide.
This seems to indicate that despite its best efforts, Apple is failing to widen the gap in terms of functionality. 29% of connected watch owners use it for health and sports monitoring, the same proportion for notifications, and 22% for messaging and calling functions.