Why do we develop Galaxy Watch (Tizen) applications?

Galaxy Watch for Tizen
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Since, this is a developers forum, I would be very much interested why other fellow developers are developing Galaxy Watch applications?
I am pretty brand agnostic, I have Apple Watch (non LTE, unfortunately), a Huawei Smartwatch 2 LTE (the last Android Wear OS watch from Huawei) and Samsung Galaxy Watch LTE.
I am a business application developer, and almost in every cases I am specifying customers as requirements what devices to buy. I am typically in a convenient position, my customers buy watches, phones, PDAs for our applications not the other way around, which is quite common in business (manufacturing, warehousing, logistics, field services, and so on and forth) application world.
The pros, I like with Tizen:

  • Tizen Samsung Galaxy Watch is selling ok; after the much more popular Apple Watch is the second best seller just before Fitbit. Google WearOS is dead, unfortunately, even Huawei dropped Android from its watches.
  • Tizen provides direct support to build applications with JavaScript as well as Microsoft.NET Xamarin.Forms, two excellent languages that are easy to use and learn vs Swift/Apple Watch and Kotlin/Java for Android Wear OS. Tizen application programming with JavaScript and C# is a lot simpler than Apple or Android.
  • I love Samsung Notes with their pen support, Galaxy Watch is a perfect companion. I have Huawei Smart watch, but developing apps on a Android WearOS is not fun at all.
  • Galaxy Watch is the only LTE watch in my country today officially supported by local telcos. Apple Watch is not available as an LTE version in my country, unfortunately, which is a bummer and shame.

The cons with Tizen and Tizen Web development tools:

  • Tizen Studio is far from today’s standards. Samsung should focus on Visual Studio Code, the absolute top star today for wearable web application development.
  • Tizen Web extension module for VSC is practically unusable today, honestly, no debugging device/emulator. I’d make a “React for Tizen with optional TypeScript” project template for Create React App, that would be really appealing to the hundreds of thousands of React developers.
  • Unlike Apple Pay, Samsung Pay is not available in my country; I can use my Apple Watch for paying but not my Galaxy Watch. This could be important for business application arena, too.

What is your story?

tizenwithflow
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I’m a professional games developer, and I’ve been interested in watch based games since I got a Pebble many years ago.

I enjoyed the C based development available on Pebble, and was keen to start doing games on the Fitbit Ionic but really didn’t like the Javascript based system so I didn’t end up doing much with it.

I was waiting for the Google Pixel watch to come out and would have happily moved to WearOS but it hasn’t appeared and no real info on it and when I did a bit more research the Galaxy Watch seemed to be at least as good, and cheaper, than many of the WearOS devices that are available so I took the plunge.

So far, so good. The Tizen OS is taking a little getting used to, but the watch itself is amazing. I’m looking forward to getting started on doing some games on it. I’ve started using Unity as my game engine, rather than starting from scratch, so it gives you a good start for games (even though it’s limited to the 2017.5 version of Unity, before they stopped supporting Tizen).

I’d be interested in the Godot game engine getting Tizen support, it’s an impressive open source game engine.

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I was an Fan of the Samsung Smartwatches since the “Samsung Galaxy Gear” and after WearOS was not reeaallyy good I was styed with Samsung :smiley:
And to be honest most of the apps I had developed was because I simple didn’t find an application which could make the thing I wanted :smiley:

Also an great thing is that there are not many big companies which make apps for the watch so us hobby-developers have also an big chance to go on the top list! :slight_smile:

Oh and btw. on my country is also Samsung Pay still not available… (in Germany…) which is also the reason why I have like you an Apple Watch :smiley: (Okay also to test it and get “inspiration”/new ideas which I could miss on my Samsung Watch)

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Wow, I am surprised that Samsung Pay is not available in Germany, one of the biggest market. I love paying with a watch.
As for business app development. I am on the Galaxy Watch for a month now, and one of our first app is about to be released. Unfortunately, TAU is a nightmare, but JQuery Mobile (JQM) from 2014 is fantastic, absolutely brilliant for simple mobile and sub-mobile web applications. I initialize my projects with Tizen Studio and I use JQM along with a TypeScript tool-chain. It works brilliant.

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Interesting topic! One that I’m also very interested in.

For me, I was looking at a new direction for my company in which I could use my strengths and experience as a designer/artist combined with front-end engineering. I was looking for something new and I was very interested in exploring the idea of doing something in the wearable space. After some research, the platform that Samsung provided just seemed like a good fit for me and my company, and especially with the ability to develop using web technologies. And looking further in to the market, I thought that I had something to offer that could potentially stand out from the crowd, use a philosophy that pushes things a bit further. So I jumped in.

My first watch face was made with GWD, amazing job by Samsung with the software. However, I wasn’t really happy with the restriction and lack of ability to code in it, I just couldn’t engineer the experience I had designed for the product. So I re-engineered the entire watch face from scratch using web technologies. And now I’m currently engineering the 3rd watch face. Every project has been a learning experience and I feel that for every project there’s been leap in what I thought was possible, just a great feeling.

But like with everything in life, I have learned that the platform isn’t perfect. It’s just way too simple to flood the store. And I get the feeling that’s what a lot of people base their business model on. Keep pumping in a huge amount of watch faces so a percentage keep being on top. This is very bad for designers that want to take their time to provide high quality products in terms of thoughtful design combined with high production value. But in contrast with that I think that how Samsung is promoting good designers is great! But there’s a threshold to be qualified to it. Not saying that’s it’s a bad thing to have a threshold to set a bar, but if you have someone that spends a month or two to create something that has great value for the customer, if you have a minimum of 10 watch faces to be qualified, that would mean that you would need to spend a year getting to a point to be qualified to apply, that’s a huge investment in time.

Samsung has been great to me so far and I love the interactions we’ve had. Very helpful and open-minded. I just wish for the system to be build more towards quality (even though I know quality is very subjective). I don’t know how many watch faces are in the store right now, but I think I saw a presentation that was held a couple of years back that we are up to 80k, would that mean that we are closer to 100k by now? Do we really need more watch faces that’s been thrown together over a couple of hours?

I would also love to hear more Miklos, how has your experience been making apps for the galaxy watch? I mean in terms of business value for you and your company? Are you service based towards other companies, or are you developing your own IP’s?

How has the experience been comparing apps, watch face and games? Just very interested in hearing more about how the demand has been for each market?