If Google brings Android Wear to iPhone, the Apple Watch is in trouble

Steve Jobs, so incensed by how similar the first version of Android was to his precious iPhone, vowed to destroy it completely, famously promising to go "thermonuclear" on the platform.

Jobs' successor, Apple CEO Tim Cook, may soon have his own thermonuclear moment if a new report is true about Google's intention to bring Android Wear to iOS. According to The Verge, Google is close to making its wearable platform compatible with the iPhone, possibly for an unveiling at this year's Google I/O developer conference.

Making Android Wear smartwatches compatible with the world's most popular smartphone would be huge boost for Google's wearable strategy, which hasn't exactly lit the wearable world on fire — fewer than 1 million Android Wear devices have actually been sold. Compare that to the 1 billion Android devices shipped in 2014 alone.

The timing would be perfect. Apple has cranked the volume to 11 on the hype machine for the launch of its wrist-mounted darling, the Apple Watch, benefiting all wearables in its wake. The Apple Watch officially goes on sale April 24, and Google I/O is roughly a month later, May 28-29. That lets Google capitalize on the initial excitement for the watch, but also to take advantage of the one key feature it doesn't have: a low price.

As I and others have argued, the Apple Watch is interesting and even useful, but Apple has priced it too high for the incremental benefits it provides. After all, is it really that much easier to create Notes on a watch then it is on a phone?

The Apple Watch's weakness is Android Wear's strength. Devices start at about $150, or less than half the cost of the Apple Watch. Many, if not most customers are very price-conscious, especially for gadgets you don't really need (which describes smartwatches perfectly). People who don't like the idea of spending $349+ every couple of years on a new gadget might warm up to the idea when you slice a couple of C-notes off the price tag.

True, with Android Wear, there'd be no Apple Pay, no Siri, no apps and no semi-creepy sharing of heartbeats. But the primary use of any smartwatch is to feed you notifications on an ultra-convenient display, and Google's budding wearable platform does that with aplomb. Intrepid experimenters have actually already achieved the iPhone-Android Wear connection (without jailbreaking!) so it looks not only technically possible, but relatively easy.
 

But what about the style, the craftsmanship, the Jony Ive voiceovers? Yes, Android Wear has very little of that (though it's not totally absent), but such accoutrements typically only matter to collectors. If people really cared deeply about it, we would never have stopped wearing watches in the first place.

Given how much cheaper Android Wear devices are than the Apple Watch, there's a chance they could collectively become the most-used smartwatch platform on iPhone. That would be a huge embarrassment for Apple, and it's likely it would do whatever it could to break that compatibility.

That's speculation, of course, but this isn't: The Internet of Things — of which smartwatches are a part — depends on cross-platform capability more than any other format or platform war of the past. Google, Facebook and even Microsoft have shown that they understand that, but Apple, for all of its "Kits," has been far more reluctant to emerge from its walled garden. By design, its products and services won't "just work" with other systems.

In the wearables game, that's a wrongheaded strategy. And it could very well lead to the Apple Watch losing on its home turf.

Source: Mashable.com