In an interview at SXSW, Sundar Pichai, Google's head of Android, Chrome, and Apps, announced that Google will be jumping into the wider wearables space with an Android-based SDK focused on wearable devices. The new SDK will be released to developers in just two weeks with the hope of getting feedback from them. And like Android for smartphones, Google will be developing a device-agnostic app platform for wearable computers.



While it's easy to imagine this platform as "Android for watches," Pichai said the company was thinking "more broadly" and, according to the Wall Street Journal, pitched an idea for a jacket with tons of sensors. Google is rumored to be working on smartwatch of its own, but Pichai declined to say if Google is working on any devices. Instead, Pichai said he thinks about the wearables market at "a platform level." This "platform" idea move perfectly mirrors Android's strategy in smartphones and tablets, where Google licenses the OS out to other OEMs to produce hardware, and Google uses its influence over the software to drive people toward Google services.

While on the surface it would make sense for Google to launch a wearables platform in the same vein as Android, this outcome wasn't a foregone conclusion. Google's other wearables project, Google Glass, is definitely not a platform that is welcoming to outside manufacturers. With Glass, Google is going the Apple route with a closed-off, fully vertical device where Google controls the hardware and software. None of the special Glass parts are shared with outside developers or OEMs. Google accepts app submissions for Glass, but it strictly controls what is and is not allowed in the Glass store—for instance, facial recognition apps are banned for no reason other than the fact that Google doesn't like them.

It was easy to imagine the Glass OS being the future of Google's wearable strategy. The minimal, low-resolution, voice-based OS could have translated easily to a watch. But with the release of a proper Android SDK, Google Glass is looking less like "the future" of wearables at Google and more like a one-off, siloed experiment.

A proper Google wearables platform should mean that Google will finally start making wearable-focused apps. The biggest problem with wearables so far, like Google Glass and the Samsung Galaxy Gear , has been a lack of useful apps. Google is one of the biggest mobile app houses in the world, and a wearable with interoperability with services like Google Now, Gmail, Google Maps, Hangouts, and Play Music would go a long way toward creating a compelling device.

Work on an Android-based wearable has been going on for some time. In the summer of 2012, Google bought WIMM Labs, a company that was the furthest along in developing an Android smartwatch. By the time it was bought by Google, WIMM had built an Android smartwatch, watch-focused SDK, and app store. According to reports, WIMM merged with the Android team and has been working on a Google smartwatch ever since.

Internally, Google has been doing its part, too. Over the last few versions, the company has been slowly grooming Android to become a viable wearable device OS. In Android 4.3, Google added a notifications API which can push notifications out to secondary devices and allow the secondary device to dismiss notifications and perform actions on the notification, like archiving a Gmail message. While third-party devices have yet to take advantage of this functionality, it could theoretically allow a perfect replication of the notification panel on a smartwatch. The Galaxy Gear relied on notification support from individual apps, but with Google's OS-level implementation, all apps would be compatible. The small size of wearable devices also means that Android will need to run on an even smaller power budget, so for Android 4.4, Google focused on shrinking Android's memory footprint. Today Google says the OS can run on 512MB of RAM. For comparison, the Galaxy Gear uses 512MB of RAM, and Google Glass has 1GB.

The big question is how the OS will work in relation to the main branch of Android. Is it a customized fork, like Google TV or Google Glass, or is the OS part of the main branch of Android, the same way smartphones and tablets are? Tablets started out as a separate version of Android (Honeycomb) and later merged with the main phone branch in Ice Cream Sandwich, so we may have to wait a version or two before we get our answer.

Google needs a solid Android wearables platform to come out as soon as possible. The company has already lost its biggest Android customer, Samsung, to a rival operating system in the wearables market. With the newest Gear smartwatches, Samsung switched from Android to its own Tizen OS, so it seems like wearables will be the first battleground where we see a proper Tizen versus Android fight. Google's timing with this project couldn't be better. As we've seen with smartphones, the platform with the most apps wins, and Samsung has just blown up whatever app catalog it had when it switched to Tizen. Now with Google jumping into the wearable app development fray, any developers considering a Tizen app are probably wary of another switch by Samsung to Google's platform.

The good news is that we only have to wait about two weeks to see if Google's smartwatch platform is worth switching to. Like Android for smartphones, it looks like Google's wearable OS will be the only manufacturer-agnostic option for some time. This "horizontal" strategy almost guarantees it the largest install base, which, along with Google's app development, guarantees it the best apps. The Android smartphone situation may yet repeat itself.