Few things in this industry make me as perplexed as Wear OS. At its core, it should be a runaway success. A smartwatch that has good integration with Android, Google Assistant built-in, and great app support? Sign me up. Everything about that sounds incredible, and in theory, it is.

However, year after year, Wear OS continues to fall by the wayside. The smartwatch market as a whole is growing, with North America on its own seeing a 40% jump in sales during Q2 2019 for a market value of $2 billion. There's a lot of money to be made here, and while companies like Apple and Samsung are soaring, Wear OS has virtually no market share.

If Wear OS has such a solid foundation, why is no one buying? In my eyes, the answer is pretty simple — Google and Qualcomm have no intention of taking it seriously.

During the early days of Wear OS (formerly Android Wear), things were exciting. Companies like LG, Samsung, Motorola, and Huawei were releasing lots of interesting hardware, Google seemed eager to promote the platform, and there was genuine momentum that kept pushing everything forward.

Unfortunately, that renaissance didn't last very long. Samsung stepped out of the Android Wear game to focus on its Tizen platform, LG's highly-anticipated Watch Style and Watch Sport were flops, and Qualcomm decided to take an over two-year hiatus from creating any new silicon for smartwatches. Add that together with various UI changes for Android Wear, an assortment of bugs that have crept up and not been fixed, and a big rebrand that didn't really go anywhere, and we're left with smaller brands trying to pick up the pieces and make the best of a bad situation.

The glory days of Wear OS are long gone.

I've been thinking about this for a while, but this idea really struck a chord with me recently while using the new Fossil Gen 5 Smartwatch. Fossil is the most successful company creating Wear OS watches in 2019, and the Gen 5 is its best one yet, especially in one area that's usually a downside for Wear OS — performance.

The Gen 5 is the first Wear OS watch I've used that ships with 1GB of RAM. To put things in perspective, most others use around 500MB or 512MB. Wear OS shouldn't need that much RAM to perform well, but it does.

Qualcomm's Snapdragon Wear 3100 processor that was launched in the second half of 2018 was anticipated to give Wear OS the performance boost it so desperately needed, but we didn't see anything of the like. In fact, it had essentially the same horsepower as the Wear 2100 from 2016. In real-world use, this translates to sluggish performance and choppy animations. The extra RAM in the Fossil Gen 5 does a surprisingly good job at remedying some of these pain points, but even on the best-performing Wear OS watch on the market, I still run into slow app loading times and occasional freezes.