The Wear OS ecosystem shrinks even further as TicWatches vanish from stores and Mobvoi pivots to AI

What you need to know

• The Mobvoi TicWatch series has begun to disappear from retailers and Mobvoi's site, which now prioritizes home gym and AI tech.
• Mobvoi has yet to comment, except to say that "essential" updates for TicWatches will continue.
• The last Mobvoi watch, TicWatch Atlas, launched in October 2024 with Wear OS 4, and has yet to update to Wear OS 5 or receive Gemini support.
• The current remaining Wear OS brands are Google, Samsung, OnePlus/ Oppo, and Xiaomi, after Fossil and Tag Heuer also dropped Wear OS.

While Mobvoi hasn't officially confirmed that it's leaving the smartwatch business, all the signs are pointing that way, and have been for some time, ever since the Google-Samsung relaunch of Wear OS 3 in 2021.

After months of slashing its recent TicWatch prices down by hundreds of dollars, Mobvoi has now removed TicWatch listings on Amazon with no explanation.

On the Mobvoi US homepage, TicWatches have vanished from the Products menu, though you can still find TicWatch straps and old product pages. Click on the "Buy now" button on those pages, and you'll see "Product is not available at the moment."

9to5Google, which spotted the missing product pages, contacted Mobvoi, which replied that "we don’t have new information to announce about the TicWatch lineup," but that "existing devices will continue to receive essential support."

You would expect a more fervent answer if Mobvoi intended to reassure customers that its TicWatches would persist. Instead, "essential support" implies an emphasis on bug fixes rather than feature upgrades.

From 2022 through 2024, Mobvoi released three watches: the TicWatch Pro 5, TicWatch Pro 5 Enduro, and TicWatch Atlas. Each had impressive multi-day battery life and the same Snapdragon hardware as a Pixel or OnePlus watch, but very few year-over-year changes to keep things fresh, and they all lacked a key Wear OS perk: Google Assistant, and now Gemini.

Now, it seems likely that Wear OS watches as a category will continue to shrink. It's an unsurprising development, given the problems that brands have had with Wear OS updates.

The Wear OS update situation has reached the breaking point

Ever since Samsung and Google teamed up to relaunch Wear OS, Galaxy and Pixel Watches have been the first to receive every new feature. Other brands, from Mobvoi to Android OEMs like OnePlus and Xiaomi, typically need another year just to get the update working on their hardware.

Mobvoi took two years to roll out Wear OS 3 to its older TicWatches, and only began releasing Wear OS 4 in late 2024, after both Samsung and Google had moved on to Wear OS 5. And while the older Wear OS 2 TicWatches had supported Assistant, Mobvoi never managed to get the new-and-improved version working.

We saw, and continue to see, similar update struggles with other brands. Fossil, one of the biggest Wear OS brands before Samsung, lagged a year behind when it released Wear OS 3.5 in 2023, then abandoned smartwatches entirely a few months later. It offered another year of small updates before fully abandoning the brand.

Right now, OnePlus is our favorite Wear OS alternative, with the OnePlus Watch 3 offering impressive battery life and fast Wear OS 5 performance. But its predecessor, the OnePlus Watch 2, is months overdue to receive its promised Wear OS 5 update. Is it a coincidence that the upcoming OnePlus Watch Lite allegedly won't use Wear OS?

By prioritizing smarts and success on the Pixel Watch 4 and Galaxy Watch 8, Google and Samsung set up other brands to struggle. The only reason to buy a smartwatch that lasts a couple of days per charge is for cutting-edge smarts. When Mobvoi stopped being able to offer Google's latest tools, it had no way to differentiate itself, aside from fitness — and other fitness watches have lighter designs, longer battery life, and lower costs.

If the Mobvoi TicWatch lineup does fade away, Mobvoi still hopes to stay relevant by diving into the current AI craze. It just announced the Mobvoi TicNote, an Agentic AI notetaker that you set out to record, transcribe, and summarize meetings, classes, or phone calls.