Last month, the United States Department of Justice sued Apple for monopolizing smartphone markets.
In the lawsuit, the agency gave Apple Watch as a piece of evidence to show that the Cupertino-based tech giant is a monopoly. It said “Apple’s smartwatch—Apple Watch—is only compatible with the iPhone. So, if Apple can steer a user towards buying an Apple Watch, it becomes more costly for that user to purchase a different kind of smartphone because doing so requires the user to abandon their costly Apple Watch and purchase a new, Android-compatible smartwatch.”
In response to the DOJ’s accusation, Apple revealed that at one point in time, it considered making the Apple Watch compatible with Android (via 9To5Mac). However, after evaluating the plan for three years, the company scrapped it because it concluded that the plan wasn’t executable due to technical limitations.
If the company had gone ahead with it, Samsung users would have been able to use the Apple Watch with their Galaxy phones, which would have been a deadly combination, as the Apple Watch is considered to offer better fitness tracking capabilities and user experience compared to Galaxy Watch or Wear OS smartwatches in general. At the same time, it would have been disastrous for Samsung as most people would have gone with the Apple Watch instead of the Galaxy Watch.
That being said, there's still a chance that Apple could make the Apple Watch compatible with Android as the lawsuit could force it to. It means that there’s a good chance that people’s long-standing dream might finally come true. We hope that it happens as it would force the Korean tech giant as well as Google to make better smartwatches. At the same time, it will give users more options, allowing them to use Apple Watch without shifting from an Android phone to an iPhone.
