The best Apple Watch alternatives

The Apple Watch was not the first connected watch. Thanks to Dick Tracy, people have been dreaming of wrist-worn communicators since the 1940s, and companies have actually produced usable companion devices since the early 2000s. But since “Apple’s most personal device ever” launched in 2015, it’s come to dominate the smartwatch market by sheer volume. However, the best wearable for everyone isn’t necessarily Apple’s. In fact, the best Apple Watch alternatives provide all kinds of fantastic functionality without having to commit to iOS. 

Really, the phrase “Apple Watch alternative” sometimes does these gadgets a disservice. Apple’s offering is great, but there are other top smartwatches and fitness trackers on the market that deserve to be recognized for their own forms and features. You can find brainy accessories that satisfy all kinds of purposes: collecting health metrics, delivering notifications, tracking outdoors adventures, and much more. So let’s look at the non-Apple products that can keep your phone in your pocket but your life connected to the web.

What to consider when looking for the best Apple Watch alternatives

There are a variety of non-Apple Watch smartwatches, on all kinds of different platforms—and, luckily, many of them will work with both Android and iOS, in case you ever switch phones. Apple Watch alternatives come in a few different flavors. There’s the direct competition, which would be Google’s Wear platform—think of it as Google’s version of the Apple Watch operating system. It allows many different manufacturers to make their own smartwatches that pack the same apps and features. There are also more fitness-centric offerings, both for casual workouts and for intense outdoorsiness, and then a whole crop of budget-friendly smartwatches that provide health tracking and notifications.

It’s worth noting that recently, Google announced a new focus on its Wear OS platform, with a whole new crop of smartwatches coming out shortly. That new focus extends to a new partnership with Samsung. Currently, Samsung smartwatches—many of which are quite good—use an operating system called Tizen. Moving forward, though, Samsung will be using Wear OS. That means that if you buy a Tizen watch now, you probably won’t see the big new Wear OS updates. On the plus side, though, these watches might become a bargain purchase. Samsung has promised to give its Tizen smartwatches three years of support with updates.

What’s the difference between a smartwatch and a fitness tracker?

In general, the phrase “fitness tracker” is used to differentiate from a smartwatch in a few ways. Fitness trackers are typically smaller. They often look more like a bracelet with a small screen than a big, fancy watch. They are, as their name suggests, focused on fitness: a good fitness tracker should have not just a step tracker, but also a heart rate monitor and sleep tracking tech. Many high-end fitness watches can also integrate with more robust devices like chest strap heart rate monitors. 

That said, the line between fitness tracker and smartwatch has blurred. Modern fitness trackers have some features we’re more likely to associate with smartwatches They may have the ability to deliver notifications of texts and emails from your phone, might have a speaker so you can activate Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant. Some even sport similar faces and design elements.

But if you plan on wearing your wristpiece all the time, it’s fair to want something less like a fitness tracker and more like a full-featured smartwatch: you want it to have a bigger screen, because you’ll be looking at it more, and to have non-fitness-focused features too.

What’s the best Android smartwatch?

Apple has its WatchOS, the operating system that powers all of its Apple Watches. Google has its own, called Wear OS, which offers many similar features. A Wear OS watch often has NFC (near-field communication), a technology that enables you to pay with your credit card (or use public transportation or store gift/loyalty cards, etc.) by physically holding the watch to a point-of-sale terminal. Wear OS supports tons of apps, like Google Maps, calendars, note-taking apps, and many more. It’ll have a big touchscreen to navigate, along with voice control. It’ll have GPS, lots of fitness apps, a heart rate sensor, and, well, a battery life that isn’t stellar, usually two days at most.

Wear OS didn’t initially take off the way WatchOS did, for a few reasons. For one thing, even though many more manufacturers make Wear OS watches, the designs don’t measure up to Apple’s sleek industrial design language. For another, many Wear OS watches have been underpowered, with underwhelming processors that make the Wear OS experience seem slow and ponderous.