Throughout its history with hardware, Google launched smartphones, laptops, and smart home products, but for the longest time, it didn’t offer a smartwatch. That changed with the Pixel Watch last year. Aside from a bunch of first-timer mistakes, it was a solid product and one of the best smartwatches your money can buy, and a decent reflection of Google’s vision of Wear OS. Despite its reviews criticizing things like poor battery life and a high price tag, it seems to be selling pretty well — contributing enough sales to keep Google in the second spot in wearable sales globally.
As per a new Canalys report (via 9to5Google), Google managed to ship 880,000 Pixel Watch units in 2022, making for a considerable chunk of its wearable sales last year. It’s far from being Google’s best-selling wearable, though. Google owns Fitbit, and Fitbit is actually a pretty decently popular fitness brand, so the majority of Google’s sales are from Fitbit devices. 880,000 units in a planet with 8 billion people might sound like a drop in a bucket, but almost one million out of the four million wearable devices shipped in total is not bad at all. That’s especially true if you consider the Pixel Watch was released in the last quarter of 2022, going on sale in October 2022, so it made for a quarter of Google’s wearable shipments in just a little over two months.
Adding both Fitbit bands and Pixel Watch sales, Google is nabbing 8% of 2022’s global wearable shipment volume. This is still nowhere close to Apple, which has a whopping 28%, but it is ahead of Samsung with 5.9%. Samsung sells way more smartwatches than Google, though, as that 5.9% figure is composed exclusively of smartwatches like the Galaxy Watch 5 and the Watch 4, whereas Google has a more diverse catalog of products and only one smartwatch. But then again, Samsung had a considerable head start with its watches.
It’ll be interesting to see how well Google does this year — Google offered the Pixel Watch as a free Pixel 7 series pre-order bonus in some regions. It’s possible that this skewed the sales statistics in the company’s favor, with much fewer people seeking out the Pixel Watch as a standalone purchase. The report also says that the wearable market shrunk 5% last year, so that’s another thing to have in mind for this year despite Canalys’ positive outlook for 2023.
