The last of Fossil’s Wear OS smartwatches are finally dead

Ben Schoon | Jan 2 2025 - 12:10 pm PT

Roughly a year ago Fossil announced that it was done with Wear OS smartwatches, and to start 2025, the last remaining of the brand’s smartwatches has officially been pulled from the market.

Fossil was heavily invested in Google’s Wear OS for several years, and even became a pillar of the platform for several years ahead of the launch of the Pixel Watch and Samsung’s switch from Tizen. However, that didn’t pay off in the end, as Fossil only saw a tiny sliver of the smartwatch market and struggled with the transition to the revamped Wear OS in 2023. In January 2024, Fossil announced that it was ending its efforts with Wear OS and that its smartwatches would be pulled from the market, though with continued software support for the foreseeable future – an update just rolled out recently, in fact.

Most of Fossil’s remaining smartwatches sold out during a fire sale back in May and June of 2024, where models were available for as low as $80. But one smartwatch remained available – the Citizen CZ Smart Gen 2.

Citizen started working with Fossil on smartwatches back in 2018 and it resulted in two Wear OS smartwatches. The most recent was announced in 2023 as the CZ Smart Gen 2, a smartwatch that had some clever fitness ideas. The actual release of that watch was fraught with problems, though, to the point where Citizen briefly had to remove it from the market. Since late 2023, though, the smartwatch has remained on sale through Citizen’s website, but has now been removed.

As of January 2025, Citizen has quietly purged the CZ Smart Gen 2 – both the “Sport” and “Casual Unisex” variations – from its online store. Where it was previously listed alongside hybrid watches, it was removed within the past week. Several variations of CZ Smart Gen 2 were still listed as recently as December 25, 2024 per The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, all deeply discounted from their retail pricing.

*Citizen was still selling its Wear OS smartwatch as of December 2024*

With the end of sales for the Citizen CZ Smart, so ends Fossil’s efforts in the Wear OS market.

This was the last Wear OS smartwatch made by Fossil that was still actively being sold, though the CZ Smart and several other Fossil smartwatches can (but should not) be purchased through third-party retailers.

At this point, Google’s Pixel Watch alongside the Samsung Galaxy Watch lineup are the flag-bearers for Wear OS, while Mobvoi and OnePlus are some of the only other brands actively using the platform. The collection of stylish smartwatches from legacy watchmakers have all but disappeared over the course of 2024, though Wear OS seems all the better for it as the platform grows faster than ever before.