https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/4/3/17165282/android-wear-operating-system-rival-work-coming-soon

Soon, there could be a number of indie operating systems for your smartwatch, sprouting from an open-source code project launched last week. Indie developers making budget smartwatches can now use starting code from Project OpenWatch to craft their Android-based operating systems. The OpenWatch project is live as of last week. It was released by Blocks, the same company behind the forthcoming Blocks modular smartwatch.

Blocks’ head of engineering, Karl Taylor, said that the project is meant to “open up the smartwatch OS space to the open source community in a bid to loosen the stranglehold on the industry by other, essentially proprietary operating system.” He named Google’s Wear OS (formerly Android Wear) and Apple’s watchOS as the two major operating systems that currently dominate smartwatches. While there are a number of options for hardware companies to choose from, Taylor said none of them provided the flexibility companies need to truly customize a watch’s hardware.