PSA: Galaxy S21 won’t support your old Gear wearables

Unfortunately – though not unexpectedly – you can forget about your old Gear wearables having anything resembling official support from the Galaxy S21. Samsung’s next range of high-end smartphones won’t be the only such lineup incompatible with the company’s old fitness trackers and smartwatches. In fact, all of its mobile devices released from next year onward will ditch support for those gadgets.

The situation stems from the planned roadmap for the Galaxy Wearable (Samsung Gear) Android app. Namely, future versions of the tool won’t be made available on a handful of older hardware released as part of the Gear series, Samsung communicated, as reported by GalaxyClub.

Could have Samsung done more to prolong support for its Gear fitness trackers?

The full list of devices that are approaching their de facto end of life next year includes the original Galaxy Gear, Gear 2, Gear 2 Neo, Gear S, and the Gear Fit.

All of those wearables are pretty old at this point, and it’s been years since you could have last seen them sold anywhere. Most have turned six in the last couple of months, actually. So it’s probably not reasonable to expect Samsung to support them for much longer, given how device compatibility across half a decade of technological advancements is already pretty much unheard of in consumer electronics.

And it’s not like Samsung hasn’t been investing significant resources into delivering a better after-sales experience to its customers lately. After all, it just started guaranteeing three generations of OS updates for its smartphones as of this fall. So when an industry leader says it’s dropping support for fitness trackers that are as old as the modern concept of wearables, it’s probably safe to assume it did everything it reasonably could in order to delay the inevitable.