Why Indians Hate SmartWatches?

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:00]Okay, let me show you something weird.

[00:00:02]This watch, this is dead. Oh, this one too. And even this here, the back panel is exposed. In fact, all of these are dead. Different brand, different price tag. We bought all of them between 2021 to 2023. And today, most of them are just lying in drawers, abandoned.

[00:00:25]And honestly, so is the market that sold them because in July to September 2022, India became the biggest smartwatch market in the world. I'm not kidding.

[00:00:34]This is the data from 2022. Just see the year-on-year growth of the top five smartwatch companies. Yeah, the smartwatch market in India was bigger than the US, bigger than China. We were buying more smart watches than anyone else on the planet. The watch market grew more than 200% and then within just 2 years, the whole market collapsed. 30% decline in 2024 and another roughly 30% decline in 2025 from over 100 plus smartwatch brands. Now half of them are gone.

[00:01:13]So naturally most people think they know what happened. People got bored. The market got saturated. End of story. But that's not actually true. Which brings us to the real question. Not what happened to smart watches in India but why do Indians hate smart watches now it took us this much data to make this video like for the effort before we figure out what went wrong with smart watches in India we first need to answer one simple question what actually is a smartwatch these companies literally blurred the meaning of an actual smartwatch and most people think Motorola made the first smartwatch some people might think Apple made the first smart watch right not exactly it was neither Apple nor Motorola. The idea is much older than that. Let's go back to 1984. Like real 1984, not the George Orwell one. This is the Seikko UC 2000.

[00:02:02]Launched in 1984. It could store text, run basic computer functions, and you could attach it to a freaking keyboard and do a bunch of stuff. And honestly, this is what made smart watches exciting in the first place. The idea that your watch could become a tiny computer on your wrist. And over the next 40 years that smartwatch idea evolved into fitness tracking, seeing and replying to notifications, taking calls without your phone, making payments and eventually triple 9 rupees smartwatch during Amazon sale. Because of that, India became the biggest smartwatch market in the world.

[00:02:32]But why? So let's go to 2021. In 2021, something kind of insane happened. The Indian smartwatch market grew by 274% to be precise. Every other ad on your screen was for a smartwatch. Some smartwatch makers sponsored IPL teams. A smartwatch maker become a household name via Shark Tank. And by 2023, India was the biggest smartwatch market on the planet. For 2 years, honestly, India was high on two things. Do 650 and buying budget smart watches. And honestly, the reason people bought them made complete sense. We just came out of COVID.

[00:03:05]Everyone was suddenly obsessed with their own health. How am I sleeping?

[00:03:08]What's my heart rate? Am I getting enough steps? Do I have a fever? What's my oxygen level? And here was a 2,000 rupee gadget claiming to answer all of it. It even told you when to drink water. And because it was affordable for most Indians, this was the first variable they had ever owned in their life. No Fitbit, no garment, definitely not an Apple Watch. This this was the introduction. Brands went all in.

[00:03:32]Cricket sponsorship, Bollywood celebrity, OTT ad slots and the prices it kept dropping just like the Indian stock market. Currently in 2022, 25% of smart watches sold in India were under 2,000 rupees and by 2023 that number was 54%. More than half the variable market was a smartwatch. You could buy it for less than a dinner at a decent restaurant. And weirdly, the cheaper they became, the more valuable they looked because suddenly everyone could wear something that looked futuristic and brands just kept coming. By 2023, India had over 125 active smartwatch brand like 125 in one country selling essentially the same thing. Smart watches became a Diwali gift, a wedding gift, a treat yourself purchase for just 1,500 rupees, which sounds great until you realize something. Your very first experience with variable tech was probably a 1,500 smartwatch trying to do the job of a 30 or 50,000 rupee Apple Watch. For 2 years straight, India couldn't get enough. Brands couldn't manufacture fast enough and the entire industry was convinced this was just the beginning and that's where chapter 3 picks up. The year is 2026. People started realizing something like most of these smart watches weren't actually changing their lives. And there are three big realizations. Number one, build quality. Like the strap broke. See this thing? The display broke. This thing the panel is coming out. There were sync issues with the app. And most importantly, half of the watches never got a software update. So there's a high chance that you bought a smart watch.

[00:05:01]Then after 6 months or max a year, it was back in your drawer. But let's say it's a budget product, so things can break easily. But then came the bigger problem. The so-called smart watches claim to track heart rate, SPO2, stress, sleep, and all of this under 2,000 rupees. Sounds too good to be true.

[00:05:20]Well, it is. See this watch? It can read the SP2 level of a banana, then a locky and a bottle. Now a watch with this kind of tracking, how do you rely on tracking your health stats? And this problem gets even bigger with the third problem. All budget smart watches look the same.

[00:05:37]Nowadays, millions of Indians are buying smart watches. The obvious question becomes, which one do I pick? So, you're going through all of them to choose. Or let me make it better. We have these budget smart watches. Just go through them. Most of them look similar. Some of them look different, but again they're just cheap knockoffs of ultra luxury watch like Rado, maybe Rolex, etc. Luxury luxury watches. And the funny thing here is let me show you one. So we asked team tech if they could identify the brand confusing.

[00:06:06]>> I think this one is noise and this is boat.

[00:06:09]>> The left one is boat Yeah, I think right noise.

[00:06:20]>> See, that's the thing. None of them identified it correctly. Not just that, even if you see the software they have, it is also pretty similar. So, put all three together, what does that tell us?

[00:06:29]These smartwatch makers, they weren't selling smart watches. They were selling the idea of smart watches. The feeling of owning futuristic tech, even if the actual experience wasn't very smart at all. And once people understood that they just stopped using these watches.

[00:06:43]They also stopped buying new ones. And suddenly the industry which was growing like crazy started slowing down and falling faster than it could. Every brand at the same time, same way. Why?

[00:06:55]Because behind the cricket ads, behind the Shark Tank stories, something else was happening. And there are three big reasons for it. Reason one, let's start with the prices. In 2022, the average smartwatch in India sells for around 4,500 rupees. But by 2023 in just 1 year that number dropped to roughly 2100.

[00:07:12]That's a 39% drop in 1 year and some watches were selling for less than,000 rupees. Now let's take one specific feature. In 2020 an AMOLED smartwatch in India costed about 12 to 15,000. 2 years later they were available at 8,000 and then one budget brand launched an AMOLED watch at 2500 rupees. All of this in a short span. Another brand matched it.

[00:07:32]Then a third then everyone. By 2023, AMOLED was on every other smartwatch at every price point you can find. And the same thing happened with every feature.

[00:07:40]ECG, SPO2, heart rate, 60 Hz, AI assistant. Every new feature got copied across the industry in just 3 months.

[00:07:48]So, if you're a brand and prices keep dropping, plus competitors copy every feature you launch, what would you do?

[00:07:54]Keep dropping the prices and market aggressively because you have earned fat profits during the smartwatch boom. And now is the time to burn it to acquire new users. So to start marketing aggressively with celebs from cricket and Bollywood, then you sponsor an IPL team in some way or you do an ad segment during IPL. Now in all of this, do you notice anything? I'll just give you 5 seconds. Pause the video and comment with the time stamp. What did you notice? Done.

[00:08:19]These companies could have also innovated, right? Major thing to note here is innovation took a backseat and the marketing took the front seat.

[00:08:27]Ideally, it should have been the other way around. So comes the reason number three and then deeper problem. Even if these brands had wanted to make better watches, most of them couldn't have because most of them didn't actually build the smart watches in the first place. Let me explain. So this is smartwatch number one. This is two. This is three. All of them look same and these are from three different companies and similar price point. In fact, as for a senior analyst at Counterpoint in 204, most of the Indian smartwatch makers were using the same Chinese factories to make their smart watches. So most of the watches had similar designs, similar specs, similar software, similar app, in simple words, white labeling. So that's why no matter which brands smartwatch you bought, they all felt the same. And even the issues that they had were the same. So put all three together, prices kept falling, money went to celebrities instead of engineers. And most brands didn't even own the product they were selling. It was one simple thing.

[00:09:24]Innovation took the back seat. Marketing took the front seat and the product, the actual smart watch wasn't really anyone's priority anymore. Which means at some point these companies stopped making smart watches. They were making something else entirely. See if you see the current smartwatch market in India, all the top companies are in negative growth and quickly moving to the big fall. So the Indian smartwatch market didn't crash because people got bored.

[00:09:48]It crashed because the brand stopped making good smart watches. They were making smart bands with bigger screens and calling them smart watches. And plus, the reason for the crash is not because an analyst wrote a report or it didn't crash because someone said it's bad. It crashed because you bought one of these watches, got disappointed, didn't buy another one, and you even advise others to not buy one. That's it.

[00:10:08]One by one, we quietly made that decision and it killed the smartwatch industry that was built on a lie. Plus, marketing might get the people to buy the product once, but if the product is not good, it won't convert them into loyal customers. Now, I know what you're thinking. Think all this BS, will this hurt the future scope and growth of variable tech? No, it won't. If you see, most of us haven't stopped wearing something on our wrist. We have just gotten smarter about our choices. The people who are conscious about health, they are getting into fitness tracker like VO, Polar, etc. Like in fact, Fitbit just launched Fitbit Air, which is a smart band without a display that just does your fitness tracking. That fitness enthusiast industry is now evolving. Also, people who still want a smartwatch, they're buying the real ones. For example, Apple watch has grown significantly in India and people who just want a watch to tell time.

[00:10:55]Mechanical and automatic watches are quietly back. Queso just launched its first automatic line in India. Luxury watches have grown 12% last year. And if you have watched that Swatch XAP's Royal Pop, you would know the craze for watches are back. And nerds like you and me, we are looking into smart glasses and smart rings, whatever comes next. So people didn't leave. The market didn't die. People are still there. They just got split into different segments. And if you like these kind of TWW explain videos, make sure you like, share, subscribe. This is signing off. You're watching TWW Explains. Pew pew pew.