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Swatch Takes on Google, Apple With Watch Operating System (bloomberg.com)
Corinne Gretler, reporting for Bloomberg: Swatch said it's developing an alternative to the iOS and Android operating systems for smartwatches as Switzerland's largest maker of timepieces vies with Silicon Valley for control of consumers' wrists. The company's Tissot brand will introduce a model around the end of 2018 that uses the Swiss-made system, which will also be able to connect small objects and wearables, Swatch Chief Executive Officer Nick Hayek said in an interview Thursday. The technology will need less battery power and it will protect data better, he said later at a press conference. Switzerland's four-century-old watch industry has been adjusting to new competition since Apple entered its territory with the Apple Watch in 2015. Hayek faces the uphill challenge of trying to outsmart Google and Apple, which have fended off would-be rivals to their operation systems in smartphones and watches.
Every time I read about a new OS for IoT devices, it likely is about some new feature, but because of the mentality that security has no ROI, it means the new device is now an IoT toy for the blackhats.
If Swatch wanted to do things "right", the OS in question would be something lightweight like QNX, heavily compartmentalized (think SELinux), and done "right" from the ground up, so OS updates are as infrequent as possible, and when they come, they are ideally features, not fixing some obvious bug that should have been caught well earlier in the dev cycle.
I hope they think it through, make a lightweight, secure OS, designed to run on hardware that runs days to weeks between charges. A watch doesn't need tons of apps slurping up CPU. Instead, they should design with a philosophy similar to the original PalmOS. Black/white, do something simple, do it well.