Apple Watch vs. Smart Rings: How Screenless Wearables and Leadership Gaps Are Redefining Apple's Momentum

The Apple Watch is not collapsing. It still commands nearly a quarter of the global smartwatch market . In 2025, Apple Watch shipments even grew by 8% year-over-year, outpacing the broader market's 4% growth . But this headline stability masks a profound shift in the wearables industry and a precarious moment inside Apple’s own leadership. The future of wearables is increasingly screenless, AI-driven, and health-focused—and in that race, Apple’s momentum is facing a triple threat: a faster-growing rival category, a drain of critical health-hardware talent, and an internal reorganization that prioritizes subscription services over form-factor reinvention.

The screenless threat: smart rings are growing 8x faster

The sharpest challenge isn't coming from another smartwatch maker. It's coming from the finger.

Smart ring shipments are projected to surge 49% in 2026, making it the fastest-growing wearable category by a wide margin . Smartwatches, by comparison, are expected to grow only about 6% over the same period . To be clear, the raw volumes are still far apart—IDC estimates about 163 million smartwatches shipped in 2025 compared to around 4.3 million smart rings . But the growth trajectory tells a story of a market bifurcating at high speed. The smart ring market, valued at roughly $417–$698 million in 2025, is forecast to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22% to 29% through the mid-2030s .

Oura dominates this new category, holding an estimated 74–80% market share and reaching an $11 billion valuation . The Finnish company has filed for an IPO and has been aggressively recruiting . Meanwhile, mainstream players like Samsung (with its Galaxy Ring) and other startups such as Ultrahuman and RingConn are crowding in, validating the form factor .

The core value proposition of these devices is a direct assault on the smartwatch's weak points: 24/7 health tracking, multi-day battery life, no screen distraction, and lower physical friction . Health-first customers—the exact audience Apple originally cultivated with the Watch's ECG and heart-rate features—are increasingly choosing a simpler, more sleep-friendly device. Smart rings excel at the continuous sleep, readiness, and recovery tracking that is now central to the consumer health conversation .

Even within the smartwatch market it still leads, Apple's footing is less secure. Huawei has been closing the gap rapidly and is often cited by analysts as the genuine contender for Apple's top spot, not Samsung . In China, the smartwatch market grew 37% year-over-year in Q1 2025, fueled by domestic competitors, while Apple's volumes shrank .

The talent and leadership exodus: losing the architects of health hardware

The strategic danger for Apple is that the talent building the future of health wearables are now walking out the door—and straight into direct competitors.

The most symbolic move was Apple’s home hardware chief, Brian Lynch, who left in early 2026 to join Oura as Senior VP of Hardware Engineering . This is a specific, targeted loss: the executive responsible for building physical devices for the home and health space took his expertise to the biggest screenless rival.

Lynch’s departure is not an isolated event. Multiple key health-device engineers have also migrated to Oura, a pattern that underscores the intensifying war for digital-health talent . The competitive gravity has shifted; Oura’s focus and speed are attracting the kind of hardware and health expertise that Apple once monopolized.

In April 2026, the company lost its primary storyteller for the Watch. Stan Ng, Apple’s Vice President of Apple Watch and Health Product Marketing, retired after 31 years . Ng was the go-to-market hand behind the Watch for over a decade. His replacement, Kaiann Drance, is a respected iPhone product marketing executive—but comes from smartphones, not wearables . While the internal expectation is that Drance could eventually become Apple's overall marketing chief, her background signals a potential shift in focus or, at minimum, a period of organizational learning on the watch side .

But the largest leadership vacuum opened at the end of 2025 with the retirement of Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams. Williams had been the executive champion for Apple’s health initiatives, overseeing the Apple Watch, health projects, and the company's design team .

The organizational fracture: splitting health from watchOS

Williams’s exit triggered a sweeping reorganization, the consequences of which are still unfolding .

Apple moved its entire health and fitness teams under Senior Vice President of Services Eddy Cue . Simultaneously, oversight of watchOS—the operating system that powers the sensors and collects health data—was handed to Craig Federighi, Senior VP of Software Engineering, while the Apple Watch hardware itself will be overseen by John Ternus, Senior VP of Hardware Engineering .

This is a structural split with real operational implications. The health data strategy and monetization (Health+) now live under Cue in Services, while the platform that generates the raw sensor data (watchOS) is run by Federighi in Software Engineering. Where Jeff Williams once unified these pieces under a single COO-level executive with deep health-domain authority, Apple now has a distributed model that demands continuous high-bandwidth coordination across three different executive fiefdoms .

This reorganization is a clear signal of Apple’s new bet: a pivot toward monetizing health insights through an AI-powered subscription service called Health+, which is slated to launch in 2026 . It is a rational move for a company that wants to grow its services revenue to over $100 billion. But it also means that Apple's future in wearables health is being defined not by a breakthrough new sensor or a screenless form factor, but by a subscription layer built on top of a mature hardware platform.

The innovation plateau and a cluttered health ecosystem

The product challenges are the other side of this coin. Apple has not delivered a breakthrough new health sensor or transformative Watch feature in several product cycles . While Watch refreshes have continued—updates across the SE and premium lines did bump shipments 8% in 2025—they have been iterative, not category-shifting .

Meanwhile, the Health app, despite years of heavy investment, remains widely criticized as cluttered, clinical, and confusing . The ecosystem suffers from what has been described as “significant friction”—poor data integration, inconsistent user experience, and a stark absence of AI-driven coaching and personalized insights . These are the exact areas where smaller, more focused rivals are winning: Oura’s “Readiness Score,” Whoop’s “Strain and Recovery” analytics, and the broader trend of AI-powered health coaching are defining the new paradigm for what a wearable should do with its sensor data.

The irony is sharp. Apple essentially created the consumer health-wearable category with the Watch. It educated the market on the value of ECG, heart-rate variability, and blood oxygen tracking. But now, screenless competitors are executing faster on the software layer that interprets that data and turns it into actionable health guidance—the layer where the real long-term differentiation lies.

What this means for Apple’s wearables future

Apple is not failing. The Watch still generates significant revenue within the company’s Wearables, Home, and Accessories segment. The overall wearable device market grew 9.1% in 2025 to 611.5 million units, and Apple was a major beneficiary of that growth through a portfolio refresh .

But the ground underneath it is shifting irreversibly. The wearables industry is bifurcating into a high-volume, notification-and-app smartwatch world (where Chinese competitors are commoditizing the hardware) and a high-growth, health-AI, screenless world (where Oura, Samsung, and others are defining the next form factor).

Apple’s leadership, talent, and organizational structure are now explicitly aligned toward extracting more value from the existing Watch ecosystem via a services subscription called Health+. What is not yet clear is whether Apple can simultaneously invent the device that comes after the Watch—the screenless, sensor-first health tracker—while its core hardware talent has already left to build that exact device for a rival. The Watch is not vanishing, but its creators and its future are no longer in the same room.