In January 2014Initially, the company existed as a subsidiary of the newly-formed Alphabet Inc., but in early 2018, Google tightened its grip and integrated it directly into its hardware division.

Over the next year and a half, Nest became the face and name of Google’s smart home offering, a division that’s grown quickly as Google Home/Google Nest has become one of the top two players in the U.S. smart home category, rivaled only by Amazon’s Alexa/Echo offerings.

All the while, wearables have been an also-ran: Google has clearly had an interest in the category, launching Android Wear in 2014. The company partnered with some of consumer hardware’s biggest names, including Motorola, Asus, Sony, Huawei and LG, but to little fanfare. A year ahead the release of Android Wear (now Wear OS), Apple brought its own smartwatch to market, effectively leaving the competition in the dust.

The Apple Watch would soon eclipse the rest of the wearable industry; numbers from Canalys in August 2019 show Apple at 37.9 percent of the total North American wearable band market. Fossil, the only Wear OS partner to crack the top five, is in a distant fifth, with 4.1%.