Samsung Challenges Oura's Dominance with Galaxy Ring

Samsung is the first major smartphone maker to challenge Oura's dominance of the smart ring category. The Oura Ring will soon face competition from Samsung's Galaxy Ring. Oura has been synonymous with the term 'smart ring,' but the company is about to face its biggest competitor yet: Samsung. Earlier this year, the South Korean tech giant, which is the largest phone maker in the world by shipment volume, announced the Galaxy Ring, its first finger-worn health tracker and a direct competitor to Oura's popular Oura Ring wellness device.

With Samsung's Unpacked event coming up on July 10, we're expecting to learn a lot more about the company's big challenger to the Oura Ring, including its price, when it'll launch and additional details on its health-tracking capabilities. Given Samsung's massive presence in the consumer electronics space, you'd think Oura would be concerned about the Galaxy Ring's arrival. But Oura CEO Tom Hale isn't worried about the fact that one of the world's largest tech companies, and the fourth largest wearables maker, is encroaching on its turf. Hale thinks Samsung's entry into the smart ring territory will bring more awareness to a category that over the last decade has been dominated largely by smartwatches and wireless earbuds. Since the Galaxy Ring won't be iPhone-compatible, he also doesn't see Samsung's smart ring eating into Oura's user base in a meaningful way.

'Quite frankly, I kind of welcome the additional members of the smart ring community, because they're helping to educate the market about what's unique about smart rings,' Hale said in an interview with CNET. Samsung teased the Galaxy Ring in January and showcased it during the Mobile World Congress conference in February, but the company hasn't said much else about the device since then. That's expected to change on July 10, considering Samsung usually uses its summer product launch event as an opportunity to showcase its new wearables. In January, Samsung positioned the Galaxy Ring as a health tracker, and it's since announced new features for its Samsung Health app: Energy Score and Wellness Tips. Energy Score crunches various metrics, like sleep time, consistency and heart rate, with activity and heart rate variability to provide a score indicating your current state.

Wellness Tips provides insights based on your wellness goals. Though we won't know more about the Galaxy Ring's specific health tracking capabilities until the event, these features will likely play a big role in the device's functionality. Those tools sound like Oura's current offerings, such as its signature Readiness Score, a blanket metric that factors in bodily signals, recent activity and sleep to determine how rested or ready you are for a workout. Samsung's Galaxy Ring is expected to make an appearance at the company's Unpacked event. Still, despite these similarities and Samsung's broad reach, Hale isn't fretting over the increased competition.

Samsung device users make up only a fraction of Oura's user base -- roughly 5% to be exact, according to Hale. That number is larger when you're talking about overall Android users, but the majority of Oura Ring owners are iPhone owners. 'Are they going to be a good solution for the installed base of iOS users? No,' Hale said in reference to Samsung. 'And that's the majority of our business today.' It's unclear exactly why Oura's smart ring tends to be more popular with iPhone users. But given that Apple is the top wearables vendor worldwide in terms of shipments, according to the International Data Corporation, perhaps it's safe to assume that iPhone owners are interested in tracking their health.

As Samsung has been preparing to launch the Galaxy Ring, Oura has also been busy releasing new features and expanding its presence. In May, the company introduced a cardio health feature known as Cardiovascular Age, which as the name implies tells users if their cardiovascular age lines up with their real age. Before that, it announced a platform called Labs within the Oura app that lets users try out new features like Symptom Radar, which detects major changes in certain types of biological data to help users understand if something is off. Oura also launched on Amazon in March, expanding its retail footprint. Regardless, there's a reason why Hale is advocating for more awareness around smart rings.

Even though the Galaxy Ring has certainly generated buzz around these jewelry-shaped fitness trackers, rings account for only a sliver of the overall wearables market. IDC's forecast for the wearables market in 2024 through 2028 indicates that ear wear and smartwatches will continue to be the largest wearable device categories by a long shot, with emerging product types like rings and glasses trailing by comparison. 'What I'm looking forward to is Samsung billboards and Samsung bus signage advertising the idea of a smart ring to anybody who looks at it, regardless of whether or not they're Samsung users or Google Pixel users or Apple iOS users,' said Hale. 'Because that's good for the category.'