The biggest flaw with the Galaxy Watch 9 has nothing to do with the watch itself

You’d expect that purchasing a device would grant you access to all its features, right? If I buy a car, I’d be surprised if I couldn’t fasten the seat belts or adjust the air conditioning because I haven’t also purchased the brand-specific floor mats. Well, that’s what buying a Galaxy Watch has been like for the past six years.

The seemingly inconsequential Samsung Health Monitor app holds a host of important health and wellness monitoring features hostage to users who don’t meet certain conditions. While I’ll admit that regulatory and regional limitations are beyond Samsung’s control, there is one condition that certainly isn’t. To make the most of your Samsung Galaxy Watch, you need to pair it with a Samsung Galaxy smartphone, even if you own a brand-new Android handset.

What is Samsung Health Monitor, and why is it a problem?

Samsung Health Monitor is not the same as Samsung Health, the company’s overarching health tracking app that works across various Android phones. Instead, it only officially supports Samsung smartphones.

Health Monitor has been around since 2020, first launching in Korea with the Galaxy Watch Active 2 (remember that lovely timepiece?) to support its blood pressure and ECG features. It has since added two more tricks over the past six years, including irregular heart rhythm (AFib) and sleep apnea monitoring. These four features aren’t just throwaway numbers like the Energy Score that don’t point to potential weaknesses in your overall health — they’re fundamental indicators of potential underlying issues that affect billions of people.

According to the WHO, high blood pressure affects around 1.4 billion people aged 30 to 79. It’s regarded as a “major cause of premature death” across the globe.

An ECG, or electrocardiogram, is essential for detecting electrical signals emitted by the heart, which highlight the regularity and pace of one’s heart rate. This data, the NHS explains, can point to potential irregular heart rhythms or heart disease.

As for sleep apnea monitoring, it’s a useful indicator for those who may experience interrupted breathing while asleep. Sleep apnea, as described by Johns Hopkins, can lead to increased blood pressure, changes in temperament and cognitive acuity, and cardiovascular issues.

While Samsung emphasizes that these features are only screening tools and should not be used to diagnose users, this does not diminish the significance of gatekeeping access to them. They could be the push that a Galaxy Watch wearer needs to book a checkup. Surely they’re too critical to be made exclusive to Galaxy smartphone users?

In short, without Samsung Health Monitor, these features simply won’t work, whether you purchased the brand-new Galaxy Watch 9 or Galaxy Watch 2 Ultra, and reside in a region that has approved these features. One app is keeping billions of potential users from accessing the most critical health indicators.

So why isn’t Samsung Health Monitor available across Android?

There doesn’t appear to be an intrinsic reason why the Samsung Health Monitor app couldn’t be made available on non-Samsung smartphones, apart from its current residence on the Galaxy App Store. This seems to be the obvious limiting factor, but given Samsung’s extensive hardware ecosystem, it could be argued that the underlying reason is largely financial. The company wants its smartwatch users to buy its smartphones, after all. I mean, why wouldn’t it?

Thankfully, as Android is still a (mostly) open ecosystem, developers have created workarounds for those clamoring for the full Galaxy Watch feature set but are arbitrarily held back by Samsung’s limitations. My colleagues and I have used such methods, including testing modded versions of the app and using the GeminiMan Wellness Companion tool, to unlock these features on our devices.

These methods come with their own pitfalls, though. Depending on where and how you seek out these workarounds and modded apps, you’ll be increasing your potential exposure to malware. It would be far safer for its consumers if Samsung opened up the app to more Android phones. Interestingly, when I tried these solutions on a HUAWEI P30 Pro with my Galaxy Watch 4, I could access the Health Monitor features without issue, further suggesting that the app’s Galaxy phone exclusivity is strategic rather than functional.

It’s also worth noting that no other OEM limits access to features quite this way. The Pixel Watch’s full health feature set works on Samsung phones, as do those of OnePlus and Xiaomi wearables. There’s no discrimination elsewhere in the Android world.

Samsung can remedy this, but does it want to?

So how can Samsung remedy this? The easiest solution would be folding the Health Monitor’s features and functionality into the mainline Samsung Health app. This would make these features available to every Galaxy Watch user immediately and without downloading a tertiary app, provided their device supports them and they are approved in their region. This would also negate the need to maintain a secondary app on another app store. I won’t pretend to know how simple or complex this task would be, but it would certainly offer consumers a far friendlier, unified health experience.

If Samsung opposes this idea, it could still debut the Samsung Health Monitor app on the Play Store. Currently, it’s exclusive to the Galaxy App Store, which itself is exclusive to Samsung phones. This is perhaps the only public-facing reason the app is limited to Samsung devices. This wouldn’t be a foreign concept for the company, either, as previously Galaxy App Store-exclusives like Good Lock are now freely available through Google’s catalog.

Finally, if Samsung remains determined to gatekeep the Samsung Health Monitor app from other Android phones, it should at least be more transparent about the relationship between the Galaxy Watch series and its Galaxy phone line. While this requirement would be fairly well understood by legacy Galaxy Watch users, newcomers to the series may struggle to find and understand this info. Samsung does make reference in the footnotes of its latest press release that some features require a Galaxy smartphone to function, but some simulated marketing images give a different impression (see above).

Thankfully, I’m in the privileged position of owning a Samsung smartphone alongside my Galaxy Watch 4, but plenty of others who rely on Pixels and other Android phones don’t. These users cannot access some of the most critical health-screening features available on the wrist today simply because they’ve chosen a phone made by another Android OEM. My colleagues and I had hoped that Samsung would address this exclusionary stance with the Galaxy Watch 9’s debut, but it hasn’t. Instead, it looks quite comfortable doubling down.

But hey! You still get all the swanky new features, like Vitals, Fitness Index, Daily Cardio Load, and Hearing! But if you need a smartwatch to track your heart’s rhythm, potentially dangerous sleep conditions, and your blood pressure, I’d think twice about buying Samsung’s latest. There are better wearable solutions that don’t arbitrarily force you into an ecosystem to use the features you’ve seemingly paid for.