The great smartwatch charger debate: Is it time for the industry to standardize?

23 Dec 2025, 17:15 by Mark Jansen · Android Police

Smartwatches aren't like smartphones in many ways, but one way they are similar is that most require a daily charge.

That means you quickly become pretty intimate with your smartwatch's charging cable, and can probably identify it from a lineup of other smartphone chargers.

But it's not like this is particularly difficult, as, for some reason, smartwatch chargers are all different — and that's becoming an issue smartwatch makers should start paying attention to, before they're forced to.

The one feature missing from most wireless charging hubs that drives me crazy

It's the simplest addition, and it would make my life so much easier

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Smartwatches are great — charging one isn't

Smartwatches are great.

It took me a while to come around to the merits of even the best smartwatches, and that's largely because I was heavily put off by the lackluster battery life of most smartwatches.

When compared to fitness watches, which tend to last at least a week on a single charge, a smartwatch's ability to last a day and a bit was extremely disappointing.

Since then, I've had a revolution in how I use wearables, and have specifically stopped wearing them at night.

As such, I now have a much more natural time to charge a smartwatch, and it's been much easier as a result.

So I've really come around on smartwatches. But do you know what I really don't like? Smartwatch chargers.

I may only have noticed this because I've tested a lot of smartwatches, but my word, there are a lot of different smartwatch chargers out there.

There are wireless charging pucks, pucks with pins, clips that snap onto pins, plugs that stick awkwardly out of the bottom of the watch, and there's even one group of mad lads that uses an actual USB-C port.

Charging should be simple, but it's not. My smartwatch uses a very different charger from my partner's fitness watch, so if she wants to charge her device, she'll have to dig out her cable from wherever it's ended up.

Contrast this with our phones, and it's a completely different situation.

She can grab my charger, which could otherwise be charging any number of tablets, e-readers, or phones. It'll charge a $1,800 Z Fold 5 just as well as it'll charge an $80 Amazon Kindle.

But not so for smartwatches. It's a weird situation, and one that's clearly a bomb waiting to go off under the smartwatch industry.

It's anti-eco and anti-consumer

This situation with smartwatch chargers might not seem so weird if it weren't for some of the other stuff the tech industry was doing.

Remember when Apple took away your bundled charging brick to reduce e-waste? Now, some phones may even be coming without cables for the same reason.

I'm in favor of reducing waste, and I have enough chargers and cables as it is — but isn't it a little strange that while companies are reducing e-waste in one area, they're happy to pile it up in a different one?

Even those smartwatches, which use similar-looking methods, are generally incompatible, as even wireless charging pucks have slight differences in layout that mean they simply don't work with other smartwatches.

Everything is exclusive, everything is special, and everything is annoying and stupid.

Sure, you can point out that smartwatches are pretty small fry compared to phones, so the amount of e-waste generated is much smaller.

And yeah, you can send back a charging cable if you sell or trade in your old smartwatch when upgrading, but what about accessories?

If you have a charging hub with a smartwatch charger built in, well, that's worthless now. What about docks? Heck, what about spare cables?

You can say it's not a big deal, and maybe you're right.

Still, there's no real upside to this arrangement for us as customers. It just makes it more complicated to change smartwatch brands, and that's just annoying.

It won't just be us who have noticed this. Which is why it's important that companies figure this out before they're forced to.

The USB-C moment could be coming

The Lightning cable was killed not because Apple was done with it, but because the EU forced it to.

In 2022, the EU passed a bill that forced phone manufacturers to use USB-C on their phones to create a standardized charger for the ease of consumers.

USB-C was the natural fit for that, given its high charging rate and existing open standard. And so, Apple was forced to drop Lightning in order to continue selling in the EU.

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Is it too much to expect the EU to follow up with a similar ruling for smartwatches?

When the USB-C ruling came in, there were rumblings that India could be looking to do something similar and include wearables.

As far as we know, there hasn't been such a change, nor is one planned — but if smartwatches continue to be such a lawless wasteland, where anything goes?

It wouldn't surprise me if someone like the EU stepped in to enforce some order.

This wouldn't be a huge problem for the smartwatch industry, but nobody likes to seem like they're being forced.

Just look at Apple, who continue to pretend it was their decision to drop Lightning.

It would be beneficial for the entire industry if the biggest players in the space were able to come together and decide for themselves how this mess can be sorted out.

What would that solution be? It would be hard to see how Qi2 charging wouldn't play a huge role here, and as tempting (and funny) as it is to just say it's a job for USB-C again, Qi2 fits the bill much better.

There are likely issues here. It wouldn't be the tech industry if there weren't. But I can't see how they can't figure it out and help me clean up my charger box. Call it my Christmas gift.