Citizen suspended CZ Smart smartwatch sales after reviewers documented the bugs

Citizen's second-generation CZ Smart launched in May 2023 as a Wear OS watch whose headline feature was an alertness tracker built on IBM Watson and NASA tech. By late August, Citizen was emailing reviewers that it would 'temporarily suspend sales on touchscreen models while we pinpoint the source of the issue' and find 'the best path to a solution.' The suspension came after YouTuber Michael Fisher (MrMobile) raised the watch's problems with Citizen, corroborated by a Wired account of laggy screens, bad battery life, inaccurate tracking, and watchfaces that couldn't tell the correct time.

The Verge's own unit matched the pattern: outdoor runs couldn't find GPS, froze mid-workout or failed to record — a two-mile run logged as 0.1 mile at a 93-minutes-per-mile pace; screens froze, crashed or ignored swipes; a watch at 100% battery at noon was down to 6% by 10:30 PM; and phone syncing failed even with the devices side by side. The reviewer noted it felt like 'a Wear OS experience circa 2016,' surprising given the watch ran the same Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear 4100 chip as smoother competitors like the Fossil Gen 6.

The suspension covered eleven touchscreen model numbers and did not affect the CZ Smart Hybrid. What made it worse: several unhappy customers had publicly reported similar issues as far back as three months earlier, meaning the complaints window stretched from launch to suspension with no action. When The Verge asked what existing customers would get, how long the suspension would last, and what exactly the technical issue was, Citizen didn't respond.

Touchscreen CZ Smart models pulled from sale, review units recalled, and no recourse announced for existing customers when press asked.

The watch shipped on the strength of its Watson-and-NASA alertness feature while basics — timekeeping, GPS, battery, syncing — were unreliable.

Three months of customer complaints before any action suggests Citizen treated the bug reports as isolated units until reviewers amplified them.

Suspending sales only after a YouTuber and Wired escalated turned a quality-control fix into a public product failure.

Leaving existing buyers without stated recourse converted early adopters into the product's most visible critics.

A watch that can't tell the time reliably shouldn't ship — and three months of customer complaints is not a sampling error, it's a recall waiting to happen.

Citizen said it was investigating the issue and recalling review units, with the touchscreen models off sale while it worked out 'the best path to a solution.' The company declined to say how long the suspension would last or what customers who had already bought the watch would receive, and did not respond to follow-up questions from The Verge at publication.