Pull one out of the box and there is no silicone tip.
No rubber dome. No part designed to enter your ear at all. Clip-on audio devices sit beside the ear canal rather than inside it, and for years they were a niche product for runners and cyclists. That picture changed sharply this past quarter. Fresh market data shows the broader wireless earbud category posting its first annual sales drop in three years, even as one corner of it surged. What separated the winners from the losers was a design choice smaller than a fingertip.
How a small design change reroutes sound and reshapes the whole market
A conventional in-ear earbud creates a physical seal. The silicone tip blocks outside noise and pushes sound directly at the eardrum, which is exactly what noise-cancellation hardware is designed to exploit. Open-ear designs do the opposite: a small driver sits just outside the canal, projecting audio toward the ear while ambient sound flows in freely around it.
That distinction matters more than it seems. The ear never fatigues from pressure, so the format unlocks a category of user that sealed buds could never reach: anyone who wears audio all day at a desk, on a commute, or through a workout and still needs to hear the world around them. Longer listening sessions and AI-enabled features are now the main development frontier, according to Omdia’s research team.
Omdia separates conventional TWS products from OWS devices such as clip-on and ear-hook models that leave the ear canal open. That classification, once a footnote in analyst decks, is now driving the headline number.
What the quarter’s shipment figures actually looked like on the ground
Global TWS shipments slipped 0.7 percent year over year to roughly 82 million units in Q2 2026, the category’s first annual decline since Q2 2023. Inside that broadly flat headline, two very different markets were moving in opposite directions.
Conventional TWS shipments declined 2 percent in the quarter. Open wireless stereo shipments, by contrast, grew 12 percent to 11.1 million units, lifting OWS share of total TWS shipments to 13.5 percent from 12.0 percent a year earlier. The gap between the two curves is widening fast.
The shift is being led by clip-on designs. Omdia says clip-on models represented 61 percent of open wireless stereo shipments in the quarter, ahead of ear-hook styles at 39 percent. The format most people had never heard of two years ago now commands nearly two-thirds of a category growing at double-digit rates.
Geography helps explain where the conventional side stumbled. China, the world’s largest TWS market, saw shipments fall 9.5 percent as stimulus-driven demand faded and replacement purchases were pulled forward into 2025. The US and India also declined, while emerging markets partially offset those losses.
The price bands where the open-ear surge is hardest to ignore
The price split tells its own story. Shipments in the sub-fifty-dollar segment jumped 323 percent year on year, while the hundred-to-two-hundred-dollar band rose 253 percent, suggesting demand is growing at both ends simultaneously. That is an unusual shape for a new device category.
Most formats start premium and filter down. Open-ear audio is being pulled from the bottom, where low-cost manufacturers are flooding e-commerce shelves, and from the top, where established brands are releasing polished flagships. Both ends are growing fast at once.
Among the established players, OPPO was the only top-five vendor in the broader TWS market besides Apple to post shipment growth, rising nearly 15 percent year over year including OnePlus devices. Apple’s shipments still amounted to 20.5 percent of the total TWS market, nearly doubling Xiaomi’s 10.4 percent share in second place.
Where the open-ear story gets complicated for the brands already winning
The same data that makes open-ear look unstoppable also contains a caveat that big audio incumbents will find uncomfortable. Omdia’s research analyst noted that the OWS category has a relatively low entry barrier, meaning it cannot be dominated by a single player the way sealed earbuds have been.
For consumers, that is welcome news. More competition across price bands typically pushes quality up and prices down. For brands that spent a decade building loyalty around in-ear ecosystems and proprietary ear-tip sizes, it means starting over in a format that requires no sizing, no fit-testing and no reason to stay inside any brand’s app.
Open-ear also does not help the one thing that defines premium sealed earbuds: active noise cancellation. An unsealed canal cannot block sound by definition. That keeps sealed TWS dominant in commuter, airplane and office settings, which is why, as wearable categories pivot toward always-on sensing, open-ear audio is carving out a complementary lane rather than a replacement one. Traditional earbuds are still expected to account for the large majority of global TWS shipments for the foreseeable future.
What the forecast says about who holds ground in personal audio by the end of the decade
Omdia expects open wireless stereo to remain one of the fastest-growing areas within TWS. According to the latest data from Omdia, annual OWS shipments are forecast to rise from around 43.9 million units in 2026 to 90.5 million units by 2030, nearly one in five TWS shipments globally. That is a near-doubling in roughly four years.
No major audio hardware company will be able to treat the format as secondary at that scale. The brands best positioned are those that have already moved, and the forecast points to continued double-digit growth rates for both clip-on and ear-hook OWS segments through the end of the decade.
Shokz led the open-ear category in Q2 2026, with shipments roughly doubling year over year to 1.1 million units, a striking rise for a brand that was essentially a sports-audio specialist three years ago. For ordinary listeners, the practical upshot is straightforward: more open-ear choices at more price points will arrive through the rest of this year and into the next. The format is no longer a niche bet on comfort.
