The Samsung software I have seen on their TVs, laptops, phones has been adequate at best. I wish them best of luck developing another closed ecosystem. However their track record of developing good, functioning software is not very promising.
When you use Apple products everything is tied into Apple. I didn't like some parts of their ecosystem (Itunes). It is all or nothing for Apple, so I said farewell and moved on.
When I switched to Android I discovered it is strongly tied to Google, their services are great and free. However I grew increasingly worried about a future in which my account ends up as a "false positive" and my life get's deleted. — Seriously those horror stories about people's Google account getting deleted for no good reason are very scary to a startup founder. The probability is very low, but I am scared enough to invest money and time in moving all my data away from Google.
So Samsung if the article is right and this is your longterm strategy, I wish you best of luck, don't expect me to be a customer at any point in the future.
> When I switched to Android I discovered it is strongly tied to Google
This is a common misconception. It is very easy to replace Google apps commonly found on Android phones (such as Gmail, Google Maps, Google Talk, etc.) with non-Google apps. If Google's services start to get shitty, manufacturers will simply replace it with alternatives. For example, in China, where Android phones are popular but Google services are largely inaccessible (due to the government censorship rather than anything that is Google's fault, but the situation is sufficiently similar to Google losing its edge), Android phones come with Baidu as their default search engine. There was even a phone released on Verizon that had Bing as its default search engine (Microsoft probably paid Verizon a ton of money for that).
Yes, but in China Google services aren't nearly as prevalent as they are in the US. Baidu is as popular, so naturally it'd be okay as a default standard.
The Samsung Fascinate (Galaxy S1) on Verizon had Bing included by default, and there were quite a bit of complaints about it - not to mention the fact that the device wasn't too competitive with other devices on the market at the time.
From Engadget's review:
"This was maddening to us. We don't have a personal issue with Bing, but it's not our engine of choice, and we'd be willing to bet that it's not yours either. Now, imagine buying an Android phone -- a Google phone -- only to discover that not only was Google not defaulted to as a search engine, it's not even an option! For us, this is actually a deal breaker. It's fine to throw a new choice a user's way, but to force them into using nothing but that choice seems pretty low. Even on the original iPhone you were given a choice between Google and Yahoo!. Here, you've got Bing unless you want to get hacking -- and most people actually don't want to get hacking. They just want to use their phones. Again, it's not that Bing is a bad search engine, but Google is the standard. If it's not even offered, what does that say?"
> Yes, but in China Google services aren't nearly as prevalent as they are in the US. Baidu is as popular, so naturally it'd be okay as a default standard.
And if Google's services became so crappy that people started using something else (like Bing) on their PCs, then it would be trivial for Android phones to switch over to that as well.
My point was that Android phones are not tied to Google services, and that Chinese Android phones are a good example of that.
> The Samsung Fascinate (Galaxy S1) on Verizon had Bing included by default, and there were quite a bit of complaints about it
Yes, because people didn't want or expect Bing, they wanted Google. The reason why almost all Android phones (outside of China) have Google as their default is because people want Google to be the default, not because Google has mandated it.
I agree. I've ranted previously about how Samsung is toxic for Android in the past, mostly because they really did copy Apple too much, which gave the impression that "Android" (since Samsung is a very popular Android device provider) copied Apple too much.
The problem is that whenever they don't blatantly rip-off Apple the designs they come up with are terrible. And beyond just design they're clearly lacking on the software quality front.
Exhibit B, the copy bug where copying more than 20 items in a single device session would break copy/paste across the entire device, causing any app which tries to access the clipboard to crash. The bug they didn't fix for close to a year (they never really fixed it per se, they just waited until the normal Android system OS refresh cycle and didn't include the bug in the next revision) and whose "workaround" was doing a factory reset of your device once it got into that state (you could also fix it by rooting the device and manually deleting some protected files but of course that wasn't officially supported).
As someone whose current job involves Android development, it is nearly impossible for me to avoid Samsung's terrible devices (95% of the time they are the ones I have to investigate device specific bugs on in our app) despite the myriad of problems I have with them.
The only Samsung device I've touched that is tolerable to use is the ARM Chromebook, presumably because they had virtually nothing to do with the software on it.
> The problem is that whenever they don't blatantly rip-off Apple the designs they come up with are terrible. And beyond just design they're clearly lacking on the software quality front.
Actually I find their blatant copies of Apple some of the worst offenders when it comes to their design. The ugly bars all over TouchWiz are pretty much darker tinted variants of the default bars found on iOS. The Samsung messaging app is ugly and essentially copies the iOS messaging app with a darker color scheme.
But really Samsung's designs are just terrible. They should try to work more with Google and leave as much of the stock UI as it is.
> The Samsung software I have seen on their TVs, laptops, phones has been adequate at best.
You've clearly used a Samsung SmartTV then. The software is so slow, so clunky, so unreliable; it's a hair pulling exercise just waiting for the thing to load (1-2 minutes to bring up the dashboard). Its bad enough to justify hauling the thing back to the shop and getting a refund.
I have a SmartTV as well. Tried the apps once and never touched it again. It really is 90's era software.
I honestly can't fathom why the TV manufacturers are just sitting back, twiddling their thumbs and waiting for Apple to come in and make them look stupid. I mean really is a TV so much more complicated to build a decent UI for than a smartphone or computer ?
So true. But the worst part is when their software update servers go down. Apparently SmartTV phones home about every 5 minutes or so, and when Samsung's servers are offline for any reason the TV pops up an annoying box in the middle of the screen telling you that your internet isn't working. Even if you're just watching TV or a DVD.
I contacted Samsung and they told me not to use my TV and that it should be fine the next day. In the end, I factory-reset my TV and didn't give it the wi-fi password.
Very true. I feel like I'm sitting at a PDP-11, except a PDP-11 would be more intuitive than the Smart TV interface. I only use my Apple TV as an interface for Netflix, Hulu+, etc. now; the only thing I touch the actual TV controls for are changing sources.
I own a Samsung TV, a camera by them, and used to own a cell phone by them. My friend also has a GS3.
All of them are just poorly-designed, cheap imitations of Blackberry and Apple UI design. The Smart TV interface is a disaster. It's a mess; nothing works and the supposedly "smart" touchpad integrated into the remote constantly misses what I want to select.
The camera is decent; but it's only a camera, so not very much going on there.
The phone I used to own (a feature phone by the name of SGH-A867) was also okay with regards to UI. It was fairly intuitive and worked well; although AT&T probably designed most of the software for the phone. It was, however, on the hardware front poorly designed. The touch screen stopped responding after a year of light use. Unacceptable.
The GS3 that my friend owned really seemed promising. But the polycarbonate construction left a lot to be desired and the UI felt like a hobbled-together, piecemeal catastrophe.
I bought a Nexus 4 and am enamored by it. It's perfect.
Samsung have a lot of money, and a lot of resources to through behind making their software work better. I find it hard to believe that is that hard to get right.
If they had any sense they should buy BB or Palm OS.
Software is hard. Any company where you can ship production code with all of physical memory mmap'able world-readable/writable (Exynos Android 4.0 vulnerability) points to a seriously flawed software engineering culture.
A lot of people don't remember Palm OS, but as someone who owned a Palm TX device, I have most fond memories of it. And I still consider it the best handheld device that I had (including my current Nexus 4) in terms of both design and UI, and user control, and battery life, which lasted up to a week! It was a real bummer to see it go. I still miss it.
I lost my Android phone, so am currently using my wife's old centro. It's amazing how many things it does as well or better than the android phone did (battery life being the biggest one).
You may want to check one of those "lost/stolen Android" apps for your next Android. They allow you to control device remotely, find out GPS location, erase SD card, etc. Quite useful.
They're going to use it as the basis for a new line of "smart" TVs. I still have my fingers crossed that OpenWebOS makes a usable phone to replace my Pre2.
What's strange to me is that everything Samsung does to try and differentiate themselves just makes me like their phones less. Their hardware design is plastic and cheap feeling and I hate the touchwiz layer they put on top of android with their gimmicky features (camera based gesture controls? - who cares?).
I think Apple, Nokia and even HTC make much nicer hardware (although HTC still puts its Sense on top of android). I really wished Nokia had partnered with google to make the nexus phones instead of joining up with microsoft - then we would have had awesome hardware and a solid vanilla android phone.
I have a Nokia Lumia 920 and other than battery life I am extremely happy with it. WP8 might prove to be a nice middle ground between iOS and Android. If only more people would give it a chance, it's a really stellar experience.
I actually switched to iPhone 5 after a couple months of Lumia 920 usage. Bought it right after release, with the wireless charger and stuff. I really liked the device.
My problem was the fucked up regional annoyances. If you are not in USA, good luck! No full size skydrive photo uploads for you! No Xbox online.. No album covers in music app. A lot of missing apps in store. No this, no that. Well, I have no such problems with iPhone and Android.
BTW: After I switched, I sold my Lumia to a friend and used factory reset before handing the phone. Guess what? There is a known bug in factory reset that bricks the phone and it was apparently not fixed in 2 firmware upgrades that I got during that time :)
Are you in China? Yes, the regional annoyances on the 920 suck. Ironically, they are only an issue on the Nokia phones; the HTC phones (like the HD8) allow you to change to the American app store very easily.
iPhone 5 has a few that are not obvious, even if it does allow me to easily switch to the American app store. Chinese versions of Android are a complete pain, but the devices are easily rooted.
At least it is only software-regional. I've bought the One X in Taiwan when it was brand-new and now I have an Android 4.0 phone that only supports the following languages: Chinese, Simplified Chinese and English (I'm still too scared of Buyer's Remorse to check what else is different).
...that was a pretty cryptic post, what I meant is that it only supports these three languages no matter where I am (different hardware/OS per country). It's like buying a movie on a vacation and then finding out about DVD regions.
I think this is overstated. I switched from a Galaxy S3 to a Nexus 4 recently, and there are several ways in which I find the Nexus to be inferior.
Hardware:
- The Galaxy S3 is noticeable thinner and easier to hold.
- The hardware buttons lead to a more efficient use of space. The GS3 effectively has a larger screen, although the Nexus is roughly the same size as it has an empty, useless space where the S3's buttons are.
- I've never really felt/cared that plastic "looks cheap". It is highly light and durable, and doesn't slide in the hand and on surfaces like the glass Nexus.
Software:
- Samsung's settings toggle notification widget is very convenient, easier to use and with more options than the vanilla equivalent.
- Notifications are clearly separated into sticky and clearable sections, and clearable ones are chronologically ordered. I haven't yet figured out how stock Android organises its notifications, but so far it's been confusing.
- The camera app has several useful features like rapid-fire shooting.
Yes Samsung throws a lot of features at the wall, but they're largely inconsequential, and some of their changes are legitimate improvements.
I've had an S3 (currently an iPhone 5) running both stock TouchWiz and CyanogenMod10.1, which is the closest to stock Android I can get.
The hardware button didn't make sense to me because it made the back and menu buttons much closer to the edge, which lead to accidental presses of those buttons and there was also less space to hold the phone with. I disabled the hardware buttons and had on-screen buttons like the Nexus 4's. The multitasking button made me much faster at switching apps.
The plastic got greasy fast, that's my major complaint. As for thinness, I found an Otterboxed iPhone 5 easier to hold because of the depth. I don't understand this race to thinness because at some point (we may have already hit it), thinner phones are just harder to hold (my opinion). I also wish that phones could be a bit thicker with a bigger battery.
The notification widget is possibly the dumbest thing Samsung did with TouchWiz. No matter what position you were at in the widget (left, middle, far right, whatever), the widget would start to the right and then scroll back to the furthest left. Not only is this annoying, it was completely unnecessary and happened every single time you pulled down the notification shade.
Stock Android also has this widget, by the way. It's called Quick Settings and has more toggles than Samsung (at least in the S3. haven't played with S4 yet) and is customizable. It was also easily accessible by pulling down on the user-specified part of the screen (may have been CM10.1 specific).
Notifications in stock Android can also be easily swiped away, same as S3. I don't see how anyone can't figure out which ones are swipable or not. Use your phone, swipe, if it doesn't swipe, then it won't swipe in the future. It's usually things like voicemail or persistent processes that you started.
Stock Android should have burst mode as well for the camera.
If some of these features don't exist, I apologize. The Cyanogen team may have implemented some of these features on their own, but even so, I hated TouchWiz with every fiber of my being. A refreshed interface comes along with the release of Android 4.0 and Samsung decides to keep the look dated with a Gingerbread-era settings menu. Or the menu button, which should be extinct by now.
I'm testing iOS right now, but when I come back to Android, it will be either an HTC running CyanogenMod or Nexus phone for me.
> If ITV wanted to avoid fragmentation it would have chosen to make its app compatible with only pure versions of Android
That isn't what causes Android's fragmentation issues. Even between virgin android devices there is a LOT of fragmentation, these devices just happen to be popular with developers so most people aren't impacted by it.
Different screen sizes/resolutions, driver issues, graphics acceleration, aftermarket distro's, all cause a LOT of issues and these things all exist on virgin Android just as much as Samsung's strange re-imagining of the ecosystem.
Nvidia Tegra in particular has broken a LOT of stuff.
Are you suggesting that screen sizes and resolutions are uniform among Samsung devices? Drivers are the same? That is nonsense.
Aftermarket distros include no warranty warnings, it's up to the packagers to solve bugs in their builds.
Here is the reality: if they had opted to use the MediaPlayer classes with whatever streaming service they use on devices 2.3+, they would have likely had to deal with a few corner cases. If they didn't, they have made a poor decision. If they did, they are restricting allowed devices for reasons that are non-technical.
> Even between virgin android devices there is a LOT of fragmentation, these devices just happen to be popular with developers so most people aren't impacted by it.
I use the emulator for almost all of my testing and then test on a Galaxy Nexus. I beta test across a large net. The number of corner cases that are not related to pre-gingerbread versions of android is tiny. [EDIT: In the streaming media field, as of now. This was a much bigger problem several years ago. Obviously, the differences are more of an issue with games, which we are not talking about here.]
> Are you suggesting that screen sizes and resolutions are uniform among Samsung devices? Drivers are the same? That is nonsense.
...No? In fact my post said exactly the opposite of that:
> all cause a LOT of issues and these things all exist on virgin Android just as much as Samsung's strange re-imagining of the ecosystem.
I am saying there is fragmentation between two "virgin Android" devices. Therefore making his point that virgin Android somehow "solves" fragmentation wrong.
Samsung has a lot of fragmentation. So do "virgin Android" devices. Android has fragmentation because there is too much incompatible hardware and for some things the abstraction is more weakly enforced than for others (e.g. hardware acceleration).
The argument that the post was making was that there is zero weight to the claim that this decision was made for technical reasons.
Further, the post makes the point that choosing an open-source baseline as the first system you support means that there's a clear and relatively straightforward path to compatibility. Setting that target at a proprietary fork of that system does nothing to improve the situation.
I too am an Android developer and I test similarly to how you do (even have a Galaxy Nexus [as well as a Nexus 7]). Really have not had anything drastic in fragmentation either if only supporting 2.2 and above (2.2 lacking the download manager, but I don't really need that too much).
Even the gripes other are claiming about graphic incompatibilities are generally untrue, since 2.2 and above supports OpenGL ES 2.0. As someone else mentioned, audio still leaves something to desired. Graphics are not anywhere close to that being an issue from my experiences, but I suppose that all has to do with how far one goes down the rabbit hole for optimizations and tuning to a specific GPU. I don't doubt that OEMs screw around with things, but I'm not a GPU development guru by any means so I cannot say it won't be in every use case.
The only real compatibility issue I've had to deal with was working around in the radio interface layer for Android in a small open source app I maintain[1][2] as a personal side project for reading/analyzing some of the hidden network readings that Android does not normally expose to the user. Biggest issue with that is that some OEMs (Samsung being one) do whatever they feel like with the data here (sometimes tying some areas into the radio firmware and other times not [as well as sometimes deviating from what the functionality says it should do in the Android API]).
Since Android 4.0, it's been pretty sane across the board in the radio interface layer, but I still get an occasional 2.3 or 2.2 device that sends me a stacktrace after crashing for some silly reason. If it's not too much trouble, I'll try to work around it, but otherwise (short of a user going out their way to help me pin down the issue personally) I just let it go. I've mostly abstracted out any of the issues to make the old readings compatible with Android 4.0 now so it's not too much of a big deal for me anymore.
Add audio APIs to that list. If you want to do anything with noise control, echo cancellers or gain control it's a whole world of pain - in my experience HTC phones are particularly bad in this area - your experience may differ, depending on what type of app you develop.
The time is right to capitalize on Android's big weak spots (OS fragmentation, disorganized app infrastructure, indifferent branding) but I don't see Tizen looming large yet. Samsung is doing a great job selling phones to consumers, but it's not in a great position to buy up the whole Google Play collection one piece at a time, and it doesn't seem to be trying to get developers and advertisers interested in Tizen at the moment.
If their long-term plan is to fly close to Android and then swap it out for something completely different, I'd be very excited. As a longtime smartphone user and current Android developer, I've been through the transition from one proprietary platform to another... BlackBerry, iOS, Android... I'm weary of dismissing a dozen app update notifications from my tray every day, and I'm tired of "apps" in general. I don't want to jump to another copycat of the same old junky, cluttered world. If Samsung is prepared to offer a fresh way of seamlessly being in the physical and digital worlds without having to navigate through a bunch of noisy, crappy apps (possibly without even the candybar form factor), I will be right there, wallet open. But as the author points out, it looks like the current iteration is just to load up a bunch of crapware onto a plastic toy, and users have to buy into the whole infrastructure if they want access to their favorite brand. No thanks.
I see two major issues with Samsung switching to Tizen:
* Samsung is unlikely to get developers as talented as those at Google. I doubt that Tizen development could approach mainline Android's development pace, given the talent difference.
* Tizen would need its own app store. Ask BlackBerry or Microsoft how well new app stores do.
Tizen is unlikely to catch up with Android functionality- or app-wise. Unless the carriers push it hard over Android, it will have no advantages and thus will not sell.
Android's development pace is slowing down, as is iOSes. Smartphones are not an innovative platform any more. It used to be that OSes got major new features like universal voice dictation, universal search, and turn-by-turn navigation, but in the last couple of years the two major platforms have been getting very iterative improvements; performance upgrades, visual polishes, proprietary assistant apps...
That's because the smartphone market is slowing undergoing commoditization. We're only a few years away from when Samsung could realistically swap out Android for another OS that looks on the surface to be the same and not many people will notice.
and not many people will notice: unless they try to run their favorite Android apps - starting from the Google ones - and they discover that they're not there...
This implies that people buying a new phone actually have detailed knowledge about the underlying OS. But a lot of sold Android smartphones are cheap ones. I know lots of "mormal" people that barely know Android is powering their phones. They will not miss their favorite apps because they have none and seldom install new apps on their phone. Thats the "mass market" that Samsung could address with its own OS.
Ok, leave alone the "apps" - let's talk about the functionality. Where are my maps, with turn by turn navigation? Where is that translation thing that my nephew has got? I think that most people who buy a smartphone, paying good money for it, want to do "things". Many of the most interesting things you can do with Android phones (for free, too) are Google powered. Even Apple has a difficult time replacing them on iOS, and my guess is that they're much better positioned than Samsung in that respect.
From what I'm hearing, Google is not happy with Samsung. Google wants to lead and direct the future of Android but Samsung wants to do what's best for Samsung. Google is facing a bit of a dilemma. They can't push and risk alienating their number one device producer and they don't want to lose control of Android.
Their only option is to move faster than Samsung to make sure samsung follows.
Their other option is to declare android essentially a lost cause, let the device manufacturers do whatever they want to it, and develop their own "pure google" platform that runs on top of android and works around any OEM specific customizations.
Coincidentally, they already have a platform that they maintain complete control over and that runs on top of other operating systems - Chrome. and android just got brought under the umbrella of the chrome division.
They have that now, but they don't because consumers do not care.
The Nexus line is the best smartphone bargain that has ever happened, period, and it's still outsold by the Galaxy S III. They even use the words "pure google" in some of their marketing materials for the devices. Developers seem to be most of their market, though.
They could also opt not to include the Google properties on such phones (GMail, Google Play Store, etc...) but they don't. I suspect that relationships with headset manufacturers is the reason for this, but that's pure conjecture.
>The Nexus line is the best smartphone bargain that has ever happened, period, and it's still outsold by the Galaxy S III.
Dont forget what happened with the Nexus 4. A pure-android device with great hardware at a reasonable price. It sold out within an hour. Availability was terrible for weeks (months?) after launch. A very large number of people who wanted the phone couldnt have it and presumably went with other handsets such as the S3.
So clearly consumers do care, but in this case it was Google/LG who screwed up. I suspect they'll be better prepared for the next Nexus iteration.
Plus, I don't know about the US, but in Australia the average consumer is going to have no idea the Nexus 4 even exists. Previous nexus handsets were supported by significant collateral from telcos, the only way you'd know about the N4 would be if you accidentally clicked the 'devices' link in Google Play.
The lack of 4G is also a bit of an issue to the average consumer, I think - it's a clear feature differential between it and high end phones, at a time when 4G is receiving a huge marketing push in Australia.
They'll be prepared with the next revision for sure. The last time Google tried to sell a phone was the Nexus One, but that was at full retail price. The Nexus 4, on the other hand, was below market price, unlocked, and the best "pure Google" phone around.
I don't think Google was overly happy with Samsung implementing the multi-app view on the Note 2 either, but there was not much they could do about it in the end. They had already told Cyanogenmod previously not to do this[1], so one can assume they were not pleased that Samsung would do it, but Samsung carries much more weight than an AOSP modding group.
Samsung implemented multi-window exactly as Google wanted: opt-in instead of opt-out or forced. I highly doubt the Android team is unhappy about that. Several top Google apps support it (Chrome, Gmail, Maps, Talk and YouTube, judging from my Note 2). Given that (and the many other windowing hacks I've seen including ones by such obscure companies as Facebook and Sony) I expect some sort of cleaner, official multi/floating window support to be coming in a future version of Android. I would have even predicted next week before the rumor mill started saying to expect 4.3, not 5.0
I wouldn't mind multiview becoming the norm with official Android API support for apps made to support it. I didn't realize Samsung made it opt-in, but that makes much more sense and calms my fears about it. We can already have multiple fragments displayed in an app, so it would make sense the next logical step is to have multiple apps open with some limitations and restrictions via official support in the Android API.
Just curious, but did support for it (for Google Apps) come at the Note 2 release or after its release?
I believe it came with the Note 2 release (though possibly not with some specific models, like the US ones). I got my (international) Note 2 a few weeks after it came out and, IIRC, I had a least a couple of multi-window Google apps (maybe Chrome and Maps but not Gmail and YouTube?) from day one.
From what I remember, the Note 10.1 (which came out a few months earlier) was much more limited on that front - only some Samsung apps supported multi-window, but that seemed to help pave the way for the Note 2 (and improved support on the 10.1, of course).
The multi-window feature and the google app support were available with the note 1 with the android 4.x update. Adding support is almost trivial with it being a few XML lines.
There are also mods that let you multi-window any app which makes the feature much more useful.
Samsung is allowed to do this because they limit multi-window to apps that support it. Cornerstone was built to work for every app, and could cause problems for apps that don't know how to behave properly when windowed like that.
You appear to be the sole voice of sanity. The Trusted Reviews article is a badly written illogical pile of mish-mash. And you can quote me on that. I've read most of the comments here as well and they're well wide of the mark. Android is here to stay, Samsung are not going to make any headway with Tizen. Firefox OS does not stand a chance in my opinion, though I admire their efforts. I still use Firefox the browser and I have tons of respect for the Mozilla Foundation. It's a win-win for open-source either way.
Google is doing what Microsoft should have done years ago but couldn't because it wasn't in its DNA. Android is Linux folks, don't forget that, Google is the steward at the moment but anybody can fork it if Google starts behaving badly. A whole consortium could get together. I really wish people would quit with the griping and conspiracy theories and appreciate what Google have done. It's unprecedented and I salute them. And to prove I'm not a total fanboy, I'm writing this from a Macbook, not a Linux box, and I own a HTC One X. I say hats off to Google and Samsung and HTC and Motorola and Huawei and whoever jumps on board. Every sale of Android is another vindication of the open-source model and I wish them all well.
I mean in a technical sense that is true since well it is the Linux kernel.
But there is the argument that Linux is not Linux without GNU tools, build systems, terminals and *root access. I stress the last one, the day I can ssh into my phone and install/add repositories, setup scripts, who knows I might actually make my life easier and for god sakes develop with whatever I want, whether it be C, Clojure or Python. And I mean we all know that Java developers are the renown worldwide for their quality especially considering how wonderfully over designed everything needs to be.
Your writing this from a Macbook so no offense I doubt you have any idea how Linux works deeply or have seriously developed something like say Robotics(http://www.ros.org/wiki/), or drivers, or the kernel.
It's true that the kernel is the most important part of the OS, but the total sum of all aspects of a OS especially for a consumer oriented product is vastly greater than just what the kernel provides.
I'd also like to add that just because something is open-source doesn't mean it's a net positive for the community or the consumers for that matter. Just look at Oracle, hell just look at Android. There is no diversity hence there is no evolution and if developers aren't going to get better at solving harder problems all I see is a sinking ship.
To be fair though, it's vastly closer than anything else around. You can get shell access—and it's a bourne shell, with environment variables, piping, control-structures, etc (it even has emacs-style command-line editing!)—add a C compiler, etc, on an unrooted Android phone.
It's not really Linux the way we usually know it (just the non-standard filesystem layout ensures that), but typing "cat /proc/meminfo" into a shell and seeing the expected result, and using ls, printenv, df, etc, to explore, really makes it feel pretty familiar to someone used to Linux or other unix-style systems. [It also seems to use the standard linux/unix group mechanism for granting app permissions: if you type "id" to the shell, you'll see the permissions the terminal app holds listed as groups it belongs to.]
The end result is that it really does feel like "Linux with a twist" rather than something alien.
No mobile maker makes any money of it worth mentioning, including Google, besides Samsung. The disparity is so big, it's not even funny. The majority of Android devices shipped ARE Samsung.
If Samsung was to stop shipping Android stuff, maybe someone else would pick up. But if Samsung Android devices were to disappear altogether magically, Android would have like 10-15% market share.
If Google had been less afraid of the GPL, Samsung would've been forced to share-alike. Instead, they can just grab the fruits of Google's labors, put some icing on top, and leave Google with a lesser product.
And what do the masses have to say about the quality of software and development. Especially those markets that have been largely abandoned. I'm look at you Russia, China, Philippines.
Just look at the factory videos by the guy from ARMDevices.net they are selling $61 android tablets to Philippines, Russia and other developing countries. I watched those last week, what happens the other day I see my mom get one of those.
Ah, the "that's only true for the US..." meme, which always lacks any kind of graph or reputable article supporting the assertion. I don't actually disbelieve it at all - Samsung have a lot of different devices on sale - but the trite assertion that 'marketshare = victory!' is entirely pointless. No, I won't search for it myself. You asserted it, so the burden of proof lies with you.
You might want to pay particular attention to the device category Android is running away with. I found it surprising.
Separately, the timing of that article (dated April 8, 2013) makes its manipulation transparent. Talking about Android's US market share peaking mere weeks before the 2013 flagships (GS4, HTC One) land is almost as stupid as claiming the iPhone has peaked based on the quarter before the new model is released. Of course, the bases are covered because they mention the GS4 launch lower down, but somehow that isn't reflected in the clickbait title.
I'd think twice before going to war with Google. Samsung's phones aren't as much better than Motorola as Samsung seems to think they are. It isn't hard to see Google pumping the next Razr model with significant advertising dollars and claiming the crown for best selling Android smartphone for itself. Remember how fast Chrome beat out Firefox and and IE?
Samsung should have been content slipping under Google's radar and riding that wave. I can't see how poking the Google beast is a good idea.
Fighting Google is the lesser of several evils. There are three companies doing serious mobile business: Apple, Amazon, and Samsung. All of them are at war with Google one way or another.
Everyone playing "nice" with Google is losing money and/or insignificant. They're going down the same road that the PC vendors went down playing by Microsoft's rules. It looked like a different game at the outset because Google wasn't charging them an $80 tax on each device. But the end result is the same, they are being commoditized into irrelevance.
This might sound crazy, but it seems that Google are trying to do the same to Apple as well. Obviously they won't switch to Android, but most consumers don't really care about the OS. Nobody can replace Google's apps - Apple can't, Samsung will fail if/when they try.
By placing their apps on iOS, and essentially being the best of breed in every category, the long game seems to be to relegate Apple into the realm of the Android OEM. When it comes time for average iOS consumer to replace his phone, if Google have managed to push enough apps on him, he probably cares more about them than iOS. If Google can play it right, they might be able to make choosing a phone choosing your favourite front for Google apps, with no revenue difference either way.
They're not there yet, but it looks like they want to be. If Samsung, Apple, whoever has market share don't move fast, and Google play it right, they could all become fronts for Google's apps. And then the market share just shifts around between the current best front for Google's apps.
Have you never used the Google apps on the iOS before ?
They are good but not significantly better than Apple's built in ones. Apple Maps may have less quality data but has a much better UI and uses a lot less data. Google Now is pointless compared to the genuinely useful Android version. Chrome is slower in most cases than Safari and not integrated with the rest of the OS. And really all their other apps simply aren't popular.
Unfortunately Apple just doesn't give third party apps any room to expand beyond its tiny little sandbox.
> They are good but not significantly better than Apple's built in ones.
I guess I'll agree to disagree here. Apple's first party apps significantly behind Google's in my opinion.
> Unfortunately Apple just doesn't give third party apps any room to expand beyond its tiny little sandbox.
This is unfortunate, but it looks like Google is working hard to make its own applications interop nicely and directly, even with the limited capability iOS provides for this.
Sure. I find the Mail app to be ugly when compared to Gmail and more frustrating to use. Chrome seems to handle text much better than Safari, and the syncing is more convenient to me (because the tabs sync with my Android/Linux devices as well probably). Apple Maps seems to give pretty poor directions relative to Google Maps (just last weekend 2 of my family members got lost on their way to a family party because they used Apple Maps and it took them to the opposite side of town). Everyone using Google Maps made it just fine. Siri's voice recognition feels much slower and less accurate than Google Now.
"By placing their apps on iOS, and essentially being the best of breed in every category..." I have to say that this is a stretch. Their mapping app is worse than Apple from a UX perspective. Granted the data is better, but Apple are improving very quickly in this concern. The Gmail app isn't even the best Gmail app on the platform, and their anti-user stance (getting rid of ActiveSync, not supporting push on other devices) is the only reason Mail isn't particularly great with Gmail. Conversely AS/Exchange, Hotmail/Outlook, Yahoo! and iCloud mail all work really well with Mail. The Google app itself is riddled with bugs that made the last update practically unusable and Now useless. The other apps barring Chrome, which does have issues but are out of Googles control, seem to be abandonware. For me, if you are already locked into the Google ecosystem, then Android is the obvious choice. However Google, IMHO, are playing dirty on this front.
"...they could all become fronts for Google's apps." Which would, IMHO, be disastrous for consumers and the open web. Google already have far too much control in the web space, getting close to ubiquity. Samsung, at this juncture, are the lesser of two evils. However, I wouldn't trust them as far as I could spit.
Android was designed to kill the smartphone business. Samsung is smart enough, and well run enough, to use Android and then discard it. Other Android OEMs are roadkill.
Hmm, I'm interested why you think that - I think Google's goal is to fundamentally change the smartphone business to be about services, not hardware, but I don't think that's the same as killing it. As for Samsung, Apple don't seem to be able to match Google's services, so I don't see why Samsung should be able to do any better. I don't own a Samsung device, but if I did I can't think of any Samsung service I'd want to use.
But the end result is the same, they are being commoditized into irrelevance.
Is that really true? I like Thinkpads, but not for the "ThinkVantage" features. In fact, the first thing I do when I buy a Lenovo laptop is remove all the stuff that "differentiates" them. I just want a computer, not "an experience".
> Samsung's phones aren't as much better than Motorola as Samsung seems to think they are. It isn't hard to see Google pumping the next Razr model with significant advertising dollars and claiming the crown for best selling Android smartphone for itself. Remember how fast Chrome beat out Firefox and and IE?
It's the brand that matters. Motorola's is pretty beat up and is losing a lot of money every quarter even after Google bought it. I doubt Samsung warming up to Google will stop it from marketing the next Razr phone anyway.
Also, much of Chrome's success among non-geeks came from default bundling and installation with Flash, Acrobat Reader and Java updates, not from Google's marketing. A lot of Firefox users that I had moved from IE during the IE7 days had no idea how they ended up with Chrome on their machine.
>Samsung should have been content slipping under Google's radar and riding that wave. I can't see how poking the Google beast is a good idea.
I don't think it's as easy for Google to sell tens of millions of phones as you think it is. They've had some major screwups with hardware like the Google TV, Nexus Q etc.
> They've had some major screwups with hardware like the Google TV
AFAIK Google has never released their own hardware for Google TV. Hopefully this changes but it's probably not fair to lump the shitpool that is Google TV hardware in with Google's hardware faults (of which the Nexus Q really seems to be the only one, maybe the Xoom as well?).
Samsung will never truly ditch the platform that helped it become the number #1 mobile phone maker in the world, at least not in the next few years. While Samsung undoubtedly have a plan for Tizen, swapping out Android for Tizen is probably suicide right about now. Without Android, Samsung probably wouldn't be in the place that they are right now: highly profitable and popular.
The average consumer doesn't buy a phone because of it's CPU, battery life or operating system, they buy phones based on the number of apps in an app store. The reason Apple were the number ones for so long is due to the fact they were the first mobile phone manufacturer to have a decent app store. Sure Symbian had app stores and before that you had stores where you could buy Java apps for other phones, but nothing unified and supported by just one device existed.
The only way Tizen will succeed is if they manage to build an app marketplace that can rival Android or iOS: consumers want apps. As Microsoft and Blackberry have shown, it's not easy releasing a new OS and getting developers to spend time and money to build for yet another operating system and marketplace with little market share in comparison to Android or iOS. The Lumia 920 had some of the best hardware and camera around, but failed to reach the masses because of the app store drama's.
Lets not forget the other side of the story here. Samsung are helping Android out here as well, every time Samsung sells a phone it's currently benefiting Android not hurting it. Currently it is in Ssamsung's best interests to see Android succeed as it took what, five years for Android to be the dominant player in the mobile space via it's quantity not quality approach in the early days. Anything is possible here for either platform.
I foresee Samsung releasing Tizen phones and Android phones in the future, then depending on the success of Tizen choosing to venture down a completely Android-less path. Only time will tell what truly happens here, not conspiracy theories.
I am a happy Samsung Galaxy S4 owner and I really like the TouchWiz additions Samsung put over the top that make the phone more user-friendly and easier to use. I don't see the additions as a degradation of the Android experience, I actually prefer them and they're leaps and bounds more stable than the additions in the S3 or S2 (which seems to contradict this article suggesting Samsung want Android to fail).
So what, they still can't just upload all apps from the Google Play Store into their own.
I've actually tried some of the other stores for publishing my own apps and my experience is that users of those alternative stores either have no money or do not want to spend any money on apps. (the sales have been catastrophic, even in Amazons App store)
The point of an app store is to make money for the app store owner. The owner charges "rent" to put your app in its store. The rent is a cut of your earnings. So, given this fact - do you think putting Google Play on its Tizen would benefit Samsung? Because then the marketplace would still be google's and the revenue would still be theirs..
Amazon Marketplace is not Google play is it? So the revenue from it is going to amazon.
Paying off a software developer for an exclusive is, by some measures bad. But how bad is it? Worse than Netflix having exclusive content? Worse than exclusive games on consoles?
There is a lot not to like about Samsung's approach to "differentiation," but this seems like a minor, petty basis for condemning Samsung as harmful to the overall Android ecosystem.
It is also alarmist to say Google is in a weak position relative to Samsung.
Compared with Amazon, who compete directly with parts of Google's ecosystem on an Android-derived platform, Samsung is a model citizen, if you look at the world that way.
Google is content to leave a large penumbra of non-Google-ecosystem Android devices in the market without exerting any pressure to reign them in. Why worry on Google's behalf?
You know, Samsung did the exact same thing last year with the S3 and Flipboard. I believe that, at the time, some people had similar concerns. In retrospect, though, that deal turned out great for Android. Samsung paying for exclusivity helped give the Flipboard developers an incentive to do the (long-desired) port. A year later, "everyone" has it and most people have forgotten that Samsung had an exclusive window (if they ever knew it at all). If the ITV app turns out similarly (and other have pointed out that the exclusive window is limited), I don't see any reason to be worried on behalf of "Android".
This articles just increase my expectations for FirefoxOS and Ubuntu phones. I really want one of them to succeed. Firefox can probably attract more developers than Ubuntu.
Android has never been particularly open; never in the sense of FOSS. Samsung is in the business of selling devices and their business strategy is winning at the moment. I am sure Google too is looking for business though their scale dwarfs in comparison to Samsung.
Yes, Google should be supporting active pens in a much bigger way. There are certain "niches" in the app ecosystems where the iPad and the iPhone are much better than Android, and that's mainly because of Google's almost complete disregard for those categories of apps such as: games, music tools, and drawing/designing.
Rumors are Google begin to address gaming at next I/O, and some rumors said they will announce something about audio latency improvements in Android, too. But I'm not expecting them to announce anything about drawing yet.
I don't think Google dropped the ball on active digitizers, other OEMs did. From what I remember, at least two other companies (HTC and Lenovo) also tried active digitizers on tablets. And soon after that (right around the original Note), Google started adding more stylus APIs in ICS.
Unfortunately, the HTC and Lenovo tablets flopped (and I can say, from personal experience, the HTC Flyer deserved it - the stylus was laggy and very disappointing) and only the Note took off. It's really disappointing how many OEMs are going after the Note's screen size and how none of them are going after the active stylus (though I'm sure Samsung's Wacom investment has complicated that). My Note 2's stylus is one of the few reasons I put up with TouchWiz.
Drawing/handwriting on the iPad isn't great either; the software (3rd party) is good but the hardware isn't. Samsung on the other hand have the hardware spot on, but their software could be a (lot) better.
Apparently the Surface Pro pen is just as good; that doesn't surprise me in the slightest because Microsoft have been active in that area for a long, long time.
A proper pressure-sensitive stylus from Apple would be nice. Out of the few pressure-sensitive bluetooth styli available from third-parties, only two (Pogo Connect & Jot Touch 4) support palm rejection. Even the prototype pen showed by Adobe during MAX didn't seem to have palm rejection implemented. It just feels really awkward holding a pen without putting the palm on a surface somewhere. The drawings apps on iOS are so good though, and if I have to pick between good hardware/weak software (Android tablets w/ S-pen) and good software/weak hardware (iPads w/ 3rd party pen), I would choose the latter.
Also, the Surface Pro pen apparently had issues supporting Photoshop, and it didn't get fixed until a (beta) driver update released two days ago.
As a monetization strategy an app maker gets in bed with a certain vendor. This has literally nothing to do with Android (or "fragmentation"), and Samsung is just as capable of entering into such deals as HTC is, or Apple, or any other vendor.
If I were a consumer of the service, I would be pissed with the service provider for making that choice.
Android was gaining significant market share before Samsung emerged as the clear leader (see Motorola Droid, HTC Incredible, etc). There's tons of budget consumers carrying around sub $100 Android phones from Cricket, etc, many of which aren't Samsung devices. (I see probably 100 of those for every 1 Windows phone I see in the wild) Also, since you didn't delineate that you're referring to phones alone, I'm sure the tablets sold by Amazon and B&N are quite relevant.
When you use Apple products everything is tied into Apple. I didn't like some parts of their ecosystem (Itunes). It is all or nothing for Apple, so I said farewell and moved on.
When I switched to Android I discovered it is strongly tied to Google, their services are great and free. However I grew increasingly worried about a future in which my account ends up as a "false positive" and my life get's deleted. — Seriously those horror stories about people's Google account getting deleted for no good reason are very scary to a startup founder. The probability is very low, but I am scared enough to invest money and time in moving all my data away from Google.
So Samsung if the article is right and this is your longterm strategy, I wish you best of luck, don't expect me to be a customer at any point in the future.