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.
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).
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?"
http://www.engadget.com/2010/09/07/samsung-fascinate-review/
eg: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4346221
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 A, The easy root exploit via /dev/mem:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2048511
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).
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/feb/22/samsung-cop...
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.
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.
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 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 ?
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.
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.
Afaik, Google also sells commercial support for email, documents, etc? As a founder, you'd probably want a company email address anyway...
Googlw would hardly dare to delete those company accounts without a court order?
And Google could very well delete (or block) "those company accounts" without thinking twice.
After all, it's not like "company accounts" are sacred. Especially when the company is some 3-4 person shop in Iowa or something.
PayPal blocks such accounts all the time.
If they had any sense they should buy BB or Palm OS.
http://www.webosnation.com/lg-purchasing-hps-webos-division-...
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.
Their only option is to move faster than Samsung to make sure samsung follows.
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.
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.
[1] https://plus.google.com/100275307499530023476/posts/ViCME1bb...
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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?).
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.]
...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).
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.
[1] https://github.com/yareally/SignalInfo
[2] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cc.signali...
Why no-one else is innovating in that area is beyond me. Or do google prefer us to type our data in, because it's easier to index?
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.
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.
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.
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.
http://www.engadget.com/2013/05/09/samsung-itv-player-androi...
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.
http://econintersect.com/b2evolution/blog1.php/2013/04/08/an...
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).
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.
Maybe. But without Samsung there is NO Android.
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.
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?
If I were a consumer of the service, I would be pissed with the service provider for making that choice.
