Samsung is hurting Android

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.

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 am an android developer.

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.]