Samsung has shown clear signs of building a rival Android ecosystem to Google’s for a year or more now. It has been investing in software start-ups and developer communities and building its own user interfaces and stores. And why wouldn’t it? It dominates the Android device market and increasingly has little motivation to abdicate the power that brings to another company, especially in a world where more and more revenue and brand profile comes from content and user experience, not just hardware. Amazon, the other big rival to Google as an Android power base, has shown the world how that works, but the Korean giant is an even greater threat to Google’s control of its own platform, at least in the short term, because of its hardware penetration.
However, longer term, that may change, not just because the fickle mobile buying public may turn against Galaxy, but also because the value in the mobile space will shift even more towards the firms which brand and deliver content, and a common interface across all kinds of screens. That means Samsung needs to intensify its efforts in software and content considerably, and the developer event it held this week showed it clearly recognizes the fact.
Discussions of whether it would abandon Android for its own-controlled Tizen in future are old-fashioned ‘ this is not just about a mobile OS war, but about the overall digital content experience. Google, Amazon, Samsung, Apple and Microsoft are all chasing that multiscreen, multimedia platform, and each has its own strengths and weaknesses. The problem for Google is that the first three are all basing their attack on Android, and while Amazon beats the search giant on retail reach and slick user experience, Samsung does the same on hardware and the marketing juggernaut that goes with being a massive consumer electronics marketer. Google itself has its own key advantage ‘ its leadership of the Android developer community and wider ecosystem. Each of these three Android giants will retain an important role, but the balance of power will depend on how far each can emulate the strengths of the other, which in Samsung’s case means a major effort in software.
Samsung hosted its first developer conference this week in San Francisco, where it has been tapping into the Silicon Valley community recently via incubations and investments as well as a major R&D hub. This highlighted many of its future directions, though its main purpose was to establish the vendor’s credentials as a developer platform in its own right, independent of Google.
Nor was everything about Android. Like many companies, Samsung apparently sees Android as the safest best for broad mobile appeal right now, but is also keen to explore other options which might enable it to leap into the next generation of mobile platforms ‘ those based around HTML5 and cloud services rather than native apps ‘ with a greater degree of control. Firefox, Ubuntu, Baidu and others are contenders for the crown, though the more important point ‘ and the more threatening one to Android ‘ is that, with HTML5 as a unifying umbrella, they could all claim a viable platform. In theory at least, HTML5 will end the apps wars and the inevitable consolidation around two or three OSs with the largest numbers of programs to their names.
That’s a far-off dream of course, and one that will almost certainly be tainted just as Java’s was, but there will certainly be openings for new platforms and ecosystems in the post-PC world, and if Samsung assembles its software credibility and its developer base now, around Android, it may be ready to take a bigger role in the HTML5 era. It has its OS lined up, in the shape of Tizen, an open source mash-up of two failed mobile Linux offerings, LiMO and MeeGo (the latter itself an amalgamation of Intel’s Moblin and Nokia’s Maemo). The history is not promising, and nor was the delay of the first Samsung Tizen smartphone, reportedly because of problems with that most critical of elements, the store. However, Samsung is said to have incorporated elements of another of its inhouse operating systems, bada, which powered the relatively successful Wave range for a while, and has some commercial experience. And its sheer market weight will attract many developers who are already working with HTML5 to optimize their offerings for Tizen.
All that is for the future though, and Samsung’s business is all about huge volumes in the here and now ‘ which means Android.
Most of the 1,300 attendees were Android focused, and Samsung delivered them no fewer than five software development kits (SDKs), each for a different device type, but designed to make it easy to link applications across multiple devices. They are Mobile, Multiscreen, Gaming, Smart TV and Knox (the silicon-to-apps enterprise security platform).
Together with an enhanced smart TV user interface, these were clear nods to the multiscreen world where the smartphone controls everything and content and apps are delivered uniformly and interactively to many screens. They also take Samsung far beyond Google in scope and reach, if not in the depth of the mobile Android base, because of its presence in TVs and other screens. And it is directly hitting at some of Google’s most trumpeted capabilities ‘ Samsung has a new digital wallet, for instance, while the Multiscreen SDK supports applications in which the user presses a button on the handset and launches a video stream or app on the TV, a hallmark of the Google TV and Chromecast efforts.
Other announcements included deeper support for pen input and controls, as Samsung ‘ like its rivals ‘ seeks to differentiate its user experience with input mechanisms that go beyond the standard touchscreen and keyboard. Its flagship in this area is the S Pen, which has an apps ecosystem of its own for the Galaxy Note range.
Samsung is nowhere close, yet, to Google, Microsoft or Apple in its ability to manage and drive a massive developer base. But it does promise programmers a vast market. If it separated its Android platform more significantly from Google’s, as Amazon has done, it would certainly be the version most developers would target first, since it now accounts for one in three smartphones shipped on the planet (a majority in Android), and has sold 53m TVs and 250m client devices (handsets, tablets, notebooks and so on) in the past year.
“Once these devices are connected, we hope to build one of the largest platforms in the world to deliver apps, services and ads,” said David Eun, head of the vendor’s Open Innovation Center, where it incubates start-ups.
Those were the words which should keep Google awake at night. Samsung is no longer dabbling in software. For instance, the Mobile SDK offers 800 APIs to developers, and the Galaxy Note’s pen alone has 1,800 apps. Now the company will move from just attracting developers to its devices, to creating a semi-closed platform within Android.
The Korean giant needs far less help from Google now. A few years ago it had virtually no smartphone presence and no reputation in software, so an already established platform was a major bonus. But it completely reversed the first situation and is on the way to doing the same in software, and a few extra sales via the Nexus partnership with Google will hardly be enough to keep it loyal (though Samsung also has a long history of backing every OS flavour, and may continue to do so if Google permits).
But either way, it is developing an Android experience which goes far beyond a differentiated overlay like HTC Sense ‘ and Google was concerned enough about those UIs, trying and failing to impose a uniform Android look and feel on several occasions. It is rolling out a rising number of rich and distinctive functions over which Google has no control, like the S-Pen, and which compete directly with its own services, as seen in Samsung’s Wallet, navigation, voice input and other features. This is even worse than a UI that excludes Google services such as search, as Amazon’s does.
Google has many weapons to fight back, but users have not moved as quickly as it once predicted to aligning themselves primarily with a web service or application, rather than a piece of hardware. The vision of hardware irrelevance never quite works out as Google would like. Even the Chromebook ‘ the latest attempt to create a commodity, no-frills appliance to run all kinds of web-based functionality ‘ has recently morphed into a piece of premium design, tempting buyers with its appearance and brand not just its browser UI. Until consumers fall out of love with the gadget, Google will have a serious problem with Samsung’s decision to dominate Android software as well as hardware.
This is one reason why Google has gone the other way and invested in hardware itself ‘ not just to emulate Apple’s vertically integrated approach, but to use differentiated gadgets to showcase the joys of its own Android implementation and apps. So it is starting to build a hardware ecosystem of its own, making the best of the shotgun wedding with Motorola Mobility that the company’s canny former CEO, Sanjay Jha, foisted upon the search giant as the price of gaining a treasure trove of patents.
Google must know that it is too late and too inexperience in hardware to mount a device challenge to Samsung. Instead, it wants to do something different with its Motorola unit ‘ and something that keeps that at a distance from other Android licensees and Nexus partners. The mobile unit this week unveiled Project Ara, which allows users to create modular phones, mixing and matching components as they do with PCs. This is not a new idea of course ‘ remember the innovative Modu? – but it could help Google to repeat what it did in software and build a large ecosystem around Android, this time in hardware.
Project Ara is far more than the customized colors and skins which were announced with Motorola’s last smartphone, the Moto X. Emerging from the division’s Advanced Technology and Projects Group ‘ the crown jewel, after the IPR, for Google ‘ this combines a smartphone ‘exoskeleton’ with a range of user-selectable hardware modules. Some of the modules which will be available to pick and choose are likely to include application processors, displays, keyboards, batteries and sensors.
The important factor is that most of these will come from third parties. In others words, this is not just a gimmick to differentiate Motorola handsets, but the basis, according to Paul Eremenko of the Project Ara team, of a ‘free, open hardware platform for creating highly modular smartphones.’ Motorola has already been working with Phonebloks, a pioneer of modular handsets, on the project and will have access to that company’s open hardware development community.
Just as Google brought mobile open source software out of geekdom and into the consumerist mainstream, it aims to do the same for the hobbyist area of open source hardware, getting itself a power base in handsets without having to rely on the unlikely prospect of Motorola or Nexus suddenly challenging Samsung’s volumes.
Eremenko added: ‘We want to do for hardware what the Android platform has done for software: create a vibrant third party developer ecosystem, lower the barriers to entry, increase the pace of innovation, and substantially compress development timelines.’ With Samsung and Amazon having the same idea in Android software, and the world of the anonymous web appliance still far away, this may be Google’s best move in years to maintain its mobile momentum.