Samsung’s secret mission to cut Google out of its Galaxy
digitaltrends.com
digitaltrends.com
As a Android user, I like Google's interface and several of the apps. Samsung's apps are extremely poor quality. I own 3 of their devices (two phones and a tablet) and I don't use a single Samsung app on any of them. I would actually pay extra for a Samsung device with stock Android installation modified for Samsung hardware support and nothing else.
Not to say I don't have problems with Google, I do. Privacy, in particular the lack of granular control to lock down feature access by application, the scenario is this:
You're looking for a app particular type of app, you find a simple one that does everything you need, requiring only access to store data locally. Perfect! You install it, then a month later an update comes out that requires additional privileges, network access, because the developer has decided that everybody must want to store their notes in the cloud. Obviously you can elect to remain at the previous version for something as simple as the notepad, but when you move to more complex apps that's no longer an option. If you stopped updating apps a year ago for instance, you'd now be vulnerable to a myriad of attacks due to improper SSL implementations that've since been corrected.
I'm aware that in that context I could install a firewall and remove the apps network access, but how could you prevent an app accessing your contacts, messages, SD card, etc.
Surely there's a market for guaranteed apps that guarantee zero feature-creep? No updates beyond security and hardware support. I'd buy it.
I never got to try it (went from 4.2 CyanogenMod to Nexus 5) but there are apps which do the same in the Play Store. They supposedly break a great deal of apps, though, and that may be why Google removed theirs in the first place. Hopefully just for the time being.
With the complexity of today's app, which become close to yestersay's desktop one, it seems like samsung goal is really unreachable. They've tried it with bada without luck, then tizen, and now they're doing it with android.
Maybe what they're trying to do is not to get rid of android, but rather to create its own fork, just like amazon. That seems like a much more manageable ambition.