Written: January 28, 2017
Samsung is the biggest Android smartphone vendor by far, and it’s managed to achieve that position without being particularly good at adding value through services – its main advantages have been scale and marketing muscle, as well as decent (and recently much improved) industrial design. But it has repeatedly tried and failed to make its proprietary services on its smartphones meaningful positive differentiators rather than sub-par alternatives to the ones that ship with Android.
That’s not to say that Samsung hasn’t tried with services, over and over again. It’s put its own voice assistant, video services, music services, and much more besides onto smartphones, but they’ve either fallen short or eventually been killed off entirely (see especially its “Milk”-branded music and video services). Samsung simply doesn’t seem to have the corporate culture necessary to do really well in software or services above and beyond the core Android experience. It’s also been prone to gimmicky add-ons that make for interesting keynote demos but aren’t useful in real life. In the last couple of years, it seems to have toned back some of these customizations and its ugly UI overlays as well, partly in response to pressure from Google.
However, it doesn’t seem to have given up entirely – it recently acquired Viv, a voice assistant made by some of the original creators of Siri, and intends to make an integrated version a standout feature in its 2017 flagship devices. Whether it’s able to do this effectively is a big question mark – it won’t have had much time to do that integration, and shipping a half-baked voice assistant is worse than no assistant at all, especially as Google’s own Assistant is likely to make an appearance on more competing Android smartphones later this year.
Short of making one or more big acquisitions in the services space to bring in the necessary skills and expertise, Samsung is likely destined to keep falling short on services. As Android competition intensifies, and especially as Google pushes further into the space with both its own first party Pixel hardware and potentially a renewed push in mature markets around Android One, that’s going to become an increasingly important disadvantage for Samsung, and one that it needs to take seriously.