AppleInsider wrote about the escalating hostilities between Google and Samsung.
Disagreement over tablets:
Back in 2010, Google similarly tried to stop Samsung from using Android 2.x to build a tablet clone of Apple’s iPad, insisting that its Android licensees wait until it could release Android 3.0 Honeycomb with features that promoted Google’s own vision for tablets.
Samsung pushed ahead with its Galaxy Tab anyway, distracting attention away from Google’s Honeycomb project while also creating a bad experience for early Android tablet adopters. Google had also warned Samsung that its tablet products were too obviously similar to Apple’s iPad.
Samsung’s shift to Tizen:
Samsung initially used a heavily-modified Android to power its first Galaxy Gear watch. However, fights between the two companies concerning Samsung’s copying of the Google Play store and muscling into other services (including advertising) that Google expected to keep for itself have since contributed to Samsung’s efforts to develop new watch models based on its own Tizen.
The threat of Tizen to Google:
Were Samsung able to migrate its Galaxy customers from Android to Tizen, Google’s market share numbers of devices using Android code would collapse in half. Fortunately for Google, Samsung hasn’t been very successful with Tizen so far.
Google wants more control over Android phones:
At the beginning of this year, Google’s head of Android Sundar Pichai demanded Samsung drop its new “Magazine UX” tablet interface, with The Information later reporting that Pichai was “prepared to forbid” Samsung from using Google’s ostensibly open Android operating system unless Samsung surrendered more control to Google.
The illusion of Android “openness”:
Ironically, Google’s original premise for Android was that it would allow companies to “openly” innovate and experiment with different designs while also allowing hackers and hobbyists to fully access all parts of the operating system, ideas that Google contrasted against Apple’s plans for uniform, secure iPhones limited to running approved, encryption-signed apps.
However, Google’s current plan for Android imposes increasingly strict rules over Android licensees and introduces locked down security features similar to iOS, in an effort to dump hobbyists and pick up enterprise customers and other higher end customers who are willing to pay a premium for secure devices.
Google wants Samsung to put and end to Tizen smartwatches:
Having crushed Samsung’s aspirations for original phone and tablet software, Google is now demanding that Samsung stop developing its own Tizen-powered watches and instead fall in line to support Android Wear, which is only represented on one of the four smartwatch models Samsung currently sells.
Who would have more to lose here? Can Google live without Samsung making Android devices? Or can Samsung be able to deliver hardware and software on its own?
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