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Comment by laurencei | Hacker News Reader

"Most other smartphone manufacturers, including the world’s largest, Samsung, use Android but do not actively develop the software, only modify it, relying on Google for primary development."

I never really understand this. Surely Samsung has the technical expertise to develop an OS to suit their own hardware?

Is it really worth relying on Google to make Android, and then "modify it" to suit their needs?

It is clear the benefit of Apple having control over the entire product - why do other large smart phone companies not do this?

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Mobile phone app stores are a natural monopoly choke point; at the moment the market can just about sustain two app stores where one is slightly lower quality than the other. The others (Windows Mobile, Blackberry World, arguably the Amazon one) are much less popular.

Samsung phones would be worth much less without the Play store, and everything follows from there.

Because it's (relatively) easy to develop a good OS, or one better than Android, but it's going to be very difficult to get the 3rd party apps to support your platform before you have enough users. And you wont get the users without 3rd party app support.

And Samsung already gets to modify Android to the point it breaks apps and forces devs to apply Samsung specific fixes. I don't really think there's a length they could go that's too far in modifying the OS past replacing Android as a base. Their market share is so large devs just put up with it.

You mean like how easy it was for Firefox?

I said "relatively". That is to say: relative to getting 3rd party app support from everybody.

Android is big brand, you can take a ride on the Google / Android branding and their appstore with a million apps.

Samsung is, however, developing Tizen, their own OS, which runs on the gear s3 watch and a number of smartphones. But the appstore is still pretty empty and consumers are weary.

Tizen is slightly more acceptable in a smartwatch because android wear is still very deficient in everything. As soon as Google bothers to bring it up to date with competitors, tizen loses all appeal.

Samsung has pretty much accomplished that, sort of by a random walk of features. Samsung's Android is different enough that, for some customers, it is preferable.

But it means Samsung's versions lag Google significantly, and Samsung is quick to orphan their own products. So Samsung customers start behind, and get stranded in the past of Android. Also, app developers often have to to test specifically on Samsung phones because Samsung has introduced bugs and security issues with their modifications.

> I never really understand this. Surely Samsung has the technical expertise to develop an OS to suit their own hardware?

Sure, they do. Its just a huge expense and then you've got to market both your tech stack and your app store to developers, otherwise, you've got a smart phone without apps to sell. With Android, you've got apps, plus you can still try to market your own unique stack on top of android and app store for additional benefit (and Samsung does), but in the worst case you've still got access to the Android ecosystem and Google Play Store, which provides value to your hardware.

They already have. It's called Tizen. [1]

1) https://www.tizen.org/

I imagine Android's fractured ecosystem prevents this. App developers have limited resources. Any new OS has to compete with iOS and a half dozen Android versions. Few companies will want to develop apps for your OS if you can't get the say 5% market share of a 5-year old Android version.

This a lot like asking why Lenovo uses Windows rather than make their own desktop OS.

They have, its called Tizen. Rasterman (of the Enlightenment Desktop Environment) works for them on it.

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