Being in the mobile health space, I instantly went into my pitching mode and started selling them on the virtues of mobile health and why it would help provide some platform stickiness (if I have a chronic disease and have lots of health data there, I wouldn't want to switch platform and lose my valuable data). This was before Apple Health was launched or was ever mentioned.
Quickly it became clear to me, Samsung was ahead of me and they fully understood the value of health data. And it was very clear how strategic they were about the future of mobile and ways the would be able to keep people on their platform.
It's obvious Samsung understands the value of software. Especially as more Chinese or Taiwanese companies are making competing hardware, it's become very difficult to differentiate or be able to differentiate in the long-run.
It's natural Samsung would want to find ways of differentiating against their competitors. However, they have not been successful yet. I think part of the problem is corporate structure/culture. Will Samsung be able to build an entire consumer software division that is free to operate fast, test things and break things? Or will the team be slowed down having to coordinating with Seoul?
Either way, Samsung will alway be one step behind Google, not having full visibility in Googles updates. And there is a chance that Google may want to put a distance between itself and the other handset makers just to reap more profits from their hardware division.
If I was samsung, I would try to focus on killer apps within the asian market. For example, Yandex (of Russia) until recently (and maybe still) had far better map over google maps in their region. Even for places like Turkey, Yandex had a better map. Can Samsung become the brand for providing far better mapping technology in the region? Can they build much better search technology for asian languages?