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Comment by geodel | Hacker News Reader

> On the one side you have Samsung, who are unhappy enough with their dependence on Google that they'll not likely eat the cost of moving from Android to something else...

Strange argument. Maybe they will move all their devices to their own superior OS Tizen. Or maybe they tried and it did not turn out very well.

So whichever side Samsung is it does not affect Google. There are many phone makers not that many phone OS makes. And with chinese manufacturers already pounding them they have no leverage on Google.

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> Maybe they will move all their devices to their own superior OS Tizen. Or maybe they tried and it did not turn out very well.

Google (via the Open Handset Alliance) managed to enforce the current status quo. Manufacturers can't simultaneously ship their own OS like forked versions of Android, or presumably Tizen, and still be allowed to use Google Play Services. It's all-Google or nothing. I don't know whether Tizen is superior or not but one could assume it isn't simply due to the lacking ecosystem. Windows Phone was a good OS. It was shot in the foot by a weak app ecosystem.

> So whichever side Samsung is it does not affect Google.

Samsung has 20% of the market and a lot more of the high end market. Going with "not Google" means a lot of users no longer using Google Play Store and services. It most certainly would "affect" Google.

It’s a game of chicken and one Samsung can’t win, but Google probably doesn’t want to inflict on them. Look at how well Huawei is doing outside China without google services (they’re dead in the water). Samsung doesn’t want that and can’t build an app ecosystem on their own. If Google pulls them and android and more importantly the android SDKs and dev tools toward Fuschia, I guarantee you that Samsung will follow.

At the same time I think Google would be foolish to intentionally antagonize one of their most successful partners. If Samsung’s bungled reaction was to try to go it alone with Tizen or hold out upgrading their phones to a new android, it only helps Apple and iOS, and that’s the last thing google wants.

*Fuchsia

> It’s a game of chicken and one Samsung can’t win

Indeed, they most likely can't (easily) make Tizen a commercial success to rival Android, and even using an Android fork would still be far from ideal without Google's Play Services.

But Google probably can't legally sustain this position for long and hold OEMs hostage, especially with all the antitrust scrutiny they are facing now. Conditioning access to the Play Services on using exclusively Google on every device sounds like something that could be considered anti-competitive.

My understanding was not that a manufacturer had to use a Google OS on all their devices, but that they could not ship Android without Google services. So Samsung can (and has in minuscule quantities) ship a Tizen phone. Or a Windows phone. They just cannot ship an AOSP phone.

Everyone in China ships AOSP phones. You’re completely free to. But everyone wants google services because everywhere outside China, they’re ubiquitous.

And Tizen will never be a successful software ecosystem on the order of android or iOS. Samsung is all thumbs when it comes to software. They don’t understand how to build and sustain a software platform and what third party devs need.

> Samsung has 20% of the market and a lot more of the high end market. Going with "not Google" means a lot of users no longer using Google Play Store and services. It most certainly would "affect" Google.

That will make Samsung phones very pretty door stops. Users do not care about phones. Users care about apps that run on those phones. Samsung has no apps that users care about ( IG/Facebook/TikTok/Snapchat/Banking/News/Tinder/etc ) without Google Play.

That's the point I made in the comment. Having no apps will shoot even good OSes in the foot. This being said all Samsung needs is for an antitrust investigation to break the exclusivity clause.

Samsung doesn't need to drop Android, they need to be able to sell phones with other OSes. Tizen probably fits the bill for low-end, cheap phones. With the exclusivity clause in place Samsung would have to bridge the canyon between the current Tizen ecosystem and where Samsung would want it in one step. Removing the limitation just gives them the chance to take it one step at a time with building their ecosystem (not a pleasant thought looking at the state of their software but hey...).

I would argue that it is not possible to slowly built that ecosystem. Samsung apps are crap and popular apps that people want create no motivation from developers to support yet another platform.

That's why the Windows Phone failed -- even though Microsoft offered shops with reasonably popular apps both money and placement to make them available in their store at the end the cost of supporting another platform was too high.

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