Meh. Samsung (and Huawei) are still the best selling phones in developing countries.
Samsung could definitely both reduce the unnecessarily large number of SKUs, and better unify their software stack so they could update for 5 years all of their phones.
It's crazy how we went from PCs having the right abstractions, where you can easily keep a 10 year old PC updated, to this awful Android situation.
They are not. Samsung is #1 but after that there is a very long tail of Android smartphone manufacturers that most people in western countries haven't even heard of. Xiaomi, Oppo and Vivo for example all have double digit market shares globally, and combined sell more than Samsung. Realme and ZTE have >5%. The "others" section in most graphs is >30%. If you narrow down the price to say <$100 there is an even larger spread.
Expecting continued multi-year support from manufacturers and carriers is impossible at this range when the sole focus is on driving down the price and nothing else.
Sure. I don't know enough about those companies so I'm not complaining about them.
But I know Samsung has the money and manpower to drastically improve the situation, yet they don't care.
With the right abstractions, they would only have a single version of "Samsung OS", like you only have a single version of Windows/Ubuntu. And all devices within reason would be able to immediately update to the latest version of Samsung OS, like PCs can.
Go to a developing country and see the share of PCs that are running Windows XP and you will realize that things aren't that simple. The majority of the world doesn't care about OS updates, and they are definitely not spending money on it. They simply want stuff to continue to work exactly as it did when they bought it. Mobile phones already get updated at a much higher rate than PCs. The vast majority of PCs in the world stay on the version that the manufacturer installed throughout their lifetime.
And say in your example Samsung does get its shit together and spends a ton of money to upgrade every phone in the world...that's still ~25-30% of the Android population. What about the rest?
The situation is understandable for budget phones sold in developing countries, but that's almost entirely irrelevant to what companies like Samsung and Google do for their flagship products.
> With the right abstractions, they would only have a single version of "Samsung OS", like you only have a single version of Windows/Ubuntu. And all devices within reason would be able to immediately update to the latest version of Samsung OS, like PCs can.
Sorry, but that's just not how developing for mobile SoCs work, and, regardless, Samsung ships Qualcomm chipsets in many of their phones. Once the latest version of "Samsung OS" needs a kernel version beyond what Qualcomm is willing to provide binary blobs for on a particular chipset, that's it for updates to phones that use that chipset.
And sure, maybe they could keep "Samsung OS" limping along on an older kernel, with some missing or broken functionality, but that costs time and money. It's not unreasonable for Samsung to not want to spend it.
> that most people in western countries haven't even heard of. Xiaomi, Oppo and Vivo
Please stop considering US+Canada == "most western countries". Xiaomi and Oppo are big brands, quite popular in Europe (especially Southern Europe), and FFS Oppo are one of the major sponsors of the Champions League, one of the biggest and most popular football competitions in the world.
I've got a stack of Xiaomi phones because they randomly don't work with various south- and southeast-Asian countries' carriers, but not in any predictable or documented way. So I have my Sri Lanka phone and my Maldives phone and my Bangladesh phone, plus two different India phones because of course West Bengal has to be different.
Doesn’t this have more to do with the hardware bands available in the device rather than the carrier software installed on the phone? Perhaps as part of the race to the bottom on price Xiaomi forgoes hardware components that allow a given phone to operate on bands that are common outside the region it was sold in or the carrier it partners with. It would make sense if that was the case, because the people spending $20 USD on a phone typically aren’t going to be traveling a lot anyway
> It's crazy how we went from PCs having the right abstractions, where you can easily keep a 10 year old PC updated, to this awful Android situation.
I feel like TPM and some modern OSes and software requiring it would like a word in that regard. :(
But yes, it feels like PCs are generally more open to both updates and running different OSes instead of smartphones getting turned into e-waste because of the more closed ecosystem (drivers, bootloaders, support).
Samsung is garbage tier and on my list of Never Buy.
They have big marketing campaigns and their phones at max brightness with a cool default wallpaper. The crapware is annoying and the performance is average at best.
Samsung could definitely both reduce the unnecessarily large number of SKUs, and better unify their software stack so they could update for 5 years all of their phones.
It's crazy how we went from PCs having the right abstractions, where you can easily keep a 10 year old PC updated, to this awful Android situation.