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I get what you're saying, but Samsung is also huge and Bluetooth is used in lots of electronics that Samsung sells -- including laptops, tablets, smart watches,

I get what you're saying, but Samsung is also huge and Bluetooth is used in lots of electronics that Samsung sells -- including laptops, tablets, smart watches, TVs... or conceivably could sell, like future IoT products. If someone senior at Samsung said to their vendor "good Bluetooth or you lose the Samsung account", that would provoke some, um, intense conversations at the vendor between sales and engineering. Incidentally Apple sometimes has more than one vendor too, so it's not just two parties. I know cases where they've had two suppliers. Displays and modems come to mind, although I've not Googled to verify.

mschuster91 6y ago
> If someone senior at Samsung said to their vendor "good Bluetooth or you lose the Samsung account", that would provoke some, um, intense conversations at the vendor between sales and engineering. The problem: There aren't that many suppliers left in the field, and Broadcom knows that their customers are pretty much locked in. The notable exception is once again Apple, they have proven that they can and will go and implement the technology on their own if their suppliers fail to meet their expectations.
- dflock 6y ago
  > go and implement the technology on their own Samsung could obviously do this too, but as you say, they lack the will - and motivation.
  - mschuster91 6y ago
    Besides that they also lack the amount of control over the software side. Google is the entity that controls the stack, not Samsung - their responsibility ends at the kernel / HAL interface. So why should Samsung invest more than the bare minimum when they can't get anything measurable in return?
    - Godel_unicode 6y ago
      This is, of course, totally untrue. Samsung changes a ton of things about their flavor of Android, at every level of the stack. Edit: Samsung has apparently already ripped out the Bluetooth stack and replaced it with their own - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26650447 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26650447
cogman10 6y ago
I get what you are saying but they are simply in different positions. Broadcom can say "Hey, there's a bunch of work here to make this not suck" and Samsung, even if they wanted to do their own thing, realizes they too would have to go through that effort to make everything work. It wouldn't be a simple matter of just making non-sucky bluetooth, they'd have to also work with the android OS to improve the bluetooth stack and no guarantee that those changes can be merged. Apple controls their whole stack. They've already written the Bluetooth stack for their OS. They only have to service their devices. > Incidentally Apple sometimes has more than one vendor too, so it's not just two parties. Not the point I was making. It's not an issue with multiple vendors, its and issue of who controls what. Those other vendors also have to conform to apples standards if they want to sell apple their products. What I'm talking about is the fact that a bluetooth device manufacture has to conform to google's android standards if they want to sell their chips to android manufactures, not to samsung standards. That's where the leverage goes away. If samsung ever pulls the trigger and uses Tizen everywhere, then they'll be more in Apples position. Until that happens, they need to work with google to get stuff done.
- Godel_unicode 6y ago
  Except that's not how it works? Chip manufacturers just care about selling chips, not about being in the iPhone or being in an Android phone. It doesn't matter that some chip works in OnePlus phones, if it doesn't work in Samsung phones Samsung's not going to buy it. If broadcom says it's going to be expensive to fix, either you pay or you don't. But it has nothing whatsoever to do with "controlling the whole stack". As an aside, and it's totally irrelevant to the above, but there's nothing other than the amount of work involved preventing Samsung writing their own bluetooth stack. They write plenty of custom drivers and they created a folding device prior to OS support. If they wanted to they could; they just apparently don't think it's worth the cost. Edit: according to a comment down thread they have done exactly that.
GeekyBear 6y ago
> If someone senior at Samsung said to their vendor "good Bluetooth or you lose the Samsung account", that would provoke some, um, intense conversations at the vendor between sales and engineering. The same thing could be said for Qualcomm's failure to support it's SOCs for more than a couple of years. Device makers could force their hand.
- signal11 6y ago
  > support it's SOCs for more than a couple of years That works, even works well, as long as device makers feel that supporting SOCs for a limited period helps them sell more phones. Apple has changed the rules of the game by supporting its devices for longer -- and as phone upgrades become more infrequent due to plateauing technology, I think device makers will realize this. Samsung has already committed to supporting recent Galaxy devices for at least 4 years -- at least with security updates[1]. I suspect this was also because they found that their extremely short-sighted prior policy re security updates encouraged corporate phone procurers to ditch Samsung and go with Apple. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/22/22295639/samsung-galaxy-device-2019-four-years-security-updates https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/22/22295639/samsung-galaxy-d...
  - GeekyBear 6y ago
    Any movement on the Android side is helpful and hopefully Samsung can shame Google into following suit. However, if we're going to count years where you only got a security update, the iPhone 5s is currently on it's 8th supported year.

mschuster91 6y ago

> If someone senior at Samsung said to their vendor "good Bluetooth or you lose the Samsung account", that would provoke some, um, intense conversations at the vendor between sales and engineering. The problem: There aren't that many suppliers left in the field, and Broadcom knows that their customers are pretty much locked in. The notable exception is once again Apple, they have proven that they can and will go and implement the technology on their own if their suppliers fail to meet their expectations.

dflock 6y ago
> go and implement the technology on their own Samsung could obviously do this too, but as you say, they lack the will - and motivation.
- mschuster91 6y ago
  Besides that they also lack the amount of control over the software side. Google is the entity that controls the stack, not Samsung - their responsibility ends at the kernel / HAL interface. So why should Samsung invest more than the bare minimum when they can't get anything measurable in return?
  - Godel_unicode 6y ago
    This is, of course, totally untrue. Samsung changes a ton of things about their flavor of Android, at every level of the stack. Edit: Samsung has apparently already ripped out the Bluetooth stack and replaced it with their own - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26650447 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26650447

cogman10 6y ago

I get what you are saying but they are simply in different positions. Broadcom can say "Hey, there's a bunch of work here to make this not suck" and Samsung, even if they wanted to do their own thing, realizes they too would have to go through that effort to make everything work. It wouldn't be a simple matter of just making non-sucky bluetooth, they'd have to also work with the android OS to improve the bluetooth stack and no guarantee that those changes can be merged. Apple controls their whole stack. They've already written the Bluetooth stack for their OS. They only have to service their devices. > Incidentally Apple sometimes has more than one vendor too, so it's not just two parties. Not the point I was making. It's not an issue with multiple vendors, its and issue of who controls what. Those other vendors also have to conform to apples standards if they want to sell apple their products. What I'm talking about is the fact that a bluetooth device manufacture has to conform to google's android standards if they want to sell their chips to android manufactures, not to samsung standards. That's where the leverage goes away. If samsung ever pulls the trigger and uses Tizen everywhere, then they'll be more in Apples position. Until that happens, they need to work with google to get stuff done.

Godel_unicode 6y ago
Except that's not how it works? Chip manufacturers just care about selling chips, not about being in the iPhone or being in an Android phone. It doesn't matter that some chip works in OnePlus phones, if it doesn't work in Samsung phones Samsung's not going to buy it. If broadcom says it's going to be expensive to fix, either you pay or you don't. But it has nothing whatsoever to do with "controlling the whole stack". As an aside, and it's totally irrelevant to the above, but there's nothing other than the amount of work involved preventing Samsung writing their own bluetooth stack. They write plenty of custom drivers and they created a folding device prior to OS support. If they wanted to they could; they just apparently don't think it's worth the cost. Edit: according to a comment down thread they have done exactly that.

GeekyBear 6y ago

> If someone senior at Samsung said to their vendor "good Bluetooth or you lose the Samsung account", that would provoke some, um, intense conversations at the vendor between sales and engineering. The same thing could be said for Qualcomm's failure to support it's SOCs for more than a couple of years. Device makers could force their hand.

signal11 6y ago
> support it's SOCs for more than a couple of years That works, even works well, as long as device makers feel that supporting SOCs for a limited period helps them sell more phones. Apple has changed the rules of the game by supporting its devices for longer -- and as phone upgrades become more infrequent due to plateauing technology, I think device makers will realize this. Samsung has already committed to supporting recent Galaxy devices for at least 4 years -- at least with security updates[1]. I suspect this was also because they found that their extremely short-sighted prior policy re security updates encouraged corporate phone procurers to ditch Samsung and go with Apple. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/22/22295639/samsung-galaxy-device-2019-four-years-security-updates https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/22/22295639/samsung-galaxy-d...
- GeekyBear 6y ago
  Any movement on the Android side is helpful and hopefully Samsung can shame Google into following suit. However, if we're going to count years where you only got a security update, the iPhone 5s is currently on it's 8th supported year.