GREE, a Japanese social gaming company, has recently come to light that they earn more than 40 percent of all revenue from users using Samsung Galaxy S2 and S3. GREE also suggested that Android developers only need to test their game apps for a select number of Android smartphones.
This trend will continue to grow until other mobile device manufacturers fail to position their products similarly to Samsung. The company has received enough publicity for its Galaxy smartphone series. It has also been the world’s leading mobile device manufacturer for the past few months. Samsung Electronics overtook Nokia in the first quarter of 2012 to become the world’s largest mobile phone maker. A BBC News Business article headlined “Samsung overtakes Nokia in mobile phone shipments” reports that in 2012, Samsung shipped 93 million phones compared to nearly 83 million for Nokia. The article also revealed that apart from Nokia, Samsung’s other direct competitors are US-based Apple and Taiwan’s HTC.
Today, the company has reached a position where it would be extremely difficult for competitors like Apple, LG, Nokia, and HTC to catch up any time soon. And there are several reasons behind this success. Two of them were recently shared by Thedrum.com in the article “Samsung’s Secret to Success: Fast Work Gets Customers Just What They Want.” The first is that Samsung continues to pay close attention to what its customers say about its products and services. Second, it rapidly develops new products or their new versions. It only took about five months to develop the S3 Mini.
When you think of an Android smartphone, the first mobile brand that comes to mind is probably Samsung. An Android Authority article from January says that Samsung sold 500 smartphones per minute in the fourth quarter of 2012. And with the launch of the Galaxy S4, this number is expected to grow even more by the end of this year.
How is Samsung domain useful for Android developers?
Samsung’s dominance in the smartphone market is helpful in multiple ways. Some of them are the following:
• Mobile developers find it difficult to create applications that support all Android devices. Android is an open source mobile operating system. Google allows you to customize your operating system according to the hardware capabilities of a specific device. If you want to power a low-end device through Android, you can cut back on some of its features. This may seem like an amazing capability of the operating system, but it also creates fragmentation. If developers want their apps to run on all Android devices, they will need to optimize these apps for more than one device. But if they have a dominant Android device manufacturer like Samsung, they will only need to build apps for a select number of devices.
• There are some country specific mobile manufacturers that also use Android to power their devices. While developing devices, they mostly follow the specifications and features of popular devices like Galaxy S3 and S2. They keep the same screen size, hardware support and other specifications to stay in the market. This helps developers to create universal Android apps.
• The Android application development process can be completed in a comparatively short period of time if there are fewer brands using the Android operating system.
• Major Android device manufacturers ship timely operating system updates that help developers timely update their applications.