Despite popular belief, Sundar Pichai says there is no bad blood in the working relationship between Google and Samsung. On the contrary, things may be stronger than ever between both companies if the recent cross licensing deal they have agreed to is any indication. It is true that it looked as if Samsung was taking steps to separate themselves from the Android ecosystem, and we wouldn’t necessarily blame anyone for thinking so as rumors were flying around everywhere that this was the case. No matter what it looked like however, looks can be deceiving and Pichai wanted to make sure that any notions about Google and Samsung having a falling out of sorts was simply just not true.
As Pichai put it during his speech at Mobile World Congress this week, Samsung and Google don’t have any immediate plans to separate, rather he said that they aren’t separating any time soon. Does this mean that it will never happen? No. That scenario is still entirely possible but if it were to happen it wouldn’t be for quite some time. Sundar was also quoted saying that he fully expects the Samsung Galaxy S 6 to be running Android, which wouldn’t surprise us in any way. Samsung is currently the largest manufacturer of Android powered devices, which Samsung undoubtedly makes an insane amount of money from. There’s nothing to really suggest that they would want to give up on that cash cow. That isn’t to say that they aren’t trying to make progress with their own OS, as we have come to learn with Tizen, especially since Samsung has opted to run Tizen on all three new Gear devices that they unveiled this week, as well as push out an update to the original Galaxy Gear to get it running Tizen also. A better explanation for the reason behind this might be to make things more connected with Samsung’s other products.
Although Samsung has chosen to run it’s own OS on a few of it’s new devices instead of Android, it’s clear that they have some commitment to Google and Android still as they have already made strides to appease some of Google’s terms regarding the open source OS, by removing their version of apps that follow extremely closely to the functionality of Google’s own core apps, that are placed on every single Android smartphone. If you’re a fan of Samsung Android devices, it looks like your favorite brand isn’t going anywhere for now.