Fans of the vanilla Android experience swear by it, but so do fans of customizations offered by the OEMs in their myriad forms – be it the customization of Samsung’s TouchWiz or the highly polarizing HTC Sense. Another factor which stems from Android’s legendary customization capabilities and its open nature are rival services – rivals to those provided within Android itself. Especially on Samsung devices almost every Google service has a competing replica designed and coded by the Korean giant. If the latest patent filing from Samsung is anything to go by, the Korean giant now plans to offer an alternative competing service to challenge Google’s Play Music and Play Movies services.
Samsung has filed a patent application with the United States Patent and Trademark Office – filed on Valentine’s Day no less – which is filed for a new application service which Samsung is strangely terming as Milk Music. The filing states that the new application is for a “Mobile software application for streaming music, internet radio for accessing, for enabling music and video broadcasting services; for accessing video-on-demand; for enabling social networking.”
Samsung already offers some of these services with different apps through their Hub apps, however the recent patent filing makes it seem that Samsung wants to consolidate their different services under a single umbrella – even something with as strange a name as Milk Music. It may also be possible that Milk Music may be something akin to Apple’s iTunes and – if we continue on this path of speculation – we could see the service launch along with the much awaited Samsung Galaxy S5 at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) next week.
Android’s open nature and customization capabilities notwithstanding, a question needs asking. Do we really need so many competing services, just because a OEM wants users to switch away from Android’s default offerings? Do let us know your views in the comments section below.