Samsung and Google’s relationship have already been pretty tense, and recently Google asked Samsung to scale it back with all their bloatware and such. Well it looks like Samsung and Google are going at it again. According to a report from The Information, Google CEO Larry Page and Samsung’s Vice Chairman Jay Y. Lee were in a “tense” meeting at the Allen & Co conference in Sun Valley last week. The reason for the meeting is that Page isn’t happy with Samsung spending tons of money on their Tizen-based wearables, and barely any into the Android Wear wearables. Now given that Android Wear only launched about a month ago, it definitely has a ways to go. But then again so does Tizen. Although Tizen is Samsung’s baby, and we expect them to spend more money on it. But being the largest Android OEM it doesn’t look good in Google’s eyes.
As most of you know, Samsung has three Tizen-based smartwatches, and one Android Wear-based Smartwatch. There’s the Gear 2, Gear 2 Neo and Gear Fit running Tizen and just the Gear Live running Android Wear. Which for intents and purposes is just a Gear 2 Neo without the home button and without Tizen.
Also according to the report, it looks like Google wasn’t too happy with Samsung launching the Galaxy Gear last year, as they wanted the South Korean manufacturer to wait for Google to launch Android Wear. Seeing as the Galaxy Gear was running a heavily modified version of Android. Page was also meeting with Lee about their smartphone relationship and is continuing to pressure Samsung to stop developing apps that “mimic” features that Google has already baked into the OS and their own apps on the Play Store. For one, it really can confuse users, and two, Google wants everyone using their services and since they are providing the OS, it makes sense to pressure them.
So looks like the Google/Samsung relationship is still pretty insecure. Hopefully that’ll change as they’ve partnered for some pretty spectacular devices as of late.