What is Samsung doing for the App Developer Ecosystem
“The real mobile news is not in the devices themselves, but in how software has changed. A little over a decade ago, software was primarily loaded onto our desktop computers through discs. Price-per-user was often well over $100 and occasionally exceeded $1000. Today’s software is small, and inexpensive or free. It takes about 30 seconds to start using a mobile app. Your device is your key to all the power of the Internet. It is where the superstorm of context is thundering into your life,” quote Shel Israel and Robert Scoble in their book ‘Age of Context’. And Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd not only gets this context quite well, but also is clearly pushing the button on contextual computing, as was demonstrated in the recently held mobile world congress.
Dr. Won-Pyo Hong, President and Head of the Media Solution Center at Samsung Electronics, said in a released statement, “Samsung will continue to provide more comprehensive SDKs for our mobile devices and maintain collaborative relationships with development partners to present unique and unprecedented content and services to our customers.”
Mobile app stores will see annual downloads reach 138 billion in 2014, according to a Gartner report. It is an extraordinary opportunity in general, and more so for the developer eco-system around the world. And when it comes to developers, one cannot ignore the outstanding capabilities and contribution of Indian developers. Samsung is going after these developers, and we will see a host of developer-led initiatives and activities in the near future.
In a recent conversation with Chandragouda Patil (Chandu Patil), Group Engineering Manager, Samsung India, we at YourStory tried to understand the opportunities Samsung is giving developers, and now bring to you some of the interesting areas you can look out for.
Chandu has been with Samsung for over six years now and is an ardent champion of developers. Being a techie at heart, he says, “I get them, and the possibilities that Samsung has for the Indian techies is immense. I hope to reach out to all of them.”
Samsung across the app development lifecycle
A typical application development process starts with ideation, goes on to development and testing, and finally onto the monetization with real users. Samsung is deeply involved in enabling developers across the whole process. If a developer has an application idea, then she can use a wide variety of Samsung resources, such as the SDKs, to build them. For example, in the case of a bank application, a stylus can be used to match a person’s signature instead of entering his pin number. There are currently 11 SDKs that developers can use.
In terms of testing, Samsung helps in two ways – one, Samsung lends existing and even unreleased devices to the partners for the latest apps they are building; and two, Samsung provides access to a Remote Testing Lab (RTL) where the developers can connect to the real devices through the Internet. The developers can deploy their app on the emulator and then test it on the real device, for which the only requirement is a Java-based browser.
