My rant about Samsung

I’ve been avoiding Samsung’s smartphone ever since my S3 (I9300), mainly because I felt cheated paying a premium for a cheap product. I believe most people would have heard of the famous crack screen on Note(s), crack frames and the eMMC hardware bug. I’m the victim of the latter 2 issues within 6 months of my purchase. Not to mention the slow catch up of firmware update. After Android 4.2, I’ve since switch to OmniRom for 4,3 and now 4.4 to overcome the dysfunctional Samsung BLE SDK. I needed a working BLE phone to work on a project. Waiting for 4.3 from Sumsung even after a year of it’s Release from Google just seems unreasonable.

Using custom ROM has not only given a new lease of live to my S3, it also improve on the performance and battery consumption, kudos to OmniRom and CyanogenMod team. Though there’s some trade off such as having some weird bug lurking around, i.e. camera disconnected issue. I can live with that. As of right now I’m anticipating Android L for my S3, I stumble across this forum post, hinting of no support for S3

 I9300 – No active maintainer

Reading further into the thread then I found this long post of one of the major S3 maintainer. It’s a hour read but it explain a lot of wrong treatment the open source community is getting from Samsung namely violating GPL agreement, last release of source code , and how upper management avoiding a proper fix to existing devices even when the open source developers has submitted patches. It’s heart breaking when this is the result of capitalism.

Based on that post, it really change my view about Sony and Qualcomm, which have been very supportive in releasing their source code so the open source community can catch up properly, and hence their users can enjoy some useful custom ROM. I’ve also learnt that xda-developers is probably the first team to get the source code from various hardware vendor and then distribute to other custom ROM developers. Hence, when XDA lost their hardware maintainer, so would other custom ROM.

TL;DR; No more Samsung smartphone or tablet from now on.

Links:

Galaxy S3 casing issues plague the smartphone, Samsung to repair affected units
EMMC Bugs
The Saga of a CyanogenMod Exynos4 device maintainer
xda-developers