Many Samsung devices have come preloaded with Samsung Hub, their Google Play clone. Samsung has many duplicate apps via the Hub installed on new devices that never really added new features just replacements for already included apps baked into the Android OS. We saw this coming as we had already mentioned several months ago that Google and Samsung came to an agreement where Samsung would no longer duplicate apps already standard on Android and this may be the start of it in action.
Generally users opt to use the Google baked in services over anything in the Hub although for those that did use the Hub this may prove to be annoying having to start over with Google’s services. Either way we aren’t surprised at this move by Samsung as their newest flagship device the Galaxy S5 doesn’t come with the Hub. This said they did spend a lot of time and resources to get the service running and to its current point so there will likely still be support for it although just won’t be a TouchWiz added app.
There are likely many talks between Samsung and Google surrounding this based on Berne’s statement that it will be going away. We don’t have a certain statement saying that Samsung Hub is completely dead just that it will no longer come installed. Berne deleted the twitter post soon after announcing so there could be a lot more to consider when the official statement is made. We aren’t sure if Samsung just isn’t ready to tell the World about the death of Hub or Berne may have just made an untrue statement.
No matter how Samsung Hub works out we do know two things, Samsung has agreed to not preinstall as many completing apps on Android devices and they and Google are talking about it in great detail. There has been no word on when there will be an official decision made regarding Samsung Hub although we will be sure to let you know when we hear more.
We will finish up with our thoughts on the issue and mostly we say great move by Samsung as there aren’t many people that appreciate bloatware installed on their devices that cannot be removed especially duplicate applications. On the other hand having their own app store for all of the Samsung only S-pen apps seems to still have a use.