// 9TO5GOOGLE — MOBILE & WEB
Samsung’s paid Galaxy AI plan has a giant Gemini problem
Good morning. Today I’m trying desperately not to buy Sony’s new nostalgia-bait headphones, reeling from how emotionally invested I was in Spider-Man: Brand New Day (yes, I know I’m late), trying to figure out what a “private, agentic notebook” is, and slowly coming around to the idea of the New York Times owning Letterboxd.
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Inbox is written by Daniel Bader. Read previous issues here, and then catch up with Ben Schoon’s excellent Weekender column published every Sunday.
The relationship between Samsung and Google has, over the years, waxed and waned depending on their respective interdependence. Samsung is Android’s physical emissary, powering a plurality of all its handsets globally. But Google, and in particular its services, is the glue that holds Samsung’s smartphone experience together.
The back and forth is over a decade old; back in early 2014, Samsung shipped a refreshed magazine-style skin with its Galaxy tablets that eschewed many of the design tenets Google had been pushing its partners to adhere to. Not only was Samsung willfully defying its most important partner, but it made a point of barely mentioning Android during its press conferences.
Around the same time, it transitioned its smartwatches from Android Wear to Tizen and began shipping duplicative apps on its devices (many of which persist to this day). The goal was to distance itself from Google as much as possible.
While we don’t know exactly what happened behind closed doors, we saw the outcome quite clearly: Magazine UX lasted one product cycle, and the two companies signed a 10-year cross-license patent deal, which may have helped Samsung prevent any future lawsuits with Apple. Google then sold Motorola to Lenovo, clearing the way for Samsung to continue building its burgeoning hardware business on the back of Google’s mobile ecosystem.
Since then, the two companies have grown even closer. In 2021, they co-announced a new Wear OS along with an overarching wearables partnership that has since grown to include Android XR as well. And Google is still the default search engine for Samsung devices, despite reported inroads made by Microsoft in 2023 to convince the Korean giant to switch to a ChatGPT-powered version of Bing Search. (Samsung’s ongoing relationship with Microsoft, which bundles its Office suite on most Galaxy devices, could be seen as a point of leverage for negotiations with Google, too.)
This brings us to today, and to AI. Samsung was among the first companies to adopt Google’s full suite of Gemini Intelligence products, and its phones often get new AI features before anyone else. But like a decade ago, when Samsung shipped Bixby to kind-of-sort-of compete with Google Assistant, it still wants to offer its own services alongside Google’s.
So a rumor that Samsung may launch a paid Galaxy AI Premium subscription next year for $5/month piqued my interest for the same reason Magazine UX did 12 years ago. Galaxy AI features today are a blend of first-party and third-party capabilities, but none of them are especially useful, particularly when compared to Google’s own Android equivalents powered by Gemini Intelligence. Now Bar and Now Brief, two heavily promoted features in Samsung’s marketing, are wildly disappointing.