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Samsung Reminds Us That You Can't Make People Use an App They Don't Want (recode.net)
Samsung has announced that it will be discontinuing Milk Music on September 22. The announcement comes a year after the South Korean technology conglomerate shuttered Milk Video, another service that didn't receive the traction Samsung was hoping. Peter Kafka, writing for Recode: It's true that you can't get media/apps/services to customers without access to a platform. But control of the platform doesn't mean customers are going to use your media/apps/services: They've got plenty of choices and they'll choose the ones they want. Ask Verizon and Comcast, which both launched video apps on their networks last year and have nothing to show for it. (You've heard of Verizon's Go90 only because Verizon keeps talking about it when people ask why it spent $10 billion on AOL and Yahoo; you have completely forgotten about Comcast's Watchable.) Soon you'll be able to ask AT&T, which is launching its own video app this fall, which will also feature lots of content people either don't want or can get elsewhere.
"Can't make people use an app they don't want? Challenge Accepted." - Microsoft
Also, no wonder it has no marketshare when people that have your phones have never even heard of it. Not that I would have used it anyway, but still...
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
But control of the platform doesn't mean customers are going to use your media/apps/services: They've got plenty of choices and they'll choose the ones they want.
If you have control of the platform you can limit the customer's choices. See Apple.
Samsung don't control their mobile platform, and neither does Verizon or Comcast. Google controls the platform.
we can avoid vendor lock-in
Milk was an awesome service when it first launched and I used it pretty extensively. It had a pretty decent music selection, an unusual (but still functional) interface, was completely ad free - not even "channel identification" ads, and unlimited skip.
The second the added adverts and took away the skips, it became a half-assed pandora clone. I fired it up the other week just to see if it had gotten better, and it had not. Ads every 2-3 tracks, 6 skips, and what seemed to me like a reduction in artists. At the very least their algorithm behind "play similar to ______" has gotten worse.
This is why we can't have nice things.
But there is evidence everywhere that you can make them use devices they don't want if the marketplace is lacking any real alternatives. The public has been asking for devices that THEY are the owner of since the beginning. When are they going to realize that smartphones are just computers. I'll use the operating system of my choice and I shouldn't have to hack my own device to be able to do so.
Digital is, by definition, imperfect. Analog is the way to go.
I wonder if the app would have done better with a name other than "Milk". Maybe it's just me, but the word evokes thoughts about spoilage instead of music.
Procrastination Man strikes again!
You know what? I don't want a god damned app for everything I do on my smartphone. I don't want to have to download and take up gigs of space on my phone when you can just deliver a HTML5 web page that's going to effectively do everything some annoying app would have done.
I don't understand why this is so difficult to do. It probably makes their lives easier for firmware updates too since there is less to go wrong or test if the apps aren't part of the image.
You are all cows! Moo moo say the cows who can't have nice things.
I miss the moo cows troll. I liked that one better than the appy apps one.
Didn't the telecoms learn anything from the cable companies?
People don't want to pay more for a bundle of channels/programs, they want to pay a la carte. Especially when there's overlap between services, and tons of unwatchable shit you have to pay for just to get the one show you want.
Look toward YouTube and Amazon Video for a clue.
We want:
* Every show to be easily available (we don't care who provides it)
* Reasonable pricing
* Instant availability
* High quality
* Watchable on all our devices
Thanks for loading trash on "my" phone, AT&T
They seem to be pushing SystemD on their server OS despite documented security and reliability concerns.
Go on, citizen, stamp the vote card. R or D, your choice.
I got a Gear S2 a few months ago as a promo when I upgraded my phone, and I've been pretty happy with it. However, the only streaming music service that actually seems to work with the tizen device is Milk Music. Pandora (which I've been using for years, and continue to pay for on an off) doesn't have an app for the Gear. I can't seem to find a working standalone streaming service that doesn't simply control an app on my phone or not work well from the outset.
Granted, there are other issues with the Gear S2, like the fact that it doesn't support WPA2-Enterprise, but all in all I've liked having it. But if I can't use it for advertised purposes without having my phone in range, then it's not as useful to me.
...but we (more often than not) can't uninstall them without rooting our phones.
I'm tired of this crap. The user has less and less control over their devices. Mobiles OS don't let the user be root and now Ms is forcing their services and spying on users with Windows 10. I want to be in control of my devices but won't (officially) let me no matter the money I'm willing to pay
So, I got this S6 and A3 (2016 model) standing in my desk. They both are asking me to update Samsung Games Service in a persistent notification (can't dismiss). Take a guess at the amazing options I got: "Later" and "Update". FCK YEAH. And this is their "Games Service" - you don't even get a notification for their "Samsung Apps" app (you know, their stupid market). You can't freeze/disable/uninstall any of these apps in a recent, bootloader-FULLY-LOCKED Sammy phone. You might argue "but hey, you're not using them, you just have them installed!", to which I say: you go tell that to the millions of Koreans tuned in at their launch events seeing stupid, cherry-picked market statistics which say "999999 MILLION PEOPLE USED THESE LAST YEAR AND SO SHOULD YOU". Chances are that thing is gonna get a lot of traction from now on, for no actual decent reason at all, other than a great marketing strategy. Who is your god now?
Other companies you heard also do this kind of product promotion through BS stats: Apple, Google, and... Microsoft. Trust me, when you're the market leader on anything (and Samsung is, in the mobile department), you WILL push whatever you want to people. They just don't want to push this because they didn't see the bucks coming in the way they wanted (which is to say: it probably didn't scale well enough to be as profitable as other services that actually make it outside S. Korea).
If they really wanted you to eat that crappy music service, they would make it work. Just like Spotify is making people eat their 8-bucks subscription service even though can get everything they need for free or really really cheap (e.g. by faking a "family"). Tech companies are not THAT stupid.
"You've heard of Verizon's Go90 only because Verizon keeps talking about it when people ask why it spent $10 billion on AOL and Yahoo; you have completely forgotten about Comcast's Watchable."
Watchable? Go90? Nope, never heard of either of them, to be honest.
Two more bullshit services that sank like a stone without so much as a ripple.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Milk was ok, but it used Slack as its back end. Milk was the bridge of radio playing that Spotify/Google needs. Pandora would be the closet to it. Even SirrusXM's streaming app is very close to Milk, and includes nice advanced tuning features. (popular vs ecliptic)
So we have a mix of music service that really are mashup or good in certain areas, discovery (slack/pandora), playlists (google/spotify), buying (amazon/google/itunes), podcasts (stitch/itunes/spotify is trying add this), tracking songs (Last.fm).
Slack was first to offer off network caching which was great, but when spotify offered this, I dumped slack and went Spotify full time. I dropped Pandora for slack also due to better mobile offering.
So now, I'm down to Spotify, Last.fm (paid), and amazon for buying my music. Google gave me Google Music for free because I bought Youtube Red (no commercials), Amazon gave me free Amazon music with Prime, but its interface is horrible, even for buying. Google music design is horrid.
Spotify runs well on my linux laptop, android phone, and windows PC, lists are synced. Now if they could add DFX into the app for linux/android, I'd be in paradise, the fidelity option is a good start.
Still feels like the dark ages. I had a co-worker try to start a multi app suite with all the different features including identification (like shazam/musicID), but it was too early in the market during the days of rhapsody.
Wouldnt say we are even close to being perfect in the music realm. There is so much good music on Spotify, but it needs an translations for non-english band names and music. Also really needs better ways to find non-american music. Theres so much out there, and they keep us in a tiny walled garden.
Oh, and spotify allows you to follow distribution labels, which is AWESOME if you follow great producers. But that could be way easier to use.
But you can make someone vote for someone they don't want.
That seems more accurate. It's not worth starting your own market place, your own coding department for the marketplace AND then having to maintain all that while companies with vast coding experience blow by your teams. App market places and authentication frameworks should NEVER be from the OS maker, as Apple, Google and MS have all done. App market places should be third party market places who's profit are hopefully linked to providing well tested and somewhat supported apps. Basically nothing more than Steam for apps, but likely with better support.Instead of charging for support, you should be charging for "a one on one tutorial" on how to get the most out of apps. Instead of basing so much on ads and data mining a quality app market would be based on well reviewed app and all the tips and tricks you could want. App markets are markets and all the fun of advertising and lying that comes with advertising comes to those markets. As silly as it sounds.. Facebook is what we need. A third party app and authentication platform that is not tied to any OS. This way the OS makers can just make the secure framework we need them to make. Linux suffers from a ridiculous amount of developer splintering, which while may seem good at first, it makes it rather easy for organized corporations to take advantage of open source, throw a few million into development and steal the user base from the coders who did the work. Opensource is nice for things that don't change often, but when things do change often opensource is less secure, slower and vastly less efficient at the goal of making great apps. It's great at the goal of using people's free time for a attempted good cause. I'd argue most open source coding time is entirely lost other than to help further educate the coders involved in the project.
Their problem they restricted it to USA, where competition is maximum and most expensive (due to wonderful law).
The origins of Milk Music were a Silicon Valley startup that essentially rebadged Slacker streaming service (trying to find the startup name ...). Me thinks Samsung had Apple Music envy of some sort and the startup was looking for a exit strategy around 2013. Slacker is still around, and if you like/liked Milk Music, switch over to Slacker's direct access plan and you'll hardly know you're listening to a different service.
The plain truth is Samsung has no Steve Jobs (or legacy contacts of said pioneer) to pursue lucrative media rights to make Milk Music / Video / live sports / ... anything but a sad derivative of other streaming services. Samsung executive eyes were bigger than their stomachs for headaches that media streaming business licensing entails. So even though the app was pretty, had nice UI, it just didn't have compelling content - hence no real user base developed, its overhead / and now its axed.
Samsung excels at building boxes, panels, and appliances which all increasing have little screens to connect to everything else. Music player on your refrigerator anyone?
Correction, acquired mSpot in 2012
http://www.theverge.com/2012/5...