Samsung is possibly expanding its Galaxy AI Subscription Club to its flagship Galaxy phones in South Korea next month, according to ET News. The two words to pay close attention to in that sentence are possibly and Korea.
The Galaxy AI Subscription Club is already a thing in Samsung’s home country for its line of smart appliances. The service launched in December to a very positive consumer reaction, and subscription sales already accompany 30% of purchases at Samsung stores. People in South Korea love Samsung and its software and are willing to buy it.
People in the U.S. aren’t as enthusiastic.
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That’s why you might have seen news about Samsung’s “phone subscription” in the news this week. Thanks to some rather questionable articles on the matter, people assumed that Samsung was introducing some sort of subscription pricing to use the phones we’re about to see at Galaxy Unpacked.
To be very clear — we’re not. This is only for special AI services, even if it makes its way to the U.S. I hate that we call this a phone subscription because it’s not; it’s a software subscription that is no different than what Adobe or Norton offer for your PC. Phone stuff is weird sometimes.
Enough about what the AI Club is and that it might expand. Let’s talk about the reaction. Why do people hate it when Samsung does the exact same thing that Apple and Google already are doing, for the same type of service?
If you use a new iPhone, you can use Apple Intelligence features free until 2027, but to get the most from it you can connect it to a paid ChatGPT subscription that costs $20 a month.
If you use an Android phone in select countries, you can use Google Gemini for free. To get the most from Gemini, you can subscribe to a Google One plan that includes Gemini Advanced, which costs $20 a month.
Samsung has already said that all Galaxy AI features are free for phone and tablet users until at least the end of 2025. It might include an AI subscription tier in South Korea.
If it’s OK for Apple and Google, it should be OK for Samsung.
Judging by the internet tech prosumer reaction, it’s clearly not OK for Samsung to do it. That’s because of the way we view Samsung in the West.
When you think of Samsung, you probably think of phones and the parts used to make phones. Samsung is well known as an electronics manufacturer and almost every phone has some Samsung parts inside of it. Even an iPhone.
Samsung is really good at this, too. There is no consumer outrage about the performance of a Samsung display on a Pixel 9 or iPhone 16. Samsung’s memory and controllers are great and part of what makes your flagship phone so fast. The company’s phones and tablets are no slouch either, and a Galaxy S24 Ultra is one of the best you can buy.
When it comes to software, there isn’t the same enthusiasm. The company seems to have finally built a great version of Android with recent versions of One UI, but most tech enthusiasts don’t use Samsung’s phone software very much or at all.
Samsung’s apps are like the Stocks app on an iPhone and end up crammed in a junk folder if they can’t be disabled. Bixby (which isn’t really that bad) is a laughing stock among Android enthusiasts, and what Samsung did to Tizen should send some people straight to Dante’s Inferno.
This is what U.S. tech enthusiasts think of Samsung’s software. You don’t have to look very hard to find people saying they wish they could buy a Galaxy S24 Ultra that runs Google’s Pixel version of Android, and there are plenty of people trying to hack just that onto their expensive phones. Most consumers don’t know any better or even care and just use what’s there, but die-hard techies are the people who get vocal on the internet about everything.
I would never pay for an AI subscription, at least until it offers more than a different way to feed me information that’s already available. When that happens, I don’t care if Samsung, Apple, or Google offers it — I’ll buy whatever suits my needs best.
More than likely, we won’t have to worry about this at all here in North America and this was just a handy excuse to complain about Samsung and AI in general.
