alt Hacker News> I'm not sure what people expect Samsung to do, just use whatever Google says to use and not try to innovate?
To me, the benefit of the S series was "Android on decent hardware". I would have preferred as close to stock Android as possible. I mostly use F-Droid stuff anyway, though of course that means I am far from the average consumer.
They are primarily a hardware company - it seems reasonable to expect them to innovate there, and leave innovation in software to the software companies.
Can you really be "just" a hardware company and still compete with Apple, which is both a software and hardware company? Samsung has its own ecosystem of products and services to manage and unify.
If I'm Samsung and I'm trying to compete in the market against Apple, I want to provide as much as possible to my customers, without needing to rely completely on a third party.
Also, when the OS or app on a Samsung has problems, customers don't blame Google, they blame the company that sold them the phone. If I worked there as a product manager, I'd make the same choices to help the company maintain as much control as possible.