Ex-Samsung engineer slags off Samsung’s Galaxy design process

Samsung’s phone software is “horrible” and the company only cares about revenue at the expense of making good products – that’s the verdict of someone claiming to be a former engineer at the Korean smartphone giant.

This post on Quora has the details, which are posted by Rezaur Rahman – who after a quick Google, seems to be legit. Its worth quoting in full as he really lays into Samsung’s phones:

“I was a software engineer at Samsung and contributed in Galaxy Tab(P5100,P5110) and S4 Mini(I9192) projects. This is my personal opinion. I’m an avid mac user, so I’m biased.

“From my personal experience I’ve seen that Samsung always cares about the revenue rather than making a good product. In the last 6 months I worked in more than 10 projects and the output was subpar. We always have to follow Sales team request. Instead of making a few good models, we have to make loads of unfinished models.(I had to work in Galaxy Star project and I simply hated this product.)

“The major difference between Samsung and Apple is the market research strategy , Samsung does this thing very seriously and delivers the product which already has a market (e.g.: tablet). The only new thing Samsung introduced was the phablet. This thing is neither functional like a tablet, nor as handy as a smartphone.

“And the software UX part is just horrible, look at any Samsung provided software (eg S voice) Samsung is still failing to create a complete user experience. Google Nexus is by far the best Android experience. It’s a shame that we just collected best hardware components and try to tell the customers that it is the best thing for them without ensuring a great software equivalent, and in many cases we don’t get enough time to make the software part good.

“Many of my coworkers consider Apple to be just a hype builder. Most of the time they don’t want to give credit to Apple engineers. But on the other hand, there are a small number of Apple users working in Samsung. We appreciate the quality of their ecosystem and the beauty of hardware-software integration.”

Ouch! Whilst his criticisms aren’t too surprising for anyone who follows the mobile industry closely, it is pretty stinging to hear them from someone who has seen the inside of the process. What’s clear is that Samsung provides a fascinating polar opposite case study to the likes of Apple.

Now we’re just wondering if the Galaxy S6, which is due next month, will be ‘unfinished’ too.