[Fascinate General] ivorycruncher:
Okay, I was gonna post this in the thread in the General forum, but I see it already got closed.

Guys, what the HECK do you think you're doing? There is a MASSIVE double standard going on here, and I'm tired of seeing it. Everybody here is so mad that Samsung doesn't seem to care about us, but then when somebody shows up to try and initiate conversation with the development community, you all just flame him for problems that aren't his fault? Good grief people, you should be overjoyed that Samsung actually does care enough about their failures that they are making an effort to reach out to the dev community (which as far as I know has never been done by an OEM before) for help. You have an opportunity that was just dumped in your lap to help create a strong working relationship between a major OEM of killer Android handsets, and you're just gonna blow it?

Come on guys, let's drop all the hate for a minute here and try to make this work. Samsung is a company, a very large company at that, and like any large company, they struggle to keep in touch with reality, and to find out what their customers really want. With a company of this size, you have to understand that not everybody knows what's going on. We tend to assume that everyone at Samsung reads all the Android community forums and just ignores what we say about them, when in reality that couldn't be further from the truth. For most people that work at these companies, their job is just a job, and there's not much incentive to really go the extra mile on things like software optimization. Also, traditionally, the dev/hacker community has been too small for them to be bothered with it. That is now changing, since Android by its very nature is open, unlike mobile operating systems of the past, and the dev community is growing nearly as fast as Android market share is.

I think what's happening now is that they realize that while they have killer hardware, they're very much lacking in the software department, and they need help. Instead of spending tons of money on trying to acquire talent and other resources to get them up to speed, they're reaching out to people that are so passionate about this that they do dev work for peanuts. Those are the people that are really going to help make Samsung's software the best anywhere, IF Samsung decides to create a working relationship with them, as is being attempted here. I know a lot of you think that our devs should work for Samsung, but I think that would ultimately be a bad idea, because they would get their hands tied by NDAs and politics. No, what Samsung needs to do is work with our very talented devs through an outlet like XDA, where the devs are still free to do what they want, but offer valuable input to Samsung's development process.

While other OEMs are clearly heading in the wrong direction (I'm looking at you, Motorola, with your locked bootloaders and nasty Youtube comments), I think Samsung is definitely heading in the right direction on this. It seems they're interested in improving the company and its products, so let's work together to make this happen. Let's stop flaming about our frustrations, and focus on providing helpful feedback. For those of you that are complaining about the lack of response from SamsungJohn, please knock it off. These things DO NOT happen overnight, and right now he's getting blasted with a huge amount of feedback. It will take time to process it all with other on his end before they can offer responses. The responses will come in time. Anyway, I've said my piece. Now, let's get back to having some fun with our phones!

P.S. GPS has already been fixed, end of story. It works perfectly on my phone, and has for quite some time. Those of you who still have GPS problems, do a complete wipe and install either a DL09 or EB01 ROM and radio. If it still doesn't work after that, restore to a stock ROM and get a warranty replacement, because you most likely have defective hardware, in which case no software patch is going to help you. Oh, and also, quit blasting them about lack of releases. Everybody should know by now that the U.S. carriers dictate everything about the software that goes on their phones. They will only offer and support the upgrades they want to (which will be limited, since they want to quickly EOL devices and make you buy new ones), and Samsung currently doesn't have anything to say about it. That could very well be why this outreach is happening, because they want to actually support their customers, and are tired of having their hands tied by the carriers, which is ruining their reputation.