Things have calmed down a bit after WWDC, so let’s take a look and see how everything is going on the other side of the…
“Samsung phones are spontaneously texting users’ photos to random contacts without their permission.” (Tip o’ the antlers to Len and Alter Eggo.)
Oh. Wow, was not expecting that. Well, who uses their smartphone to take anything other than pictures of shriners riding on tiny motorcycles, right? This is probably just the next logical step after having a commercial featuring a guy taking a movie of a woman without her permission.
Anyway, this is much ado about nothing. What could possible go wro-
One user says his phone sent all his photos to his girlfriend.
“We’re called Uvula Fetishists, Linda, and there are dozens of us! DOZENS!”
A Samsung spokesperson tells The Verge it’s “aware of the reports” and that its technical teams are “looking into it.”
They also said “Oops” and “You’re not going to publish this, are you?”
Maybe the Macalope is overly sensitive to these things but he notes a distinct difference between how these stories are handled when Apple screws up and when Samsung screws up. The Forbes contributor network and slide whistle repair facility has made a cottage industry out of wailing incessantly about iPhone bugs. Others claim that surely all of these iOS bugs will cause people to switch to Android, as if there are no problems whatsoever on Android.
Multiple apps that have previously been identified as malware and removed from the Google Play store managed to find their way back to Google’s Android app store. What sophisticated trickery did the malicious developer in question use to get the apps back on the Play store? He or she changed the apps’ names. Seriously, that’s it.
The point isn’t that iPhones are perfect and Samsung and Android phones suck. The point is that no one takes Samsung’s problems and projects people will, in significant number, stop buying the company’s devices. Because no one expects Samsung to be perfect.
It probably shouldn’t come as a surprise that people expect more from Apple. The Macalope just feels we should be open about the fact that we’re grading things on a sliding scale.