Google has become the number one mobile platform on the planet, and one major reason is that Samsung happens to sell more mobile handsets than any other company. When it comes to profits, Samsung divides 100% with Apple, which means losses and very tiny profits for all the rest. Google doesn’t make a huge amount of cash from Android, although I expect things will improve as more and more apps are sold in the Play Store. But not if Samsung has anything to do with it.

Google should certainly feel slighted over the fact that much of the coverage of the launch of the flagship Galaxy S4 smartphone focused on Samsung’s own apps and the revised hardware specs. You’d hardly know the thing uses the Android OS on the basis of the manufacturer’s advertising and promotion. Rather than showcase the value of Android, Samsung is showcasing the value of their own ecosystem.

To add insult to injury, Samsung plans to award third-party developers to entice them to develop Galaxy-specific apps. Not just Android apps, but apps optimized for Samsung’s hardware and custom features. Indeed they are investing $800,000 to be divided among the top ten winners for apps that are compatible with the company’s Group Play sharing feature. The first prize winner will get $200,000. And, indeed, developers would have to support Samsung’s proprietary Chord SDK service.

But there is one condition that may be the deal breaker: The apps must be free, although in-app purchases will be allowed. I suppose this means that the developer can offer a free, limited version of an app, and hope to entice customers to get the “Pro” or full-featured version. This is commonplace in the Android universe, so I suppose it comes as no surprise. But such apps might not be attractive enough to earn a prize.

It’s a sure thing that improving the quality of Android apps is a good thing. In terms of the numbers of apps, Google and Apple are toe-to-toe, but the iOS offers better quality software. The Google Play Store is polluted with loads and loads of ringtones and wallpapers, and apps that are available in multiple versions, with different themes, often requiring an upgrade to a paid version to kill the ads and/or add additional features.

One particularly irksome problem in Android-land is fragmentation. A huge number of owners of Android gear are using older, sometimes much older, versions of the OS. This complicates the job for developers who want to take advantage of the latest and greatest OS features, but still want to reach as many potential customers as possible for paid software. Compromises often have to be made, which is why many Android apps are flaky, poorly designed.

Building apps for a single product lineup for a single manufacturer may ensure consistency, but it doesn’t mean this scheme will help build a huge library of Galaxy-optimized paid apps for the simple reason that this contest only impacts developers who are building free stuff. However, I suppose a developer could hope that attention drawn to a prize-winning app will help sell others.

At least, users might feel more comfortable that the apps they download will be designed and optimized for their Galaxy handsets, which would be a good thing from Samsung’s standpoint. But it’s hardly going to help the Android ecosystem, unless those developers also produce versions that work with other handsets, or can somehow build universal versions, with much larger file sizes.

By pushing proprietary apps and features, Samsung appears to be working overtime to separate their gear from Android. If a Galaxy-specific software market develops, what stops Samsung from forking Android and rolling as many of these apps as possible into their own proprietary storefront? If that happens, where does that leave Google?

Would Google, in turn, focus more efforts on building out the Motorola Mobility division to manufacture top-of-the-line Android gear? Or would they attempt to push more support and development resources into less-successful companies, such as HTC and LG?

From Samsung’s point of view, if they continue to show good profits and growing sales, particularly for high-end mobile handsets and tablets, it’s a win-win. It doesn’t matter where Google fits in, or even if they fit into this marketing plan.

The real question, however, is whether the possibility of winning up to $200,000 will attract a meaningful response from developers. This isn’t the first time Samsung has waved thick wads of cash before developers to build stuff for their products. According to published reports, in 2010 Samsung invested $2.7 million to attract developer interest to their Bada platform, designed for cheaper handsets, but that didn’t seem to go anywhere.

It’s hard to know whether Samsung’s newest marketing ploy will pay off. It’s also true that, despite heavy-duty publicity, the top-of-the-line Galaxy S4 has mostly received modest reviews. My own evaluation of the product so far indicates that it works quite well, with a brighter display that’s particularly helpful in sunlit surroundings. But the software bloat is cause for concern, and not all the apps Samsung packed into the thing are really worth the bother.

According to published reports, Samsung is claiming that the Samsung Galaxy S4 flagship smartphone shipped some 10 million copies during the first 28 days on sale. As my friend Daniel Eran Dilger remarks in a recent AppleInsider article, this is considered a great accomplishment compared to the iPhone 5, which sold five million the very first weekend, which wasn’t considered so great. So much for being fair and balanced.

Certainly, there are several published bake-offs comparing the Galaxy S4 with the HTC One and, of course, the iPhone 5. I won’t consider whether these reviewers are necessarily accurate or misleading. Make your own conclusions.

I’ve only had one for a few days, but I’ve been able to put together some random findings about whether it represents a major upgrade, or is just a minor update to an existing model. So, aside from all the flashy (if only occasionally useful) new software, the changes are relatively minor in the scheme of things compared to the Galaxy S3.

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So I unwrapped a spanking new Samsung Galaxy S4 smartphone the other day. It’s Samsung’s most popular handset, earning iPhone-level sales in the first two weeks on sale, and I had to wonder whether I had a mobile gadget, or a doorway to a magical world with all the publicity it has received.

Well, I have to tell you that it’s a really good product, but it doesn’t quite match the manufacturer’s hype.

Now Apple has made a huge deal of the user experience that begins when you first open the box in which the unit ships. Well, Samsung has gone the route of a wood-grained finish cardboard, with the design motif carrying through to the tiny booklet that covers the initial setup and basic features. The charger and earphones, however, are white, same as Apple. In fact, from a distance, you may not see much of a difference, except for the fact that Samsung uses a micro USB connection for recharging (as opposed to mini USB). Apple, as you know, went from one proprietary connection scheme, 30-pin, to yet another proprietary connection scheme, Lightning.

Regardless, my review sample, a 16GB black mist model, came roughly half charged. So I connected the charger plug to a wall socket, and went on with my business. A couple of hours later, I opened the plastic cases on the S4 and S3, and transferred the SIMM card from the latter to the former. I had a chance to put the two side by side, so I could see how Samsung managed to cram a 5-inch display into a case that’s slightly smaller, thinner, and lighter than the S3. The rounded corners, for example, are less rounded, but I don’t know how round it has to be to avoid notice by Apple, although it has been added to one of those ongoing patent lawsuits. The screen bezel is narrower at the bottom and the sides.

Inside, the square 2600mAh battery seems to take up about half of the available space on the chassis, which demonstrates that Samsung’s efforts at parts miniaturization have been extremely successful. I’ve always found battery life to be subpar on the S3, at least in comparison with an iPhone 4s. The iPhone always managed to stay charged for an entire night, while the S3 routinely beeped in protest in the middle of the night, signifying that battery life had fallen below 15%. I’ll have more to say about S4’s battery life after a few days of real use, but it seems that current isn’t consumed nearly as fast.

The AMOLED display is noticeably brighter. The S3 failed in bright sunlight; the S4 is decent under those conditions at maximum brightness.

So far so good, but I wasn’t so pleased with Samsung’s standard method of transferring your stuff from an older smartphone, which can be blamed on Google. Remember that a new iPhone can, with iCloud or iTunes, completely restore a new handset to be near identical to the one it replaces within a relatively short period of time.

So after entering my Gmail account info in the S4’s initial setup assistant, I was pleased to discover that all my downloaded apps were present. But system settings, even the ones that seemed identical to the older model, had reverted to default. I also had to reenter all of my email accounts. Worse, my subscription to the Antivirus Free security software wasn’t supported, so I had the choice of either ordering a new subscription, or asking for help. Since my 90-day subscription was near expiration anyway, I oped to start from scratch.

And, yes, you want security software on an Android device. That’s where the vast majority of malware is found. Most of the rest lies with Nokia’s fading Symbian OS.

The downside of the lack of a complete restore meant that I had to waste a few hours going through all the settings to match what they were on the S3. Yes, I am aware of Android backup apps, but I wanted to treat the setup process the same as the typical owner of Android hardware who wouldn’t consider a third-party alternative.

After playing with it a while, I noticed that an email bug I discovered months ago involving IMAP accounts was still there. So evidently using a later OS, Android Jelly Bean 4.2.2, compared to 4.1.2 on the S3, didn’t make a difference. The problem? When checking a message I’ve sent on the S4 while on another device, such as my iMac running Apple mail, the text of the email would be displayed twice. This is a bug that I had reported to a Samsung product person a few months ago, and I hope they will work on a solution. You’ll see this artifact on mail sent via Android’s own Email app, plus any app that overlays Email, using its basic engine with a different theme.

Now Samsung touts loads of flashy apps and features that are designed to make the S4 appear unique. Some of those features, such as eliminating an unwanted person from a video, may actually be useful. Some, such as scrolling through a page with the tilt of your head (or the handset) seem to be needless fluff. But all that stuff, and I suppose you can call some of it junkware, ends up filling nearly half of the storage capacity of the 16GB model. Samsung is actually promising to slim the apps so they don’t take so much space, but you may want to buy the 32GB model instead. Google promises to sell a pure Android version of the S4 unencumbered by such sometimes needless extras.

Now there’s one other annoying feature. Supposedly the S4 can serve, with the WatchON app, as a universal remote control. But in my limited testing, it only seems to support a TV and a set top box. What about Blu-ray and a separate sound system? I’m still waiting for answers.

However, the S4 is a perfectly good phone. This is something not often mentioned, but calls on the AT&T network were crystal clear in both directions. Both Samsung and Apple support an enhanced audio feature, HD voice, which is only supported on T-Mobile right now, and requires using HD voice-enabled hardware at both ends of the connection. So I wasn’t able to test the feature (AT&T will add it later this year), but there was nothing to complain about. The S4 was also easy to pair with the hands-free Bluetooth system on my Honda.

Of course, making and receiving phone calls is something rarely mentioned, although a smartphone that fails at the fundamentals is a loser in my book. All in all, however, it’s clear Samsung has ample reason to be proud of the Galaxy S4, but I’m saying that ahead of actually playing with the gee-whiz features. I’ll have more to say in the days to come.

How time flies when you’re having fun. The first Mac OS came out 29 years ago, yet it still somehow seems a little unfinished. After so many versions and the move from Mac OS to OS X, thousands of features have been added, some have been removed or changed, yet there always seems to be a large wish list for the next version.

If you have a cynical bent, you might suggest that Apple deliberately holds back features in order to have something to promote, and sell, for the next release. Perhaps that’s partly true, although it’s probably true that features earmarked for a specific OS version just aren’t ready to make the cut, although some will claim that Apple doesn’t let that stop them.

Now the early chatter on the next version of OS X, presumably 10.9, speaks of support for Siri and Maps, with the assumption that Apple has probably addressed the worst problems with the latter. There’s also talk of a tabbed Finder, but that strikes me as low-hanging fruit. Minimizing skeuomorphic interface elements is mostly a cosmetic issue. It’s still more about the core functionality.

While you can probably expect more iOS/OS X integration of one sort or another, Apple clearly understands that they cannot make the same mistakes Microsoft did with Windows 8. There aren’t going to be Macs with touchscreens, because that design scheme is just plain awkward, and doesn’t make a whole lot of sense from a design and ergonomic point of view.

So what’s left? Does Apple overhaul the plumbing, unplug the aging HFS+ file system and plug in something new, something more robust, and something that can span multiple drives seamlessly? Well, I suppose, although something has to be done about converting files to the new format, and allowing you to read and write to older drives. It would be nice if Apple could make this a transparent process, for otherwise the effort doesn’t seem practical.

Apple could also go over all the wish lists about restoring features from the “Classic” Mac OS and see what ought to return. I’d like to, as an example, see a more configurable Apple menu, though I wonder if there’s much demand for that after all these years.

When it comes to iOS, a slim and light OS can become bloated real easily. Consider Samsung’s situation in packing on loads of extra apps for the Galaxy S4 smartphone and ending up filling roughly half the available storage of the 16GB version. If Apple pulled that stunt, what would happen to the 8GB iPhone 4? But Apple obviously can’t add feature after feature without paying the price of using additional storage. But I think the price of solid state storage has come down enough to make it possible to settle on 16GB as the minimum allotment even for the legacy iPhones sold after new models appear.

In saying that, I’ve already weighed in on a few odds and ends about the iOS that ought to be fixed in previous columns. I’ve concentrated on cut, copy, paste, Notification Center, and simplifying the settings panes. In comparison, Android’s settings can be incredibly complicated even in comparison to iOS. You can jump to the Settings pane, tap and hold menus, and there are internal settings of your various apps that may only appear when certain functions are accessed. The downside of having an essentially open platform, aside from the growing malware danger, is that apps can all do things differently. Consistency may sometimes go out the window, and far too many things do not just work. You have to make them work.

As with OS X, Apple might look into user complaints about iOS and fix areas where customers might tend to become confused, or have difficulty making things function the very first time. That should come before figuring out which 200 additional features, or minor feature enhancements, should be added.

The larger question, though is when (or if) Apple needs to totally redesign iOS and OS X. Maybe the latter would benefit most at this point, if it can be done without making it more difficult for customers to use and discover the new or changed features. This is the area where Microsoft failed big time with Windows 8. Although there will be an update, Windows 8.1, which may fix some of the worst ills, Microsoft has taken the position that the new OS will do fine once customers take the time to learn how things work. You see, to them it’s the customer’s fault, but that doesn’t seem to be enough to stem falling PC sales.

So as iOS and OS X are refreshed, Apple will confront the inevitable dilemma of having to come up with 100 to 200 new features to tout, while at the same time not confusing existing customers with far too many changes. But don’t forget that iPhone and iPad users managed to get accustomed to a totally new OS without a long learning curve. It can be done, as Apple has demonstrated over and over again.