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| © Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge |
Samsung is headed towards a controversial change that impacts
customers who like customizing their Galaxy smartphones with third-party
themes. The company has begun sending a notification to users that
warns beginning with Android 9 Pie, which Samsung plans to launch in
January, it will only permit free themes to be used for 14 days. After
that, the phone will automatically revert back to Samsung’s stock theme.
The Verge has confirmed the notification firsthand, after Droid Life and SamMobile reported on it.
Users
will receive two pop-up notifications before their free theme is
removed; the first will be displayed 24 hours before the 14-day
expiration. The second will hit 10 minutes prior to the cutoff. Samsung
says it’ll “provide suggested themes along with the notifications in
order to help you easily change your theme.” Presumably, those
suggestions will be for premium, paid themes; Samsung gets a cut of
those transactions from its Galaxy Store, whereas the company makes
nothing from free themes.
Samsung’s reasoning for the shift is
pretty questionable, to say the least. “We ask for your understanding as
we have changed the policy in order to help our designers continue to
create high quality products and also to provide stable and satisfactory services for you.”
For the last several generations of Galaxy phones, themes have been a
way to switch up and personalize the look and feel of the devices and
move away from the company’s own Touchwiz style. (Some of those free themes allowed users to adopt a Pixel-like theme, for instance.)
Last week, Samsung unveiled an overhaul to its software design
that it’s calling One UI. The new visual style is meant to make large
smartphones easier to use. One UI will debut alongside the Android Pie
update, which coincidentally is when this new restriction takes effect.
Putting an arbitrary limit on free themes is certainly one way to keep
people using One UI; the number of folks who pay for a custom smartphone
theme must be fairly small.
But there are still unknowns about
this policy. Once a free theme expires, is it permanently unavailable
from that point forward? Or can someone just reapply it and restart the
14-day clock? Do those who release free themes get any say in the
matter? If stability is the concern, why not review themes with more
scrutiny or just eliminate free ones altogether? Allowing them
temporarily doesn’t make a lot of sense. We’ve reached out to Samsung
for clarification on what’s going on here — and hopefully for a better
explanation.
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