I get what you are saying but they are simply in different positions. Broadcom can say "Hey, there's a bunch of work here to make this not suck" and Samsung, even if they wanted to do their own thing, realizes they too would have to go through that effort to make everything work. It wouldn't be a simple matter of just making non-sucky bluetooth, they'd have to also work with the android OS to improve the bluetooth stack and no guarantee that those changes can be merged.
Apple controls their whole stack. They've already written the Bluetooth stack for their OS. They only have to service their devices.
> Incidentally Apple sometimes has more than one vendor too, so it's not just two parties.
Not the point I was making. It's not an issue with multiple vendors, its and issue of who controls what. Those other vendors also have to conform to apples standards if they want to sell apple their products. What I'm talking about is the fact that a bluetooth device manufacture has to conform to google's android standards if they want to sell their chips to android manufactures, not to samsung standards. That's where the leverage goes away.
If samsung ever pulls the trigger and uses Tizen everywhere, then they'll be more in Apples position. Until that happens, they need to work with google to get stuff done.
Except that's not how it works? Chip manufacturers just care about selling chips, not about being in the iPhone or being in an Android phone. It doesn't matter that some chip works in OnePlus phones, if it doesn't work in Samsung phones Samsung's not going to buy it.
If broadcom says it's going to be expensive to fix, either you pay or you don't. But it has nothing whatsoever to do with "controlling the whole stack".
As an aside, and it's totally irrelevant to the above, but there's nothing other than the amount of work involved preventing Samsung writing their own bluetooth stack. They write plenty of custom drivers and they created a folding device prior to OS support. If they wanted to they could; they just apparently don't think it's worth the cost.
Edit: according to a comment down thread they have done exactly that.
Apple controls their whole stack. They've already written the Bluetooth stack for their OS. They only have to service their devices.
> Incidentally Apple sometimes has more than one vendor too, so it's not just two parties.
Not the point I was making. It's not an issue with multiple vendors, its and issue of who controls what. Those other vendors also have to conform to apples standards if they want to sell apple their products. What I'm talking about is the fact that a bluetooth device manufacture has to conform to google's android standards if they want to sell their chips to android manufactures, not to samsung standards. That's where the leverage goes away.
If samsung ever pulls the trigger and uses Tizen everywhere, then they'll be more in Apples position. Until that happens, they need to work with google to get stuff done.