Samsung Blocks Unofficial S-Voice Service Usage

It looks like those happy Android tech-savvy who managed to rip apart the first official Galaxy S III ROM will be disappointed that their work has been crippled by Samsung.

As soon as the official Android 4.0.4 ICS ROM for Galaxy S III leaked online this weekend, the first thing to extract from the build was the S-Voice apk file.

One day after the application was successfully extracted and installed on many other Android phone models, Samsung and Vlingo, the company managing S-Voice servers, have blocked access to unofficial use of this service.

Basically, any Android phone other than the Galaxy S III that sends requests to Vlingo servers won’t be processed so users will get an error while trying to use the S-Voice application.

It appears that all voice functions for the application have been disabled from the server, so any attempt to take advantage of the S-Voice service will be futile unless there’s a Samsung Galaxy S III involved.

According to TheNextWeb, Vlingo servers can identify the device generating the requests whenever S-Voice application is used, so the company can easily block any non-Galaxy S III device.

Although the folks at XDA Developers have yet to find a workaround that should re-enable S-Voice full capabilities, Vlingo’s servers might be fooled by simply spoofing the device ID.

The leaked ROM contains other exclusive apps and services that we might see emerging online within the next few days, but some of them are not related with any third-party servers, so they might work on other Android devices as well.

Unfortunately, S-Voice is Samsung’s own application and has nothing to do with the open source Android platform, so if the company doesn’t want it to work on other devices ahead of Galaxy S III launch, then it can restrict access to the application.

On a side note, Samsung Galaxy S III is expected to hit shelves in Europe at the end of the month via multiple carrier and leading retailers.