14 DAY TRIAL // It’s been a crazy year so far, and the tech world has been hit hard by the health issue that we’re still struggling to deal with.
Tech giants have one by one canceled their 2020 events, and while some moved to digital events, it’s pretty clear that the impact hasn’t necessarily been the same as in the case of physical conferences.
Apple, for example, has already organized this year’s edition of the WWDC online, and now the company is getting ready to announce the iPhone 12 as part of a digital event too. The same thing happened with the Apple Watch Series 6, and we all noticed there’s a huge difference between an event that’s organized in front of the media and one that takes place online exclusively.
Samsung is one of the tech companies that hoped until the very last minute to be able to organize a physical event, even though it was pretty clear this wouldn’t be possible too soon.
And today, the South Korean company announced the thing that everybody expected: its developer conference supposed to take place later this year would no longer happen.
More surprising, however, is that Samsung doesn’t want to switch to a digital event, so it’s canceling the Samsung Developer Conference completely. In other words, Samsung won’t be holding any venue for developers this year, so now the next chance for the company to get in touch with app makers will happen in 2021.
“Please be advised, the Samsung Developer Conference in 2020 has been canceled. We are disappointed that we will not be hosting the event this year and getting the chance to interact directly with you,” Samsung announced today.
“Our top priority is the health and safety of our employees, the developer community, partners, and local communities and in making this decision, we are following the latest guidance from state and local authorities. Be assured, we remain committed to finding ways to keep the developer community informed on our latest platform updates. We will continue to share important news and useful resources through our developer website and community forums.”
What does this mean for consumers?
Samsung used its developer conference to provide users with a closer look at software improvements that it planned, including Bixby refinements and updates for the One UI experience. This year, for example, Samsung was expected to showcase the One UI 3.0 update that would be shipped to its devices starting next year.
Most likely, Samsung will stick with a simpler approach, and the company will either release press announcements to introduce these changes and will wait until the next digital events to provide a demo of its software updates.
However, worth knowing is that the next-generation Galaxy S models are only expected in February, and the company obviously hopes (and we do too) that things would come back to normal by that point. On the other hand, if the health crisis isn’t resolved by the time the Galaxy S21 is supposed to go live, there’s a good chance the company just sticks with a digital event, and a closer look at the software update is provided too.
In the meantime, it’s pretty clear that tech giants have a hard time dealing with the whole thing, so Samsung is just one of the many that just had to reconsider their plans for new announcements. Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, and so many others have already done the same thing and some others are likely to join the list in the coming months too.