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doccontent publish api reference this page lists the parameters, country codes, and language codes used with the view seller’s app details contentinfo response and modify app data contentupdate request in the content publish api [ { "contentid" "000007654321", "apptitle" "the best app ever!", "icon" "https //img samsungapps com/content/d33aazz11a/2021/0214/iconimage_20210214000000000 png", "iconkey" null, "contentstatus" "registering", "defaultlanguagecode" "eng", "applicationtype" "android", "longdescription" "the app that solves all your problems ", "shortdescription" "", "newfeature" "", "agelimit" "0", "chinaagelimit" "0", "opensourceurl" "", "privatepolicyurl" "", "youtubeurl" "", "copyrightholder" "", "supportemail" "support@mycompany com", "supportedsiteurl" "", "binarylist" [ { "filename" "app_filename apk", "versioncode" "3", "versionname" "3", "packagename" "my package name", "nativeplatforms" null, "apiminsdkversion" "26", "apimaxsdkversion" null, "iapsdk" "n", "gms" "y", "filekey" null } ], "standardprice" "0", "paid" "n", "autoaddcountry" false, "publicationtype" "01", "startpublicationdate" null, "stoppublicationdate" "2023-01-02", "usexportlaws" true, "reviewcomment" null, "reviewfilename" null, "reviewfilekey" null, "edgescreen" null, "edgescreenkey" null, "edgescreenplus" null, "edgescreenpluskey" null, "notifyresult" [], "sellcountrylist" [ {"countrycode" "aut", "price" "0"}, {"countrycode" "deu", "price" "0"}, {"countrycode" "esp", "price" "0"}, {"countrycode" "fra", "price" "0"}, {"countrycode" "ita", "price" "0"}, {"countrycode" "jpn", "price" "0"}, {"countrycode" "kor", "price" "0"}, {"countrycode" "nld", "price" "0"}, {"countrycode" "tur", "price" "0"} ], "supportedlanguages" ["deu", "eng", "fra", "ita", "jpn", "kor"], "addlanguage" [ { "languagecode" "deu", "newfeature" "", "description" "the app that solves all your problems ", "apptitle" "the best app ever!", "screenshots" [ { "screenshotpath" "https //img samsungapps com/content/d33aazz11a/2021/0223/deu/screenimage_202102230000000002 png", "screenshotkey" "screenimage_202102230000000002_filekey", "reuseyn" false }, { "screenshotpath" "https //img samsungapps com/content/d33aazz11a/2021/0223/deu/screenimage_2021022300000000 png", "screenshotkey" null, "reuseyn" true }, { "screenshotpath" "https //img samsungapps com/content/d33aazz11a/2021/0223/deu/screenimage_20210223000000009 png", "screenshotkey" null, "reuseyn" true }, { "screenshotpath" "https //img samsungapps com/content/d33aazz11a/2021/0223/deu/screenimage_202102230000000001 jpeg", "screenshotkey" null, "reuseyn" true } ] } ], "screenshots" [ { "screenshotpath" "https //img samsungapps com/content/d33aazz11a/2021/0218/eng/screenimage_20210218000000000 png", "screenshotkey" "screenimage_20210218000000000_filekey", "reuseyn" false }, { "screenshotpath" "https //img samsungapps com/content/d33aazz11a/2021/0218/eng/screenimage_20210218000000001 png", "screenshotkey" null, "reuseyn" true }, { "screenshotpath" "https //img samsungapps com/content/d33aazz11a/2021/0218/eng/screenimage_20210218000000002 png", "screenshotkey" null, "reuseyn" true }, { "screenshotpath" "https //img samsungapps com/content/d33aazz11a/2021/0218/eng/screenimage_20210218000000003 png", "screenshotkey" null, "reuseyn" true } ], "category" [ { "name" "others", "type" "one_depth_category" }, { "name" "music", "type" "general_category" } ], "heroimage" "https //img samsungapps com/content/d33aazz11a/2021/0219/eng/coverimage_20210219000000007 png", "heroimagekey" null } ] general parameters name type description addlanguage addlanguage[] add local languages in which you want to provide application information dismiss when null is entered neither add nor delete content , remove all when an empty distribution is entered see addlanguage parameters agelimit int the samsung age rating of the app see age category under age rating for more information valid values 0, 4, 12, 16, 18 chinaagelimit string age restriction for china required value if any of the code values in the defaultlanguagecode or addlanguage list are in chinese valid values 0, 3, 8, 12, 16, 18 apptitle string the name of the app that is displayed in your galaxy store listing maximum 100 bytes the app title can be unique or the same as any other app title registered in seller portal or distributed in galaxy store per the app id policy, if you register an app title with an app id that are the same title and id of a previously registered app, then you cannot choose the distribution devices and countries as the previously registered app autoaddcountry boolean automatically distribute the app to a new country or group when it initially becomes available y distribute your app to a new country or group n do not distribute your app to a new country or group binarylist binaryinfo[] dismiss when null is entered neither add nor delete content , remove all when an empty distribution is entered see binarylist parameters to edit the binary list, use add new binary, modify binary, or delete binary after contentpublish has been called and the app is in the registering state category category[] one or more app store groups that best describe the app see category parameters cannot be modified contentid string required in a request the unique 12-digit identifier of the app copyrightholder string for apps that have copyrighted content, the name of the copyright holder of the app maximum 100 bytes if a company is the holder, enter the company name if an individual is the holder, enter the individual's name when specified, the copyright holder's name is displayed in the galaxy store listing instead of the seller's name when not specified, the seller's name is displayed as the copyright holder defaultlanguagecode string required in a request the language in which you provide application information see language codes for addlanguage and defaultlanguagecode for a list of supported languages note if the app is published in more than one country, in order to pass app review, this must be set to "eng" edgescreen image file name of the image file app icon or logo file that must be a png file, 160x2560 pixels, and up to 1024 kb edgescreenkey string the filekey associated with the uploaded file in a request, you must create a session id and then upload the file to obtain the filekey edgescreenplus image file name of the image file app icon or logo file that must be a png file, 550x2560 pixels, and up to 1024 kb edgescreenpluskey string the filekey associated with the uploaded file in a request, you must create a session id and then upload the file to obtain the filekey heroimage image file name of the image file in some countries, the image file displayed at the top of the app detail page jpg or png file, 1200x675 pixels, and up to 1024 kb you can use this field if you select a category name of games heroimagekey string the filekey associated with the uploaded file in a request, you must create a session id and then upload the file to obtain the filekey icon image file name of the image file app icon or logo file for an android app, it must be a png file, 512x512 pixels, and up to 1024 kb iconkey string the filekey associated with the uploaded file in a request, you must create a session id and then upload the file to obtain the filekey longdescription string explanation of the app including a description, features, requirements, and supported languages that is displayed in your galaxy store listing maximum 4000 bytes if the app has two or more distribution countries, the description must be in english for non-english apps, the description must contain a warning stating that the full features of the application may not be available on devices that do not support the app's languages for link-follower galaxy watch apps, the description must inform users that the linked app must be installed newfeature string explanation of the changes made to an updated app maximum 4000 bytes use this field if the app is being updated notifyresult string[] email address es that are notified when the status of the app registration changes maximum 20 email addresses opensourceurl string for apps that use or include open source software, the url of the open source license maximum 200 bytes paid boolean required in a request whether or not app download requires a user payment y users must pay to download the app n the app is free, users can download it without payment privatepolicyurl string for apps that have a privacy policy that require a separate notification, the url of the app privacy policy maximum 200 bytes if a privacy policy is not specified, the category may be changed during certification required if the kids category is selected optional for all other app categories publicationtype string required in a request when the app is published 01 publish automatically publishes the app after the pre-review phase has completed 02 publish on date when the app has passed the pre-review phase, the app sale starts automatically on the date specified by startpublicationdate 03 publish manually the seller must publish the app after all phases of the review process have successfully completed reviewcomment string information to help with the evaluation of the app to determine whether or not the app is to be distributed maximum 4000 bytes reviewfilekey string the filekey associated with the uploaded file in a request, you must create a session id and then upload the file to obtain the filekey screenshots screenshot[] dismiss when null is entered neither add nor delete content , remove all when empty distribution is entered see screenshots parameters sellcountrylist sellcountry[] countries and groups of countries to which the app is to be distributed dismiss when null is entered neither add nor delete content , remove all when empty distribution is entered see sellcountrylist parameters shortdescription string a single sentence that is a brief explanation of the app it appears under the app title in the app list and search results in galaxy store maximum 40 bytes standardprice string standard price in usd united states of america dollars that determines the default country-specific price for all distribution countries startpublicationdate string enter as yyyy-mm-dd hh mm ss when distribution of the app in galaxy store begins when publicationtype is set to 02 stoppublicationdate string enter as yyyy-mm-dd when distribution of the app in galaxy store stops supportedlanguages string[] one or more languages that the app presents graphically or audibly in its ux, instructions, or other ways communicating to users see language codes for supportedlanguages for a list of supported languages supportemail string email address of the person to whom app end-users can send inquiries maximum 100 bytes supportedsiteurl string url of the available end-user support site for the app maximum 200 bytes usexportlaws boolean whether or not you certify that the app is in compliance with all applicable u s export laws for export to other countries y you certify your app is in compliance n you do not certify your app if your app is not in compliance, it cannot be submitted for validation and distribution youtubeurl string youtube video id of a youtube video related to the app 11 characters the initial screenshot and hyperlink of the video is automatically displayed in the first screenshot location of the galaxy store listing addlanguage parameters "addlanguage" [ { "languagecode" "deu", "newfeature" "", "description" "the app that solves all your problems ", "apptitle" "the best app ever!", "screenshots" [ { "screenshotpath" "https //img samsungapps com/content/d33aazz11a/2021/0223/deu/screenimage_202102230000000002 png", "screenshotkey" null, "reuseyn" true }, { "screenshotpath" "https //img samsungapps com/content/d33aazz11a/2021/0223/deu/screenimage_2021022300000000 png", "screenshotkey" null, "reuseyn" true }, { "screenshotpath" "https //img samsungapps com/content/d33aazz11a/2021/0223/deu/screenimage_20210223000000009 png", "screenshotkey" null, "reuseyn" true }, { "screenshotpath" "https //img samsungapps com/content/d33aazz11a/2021/0223/deu/screenimage_202102230000000001 jpeg", "screenshotkey" null, "reuseyn" true } ] } ] name type description languagecode string required if you are updating addlanguage add a language in which you want to provide application information see language codes for addlanguage and defaultlanguagecode for a list of supported languages newfeature string explanation of the changes made to an updated app maximum 4000 bytes description string required if you are updating addlanguage explanation of the app including a description, features, requirements, and supported languages that is displayed in your galaxy store listing maximum 4000 bytes for non-english apps, the description must contain a warning stating that the full features of the application may not be available on devices that do not support the app's languages for link-follower galaxy watch apps, the description must inform users that the linked app must be installed apptitle string required if you are updating addlanguage the name of the app in the selected language that is displayed in your listing of a galaxy store that supports the language screenshots screenshot[] dismiss when null is entered, remove all when an empty distribution is entered see screenshots parameters to remove all content from this parameter, leave it blank in the request for example, "addlanguage" "" to keep the existing content for this parameter neither add nor delete content , set it to null for example, "addlanguage" "null" binarylist parameters cautionthe binarylist parameters have been deprecated since march 2025 the contentinfo response may continue to contain these parameters and contentupdate may continue to accept requests with these parameters however, if you attempt to edit the binary list using binarylist, unexpected errors may occur instead, to edit the binary list, use add new binary, modify binary, or delete binary after contentpublish has been called and the app is in the registering state "binarylist" [ { "filename" "app_filename apk", "binaryseq" "1", "versioncode" "3", "versionname" "3", "packagename" "my package name", "nativeplatforms" null, "apiminsdkversion" "26", "apimaxsdkversion" null, "iapsdk" "n", "gms" "y", "filekey" null } ] name type description apimaxsdkversion int the maximum api level or os version supported by the binary file apiminsdkversion int the minimum api level or os version supported by the binary file binaryseq int required when changing existing binary data copy the value from the contentinfo response this value is not visible in seller portal filekey string required for new registration or replacement of a binary file the filekey associated with the uploaded file in a request, you must create a session id and then upload the file to obtain the filekey filename string name of the binary file gms boolean required if you are updating binarylist whether or not the app provides the user with any google™ services such as google maps™, gmail™, and talk y the app provides one or more google services n the app does not provide any google services the distribution of an app that provides the user with any google services is prohibited in some countries such as china and is automatically enforced by seller portal when registering a new version of a binary file, this setting can be changed, if needed iapsdk boolean whether or not the app provides in-app purchase items using samsung in-app purchase iap sdk y the app uses samsung iap n the app does not use samsung iap nativeplatforms string supported architecture information valid values null, 32bit, 32/64bit, or 64bit packagename string the app id maximum 1,000 bytes versioncode string integer value that represents the version of the app code in the binary file relative to other versions versionname string the release version of the app code in the binary file that is displayed in galaxy store category parameters "category" [ { "name" "others", "type" "one_depth_category" }, { "name" "music", "type" "general_category" } ] name type description name string one or more app store groups that best describe the app available categories and sub-categories depend on the platform, binary files, permissions, and other factors unless governed by distribution country requirements, the app is listed in galaxy store under one or both categories and sub-categories if the category selected is not suitable for the application, it may be changed automatically select from one of the following kids, games, travel, social, music, decoration, office, photo, book, lifestyle, tool, video, system, finance, shopping, education, or traffic health type string required if a name is specified that has a subcategory see next table one or more app store sub-groups that best describe the app category name sub-category type kids valid values play, learning, story games valid values puzzle, online game, action/adventure, shooting, racing, strategy, board, role playing, arcade, card, casino, casual, music, simulation, sports, trivia, wordby selecting a specific game sub-category arcade, card, casino, casual, music, simulation, sports, trivia, word , you are not allowed to select china for the country of sale screenshots parameters "screenshots" [ { "screenshotpath" "https //img samsungapps com/content/d33aazz11a/2021/0223/deu/screenimage_202102230000000002 png", "screenshotkey" null, "reuseyn" true }, { "screenshotpath" "https //img samsungapps com/content/d33aazz11a/2021/0223/deu/screenimage_2021022300000000 png", "screenshotkey" null, "reuseyn" true }, { "screenshotpath" "https //img samsungapps com/content/d33aazz11a/2021/0223/deu/screenimage_20210223000000009 png", "screenshotkey" null, "reuseyn" true }, { "screenshotpath" "https //img samsungapps com/content/d33aazz11a/2021/0223/deu/screenimage_202102230000000001 jpeg", "screenshotkey" null, "reuseyn" true } ] name type description screenshotpath image file image file of app screenshot to be displayed in your galaxy store listing jpg or png file, 320-3840 pixels with a maximum 2 1 aspect ratio you must register 4-8 screenshots if more than eight screenshots are uploaded, only the first eight images are displayed if you register a link to a youtube video, a screenshot of the video and the link is displayed automatically in the first screenshot location of the galaxy store listing screenshotkey string set to null if you are re-using the same screenshot if you want to replace the screenshot, set this to the image filekey create a session id and then upload the file to obtain the filekey and set the reuseyn parameter to false reuseyn boolean required if you are updating screenshots whether you want to continue using the existing screenshot true re-use the screenshot false replace the screenshot enter the filekey to the image using the screenshotkey parameter to remove all content from this parameter, leave it blank in the request for example, "screenshots" "" to keep the existing content for this parameter neither add nor delete content , set it to null for example, "screenshots" "null" if you want to remove one or more screenshots, remove it from the request parameters for example, if these are the screenshots parameters in the contentinfo response "screenshots" [ { "screenshotpath" "https //img samsungapps com/content/d33aazz11a/2021/0218/eng/screenimage_20210218000000000 png", "screenshotkey" null, "reuseyn" true }, { "screenshotpath" "https //img samsungapps com/content/d33aazz11a/2021/0218/eng/screenimage_20210218000000001 png", "screenshotkey" null, "reuseyn" true }, { "screenshotpath" "https //img samsungapps com/content/d33aazz11a/2021/0218/eng/screenimage_20210218000000002 png", "screenshotkey" null, "reuseyn" true }, { "screenshotpath" "https //img samsungapps com/content/d33aazz11a/2021/0218/eng/screenimage_20210218000000003 png", "screenshotkey" null, "reuseyn" true }, { "screenshotpath" "https //img samsungapps com/content/d33aazz11a/2021/0218/eng/screenimage_20210218000000004 png", "screenshotkey" null, "reuseyn" true }, { "screenshotpath" "https //img samsungapps com/content/d33aazz11a/2021/0218/eng/screenimage_20210218000000005 png", "screenshotkey" null, "reuseyn" true } ] to remove the last two screenshots, change the screenshots parameters to this in the request "screenshots" [ { "screenshotpath" "https //img samsungapps com/content/d33aazz11a/2021/0218/eng/screenimage_20210218000000000 png", "screenshotkey" null, "reuseyn" true }, { "screenshotpath" "https //img samsungapps com/content/d33aazz11a/2021/0218/eng/screenimage_20210218000000001 png", "screenshotkey" null, "reuseyn" true }, { "screenshotpath" "https //img samsungapps com/content/d33aazz11a/2021/0218/eng/screenimage_20210218000000002 png", "screenshotkey" null, "reuseyn" true }, { "screenshotpath" "https //img samsungapps com/content/d33aazz11a/2021/0218/eng/screenimage_20210218000000003 png", "screenshotkey" null, "reuseyn" true } ] sellcountrylist parameters "sellcountrylist" [ {"countrycode" "aut", "price" "0"}, {"countrycode" "deu", "price" "0"}, {"countrycode" "esp", "price" "0"} ] name type description countrycode string required if you are updating sellcountrylist countries and groups of countries to which the app is to be distributed see country codes for sellcountrylist for the list of country codes price double country-specific price in the local currency the price must fall within the minimum and maximum allowable price for the country, if applicable prices may vary by country if the price is below the minimum allowable price for a country, it is changed to the minimum payment amount if the price is above the maximum allowable price for a country, it is changed to the maximum payment amount if the price is null or is not set, the standard price is applied if this is a paid app, the price cannot be set to 0 zero if this is a paid app and the price is set to 0, an error is returned see entering information on country/region and price for more details to remove all content from this parameter, leave it blank in the request for example, "sellcountrylist" "" to keep the existing content for this parameter neither add nor delete content , set it to null for example, "sellcountrylist" "null" country codes for sellcountrylist sorted by region, then alphabetically by country name europe "aut" "austria", "bel" "belgium", "bgr" "bulgaria", "hrv" "croatia", "cze" "czech", "dnk" "denmark", "est" "estonia", "fin" "finland", "fra" "france", "deu" "germany", "grc" "greece", "hun" "hungary", "irl" "ireland", "ita" "italy", "lva" "latvia", "ltu" "lithuania", "lux" "luxembourg", "nld" "netherlands", "nor" "norway", "pol" "poland", "prt" "portugal", "rou" "romania", "srb" "serbia", "svk" "slovakia", "esp" "spain", "swe" "sweden", "che" "switzerland", "tur" "turkey", "gbr" "united kingdom" cis "blr" "belarus", "kaz" "kazakhstan", "rus" "russia", "ukr" "ukraine" asia "aus" "australia", "chn" "chinese", "hkg" "chinese hong kong", "twn" "chinese taiwan", "ind" "india", "idn" "indonesia", "jpn" "japan", "kor" "korea", "mys" "malaysia", "nzl" "new zealand", "phl" "philippines", "sgp" "singapore", "tha" "thailand", "vnm" "vietnam" america "arg" "argentina", "bra" "brazil", "can" "canada", "chl" "chile", "col" "colombia", "mex" "mexico", "per" "peru", "usa" "usa" middle east and africa "dza" "algeria", "bhr" "bahrain", "egy" "egypt", "irn" "iran", "irq" "iraq", "isr" "israel", "jor" "jordan", "kwt" "kuwait", "lbn" "lebanon", // only free applications are available "lby" "libya", "mar" "morocco", "omn" "oman", "qat" "qatar", "sau" "saudi arabia", "zaf" "south africa", "tun" "tunisia", "are" "united arab emirates", "yem" "yemen" groups "glb" "global a", "glf" "global a free", // only free applications are available "isu" "global free", // only free applications are available "gpb" "pan latin free", // only free applications are available "gpf" "pan-africa english ", // only free applications are available "gpa" "pan-africa french ", // only free applications are available "gpl" "pan-latin" "bts" "beta test store" // only free applications are available language codes for addlanguage and defaultlanguagecode sorted alphabetically by language "ara" "arabic", "bul" "bulgarian", "zho" "chinese simplified", "002" "chinese traditional", "hrv" "croatian", "ces" "czech", "dan" "danish", "nld" "dutch", "eng" "english", "est" "estonian", "fin" "finnish", "fra" "french", "gla" "gaelic", "deu" "german", "ell" "greek", "heb" "hebrew", "hun" "hungarian", "ind" "indonesian", "ita" "italian", "jpn" "japanese", "kaz" "kazakh", "kor" "korean", "lav" "latvian", "lit" "lithuanian", "nor" "norwegian", "fas" "persian", "pol" "polish", "por" "portuguese", "ron" "romanian", "rus" "russian", "srp" "serbian", "slk" "slovakian", "spa" "spanish", "swe" "swedish", "tha" "thai", "tur" "turkish", "ukr" "ukrainian", "vie" "vietnamese" language codes for supportedlanguages sorted alphabetically by language "ara" "arabic", "hye" "armenian", "asn" "assamese", "aze" "azerbaijani", "eus" "basque", "ben" "bengali", "bul" "bulgarian", "cat" "catalan", "zho" "chinese simplified", "002" "chinese traditional", "hrv" "croatian", "ces" "czech", "dan" "danish", "nld" "dutch", "eng" "english", "est" "estonian", "fas" "farsi", "fin" "finnish", "fra" "french", "glg" "galician", "kat" "georgian", "deu" "german", "ell" "greek", "guj" "gujarati", "hau" "hausa", "heb" "hebrew", "hin" "hindi", "hun" "hungarian", "isl" "icelandic", "ibo" "igbo", "ind" "indonesian", "gle" "irish", "ita" "italian", "jpn" "japanese", "kan" "kannada", "kaz" "kazakh", "khm" "khmer", "kor" "korean", "lao" "lao", "lav" "latvian", "lit" "lithuanian", "mkd" "macedonian", "msa" "malay", "mal" "malayalam", "mar" "marathi", "mon" "mongolian", "bur" "myanmar", "nep" "nepali", "nor" "norwegian", "ori" "oriya", "pol" "polish", "por" "portuguese", "pan" "punjabi", "ron" "romanian", "rus" "russian", "srp" "serbian", "sin" "sinhala", "slk" "slovakian", "slv" "slovenian", "spa" "spanish", "lat" "spanish_latin", "swe" "swedish", "tam" "tamil", "tel" "telugu", "tha" "thai", "tur" "turkish", "ukr" "ukrainian", "urd" "urdu", "uzb" "uzbek", "vie" "vietnamese", "yor" "yoruba"
Learn Developers Podcast
docseason 1, episode 2 previous episode | episode index | next episode this is a transcript of one episode of the samsung developers podcast, hosted by and produced by tony morelan a listing of all podcast transcripts can be found here host tony morelan senior developer evangelist, samsung developers instagram - twitter - linkedin guest dan appelquist samsung internet developer advocacy in this episode of pow, i interview dan appelquist, director of developer advocacy for samsung internet dan first got involved with web browsers way back when the internet first got started, and he was heavily involved with the web standards movement that was established at that time soon after, dan relocated to london, england, and remains there today, working out of the samsung uk office listen download this episode topics covered the beginning of mobile web web standards and user experiences the benefits of samsung internet browser privacy and security web developer ecosystem progressive web apps samsung internet and ar/vr augmented reality / virtual reality android developers transcript note transcripts are provided by an automated service and reviewed by the samsung developers web team inaccuracies from the transcription process do occur, so please refer to the audio if you are in doubt about the transcript tony morelan 00 02 hey, i'm tony morelan and this is pow! podcast of wisdom from the samsung developer program, where we talk about the latest tech new trends and give insight into all of the opportunities available for developers looking to create for samsung i sat down with dan appelquist, director of developer advocacy for samsung internet dan first got involved with internet browsers way back when the internet first became a thing and he was heavily involved with the web standards movement that was established at that time soon after dan relocated to london, england and remains there today working out of the samsung, uk office hey, dan, thanks for coming on to the podcast i'm going to start with a real simple question who exactly is dan appelquist? dan appelquist 00 47 well, first of all, thanks for having me on the podcast i really appreciate it so i am director of developer advocacy for samsung internet, which is samsung's web browser i'm also somebody who's been working on the web since before there was a web so i have a background i started working in startups in the early nine, early and mid 90s, that were kind of working on web sites and web services for the publishing industry i went on and became a com, cto, being sent over to the uk from new york, to be cto for the street com at uk, which was this the uk arm of the street com i became a com refugee and because i was here in europe at the time in the early 2000s, i became involved in a lot of projects that were helping to bring the web to mobile, and were happening to helping to create digital mobile services, which was something where europe at that time was a lot farther ahead than the us so it's very interesting and exciting time to kind of be working with companies like vodafone, later telefonica to help build these kinds of services, emerging services for emerging devices and handsets and that kind of thing tony morelan 02 10 yeah, that must have been pretty exciting to have been, you know, working on technology, really, at the very beginning of something that was going to, you know, honestly, change our world forever so why is it that you would say that europe is further along than the us when it came to the start of the whole mobile web? dan appelquist 02 25 well, when in say 2001 2002, there were already color web phones that were coming onto the market here in the uk and elsewhere in europe that we're delivering digital services, like very simple digital services, but still digital services, news and online information on that kind of thing whereas i still had to really explain to my parents what it is that i was doing you know, people at that time in the us who really didn't think of their mobile phone as being for anything besides calling, even text messaging was not very well understood as a medium because the interoperability wasn't there between the different carriers around text messaging and it was only later that mobile digital services started to really develop and then the mobile internet came out of that whereas in europe, i would say my experience of it anyway has been was that with the standardization of gsm, across the continent, you had a much stronger base for delivery of mobile services across a standard range of handsets, standard range of networks, all that all that kind of thing all the technology was pretty, it was pretty standard tony morelan 03 36 and gsm is global system for mobile communications that's right dan appelquist 03 39 yeah yeah tony morelan 03 41 so the samsung internet, what exactly is samsung internet? dan appelquist 03 44 right so first of all, samsung internet is a web browser and for those who are familiar with web browsers, immune to other commonly known commonly used web browsers, especially on desktop computers, include google chrome, mozilla firefox, internet explorer from microsoft, which is increasingly being subsumed by microsoft's new browser, which is edge and then apple's safari browser probably are the biggies, the ones that people most people have heard about when it comes to market share, and especially on mobile samsung internet is also a browser that has a very strong market position and that's because we ship by default with every samsung device we're also part of the chromium project we're a browser that's built on top of the chromium, open source, project and code base that is the same code base at google chrome is built on top of it's also the same code base that microsoft edge is built on top of so there's a community of companies and organizations that are contributing into that into that open source project, including samsung and what we're doing is we're taking that and we're delivering samsung internet for android which is our kind of premium browser for the provides what we think of as the best user experience for the web on definitely on samsung devices, but we are also available across all android devices so any android device, you can download and install samsung internet and use it as your as your primary browser tony morelan 05 21 you know, of course, my android phone is a samsung phone so i didn't know that that a samsung internet browser is available for all android phones that's pretty cool yeah do you have an idea of how many people use the sampling internet browser? dan appelquist 05 34 on samsung devices? we're very high on other devices we're not that high but part of the point of being on other devices is that we it's it was very much a developer play to get it was a minimal extra effort i shouldn't say that because our engineering team it's probably gritting their teeth and saying are you kidding me? this was not minimal effort but anyway, it was it was it was definitely worth the effort? because one of the key things that we go out to developers and talk about is testing and the importance of testing on samsung internet one of the things that we're hearing very early on when we started work in 2016, on developer advocacy for samsung internet was, well, we can't test we don't have a samsung device can you lend us a samsung device? well, being available on non-samsung devices really made that conversation a lot easier, because we could just say, look, just download samsung internet and run it on whatever device you have and you'll get the get that experience and you'll be able to test and testing across browsers is so important when you're building any kind of application or any kind of web application tony morelan 06 41 and that was the reason why the whole web standard movement started, wasn't it? because we had so many different browsers that, you know, often developers were having to create different versions of their website just to be compatible with the different browsers dan appelquist 06 51 yeah, certainly the adherence to web standards has been a constant issue across the web i think that things are a lot better now than they used to be there are still differences in, in how the in the user experience of the browser itself, it can cause issues i'm going to be one example like, we have a feature on our browser, which is a scroll to the top of screen, which is a little button that appears over overlaid on top of the web content that allows the user to wherever they are to scroll right back up to the top of the screen now, if the web developer didn't test their application in samsung internet, they might put a key piece of ui underneath that section of screen where we overlay the button so it you know it things like that are these little micro issues that testing really helps and that is not necessarily about web standards compliance it's more about how you make sure that your web application runs correctly and all the ui is correct for the ui choices that that browser has made and how it displays it to you you know, tony morelan 08 01 i actually have a lot of experience with designing watch faces for samsung watches and the same is true yeah, it's best to design around the system icons that may appear under certain circumstances so that you don't have any, you know, usability issues 08 13 yeah tony morelan 08 15 so what is samsung internet done to drive awareness for developers? dan appelquist 08 19 so a lot of the work that we started off with when we started the team in 2016, was trying to drive market awareness of something and we already knew that, because we had some stats that we had strong usage numbers so we are roughly 10% of all mobile browsing in europe, for instance, the issue was actually driving awareness amongst developers that they really needed to, to understand those numbers and therefore pay attention to testing and you basically why they should pay attention to us as a browser so we started off by working with people like stat counter, that actually is one source that people use recordable stats of different browsers we then went on to work with google analytics so we after we've gotten counter to kind of separate us off from google chrome, we then went to google analytics and we got them to separate us off from google chrome and amazingly, after that happened, we started to get all these calls from different people uk government was one example where they started to say, hey, we've just had this amazing jump in usage from samsung internet, while they didn't actually have a jump they had, they always had very high usage of samsung internet but they just never knew it because google analytics was lumping us together with google chrome so and that's the problem with a lot of these stats keeper sites is that they weren't if they were just if they were not paying attention to that your specific browser, they were lumping you together with the particular engine that the browser based on so getting that right was like a key element and then we can take those numbers to other places and we can say like, look, this is how many of your users or what percentage of users using samsung internet, we really think you would benefit from talking to us or you would benefit from testing on samsung internet would you like to come do some joint projects with us all that kind of stuff we also have been working with places like mdn so mozilla developer network, or mdn, has recently or within the last few years has changed from a very mozilla specific website into basically a documentation website for the web, across browsers and what's underpin that is that they now have a product advisory board, which includes people from microsoft, samsung, mozilla, obviously google they also have people from a couple of smaller organizations such as boku, which is the north kind of open source development shop so they have been doing a lot to, to kind of create, and to reinforce the understanding that developers have it that's a cross platform development site so as part of our work there, we made sure that when there's a documentation page about a particular api, and they have a list of browsers underneath that documentation, that is the listed, supported browsers, versions for that particular api that said, some internet appears in that list can i use comm is another example of a website that people use when they want to find out if they can use a particular api and a particular browser, they were also not separating yourself from chrome so actually working with them, and then working with them through mdn we actually got them to use all of the mdn compatibility data, which is data that we update, that's data that our team goes in the background and updates through github, through an open source procedure, so that all that data is up to date both on mdn and on can i use so that developers have up to date information about which api's they can use and which versions of which browser and then in general, we've been doing a lot of things like writing blog posts, we write a lot of technical blog posts about the use of different api's, the use of different technologies, opinion pieces about topics on the web, we tend to focus on things where samsung has some kind of engineering investment so things like progressive web apps, that's one area where we've done a lot of work recently we've also done a lot of work on web xr and the immersive web and things like web payment, that kind of thing we also sponsor conferences, and we go out and speak at conferences and events these days, we're obviously we're doing a lot of virtual events and we're really trying to play a leadership role in how the developer advocacy community deals with the current situation with a lockdown by showing how you can very effectively engage with the developers and create conversation with developers using virtual needs tony morelan 13 04 you know, i couldn't agree with you more, you know, the timing with the launch of our new podcast here is actually right in line with probably what's going to be a huge change for all of the industries as we move forward in this new world of information sharing virtually, yeah, you know, i actually attended one of your virtual office hours and it was nice, because, you know, you brought in some outside people, some industry people to participate dan appelquist 13 28 and that's, and that's something that we that's the kind of ethos that we have had from the beginning we actually ran a two-day event in san jose a couple years ago, called samsung create and the whole idea of that was to feature samsung people yes, but at least half the speakers that we had were front were third party speakers that we brought in from the industry and we had an mdn speaker we had a microsoft speaker, later google speaker you know, it also fits together with the fact that our team besides doing the developer advocacy and outreach we're also doing a lot of industry work so we do work in w three c, i co-chair, a group in w three c, which is the world wide web consortium that sets standards for the web, i co-chair a group there called the technical architecture group, which is a kind of technical steering group for web standards my colleague, ada co-chairs, the immersive web working group, which is working on technologies that bring ar and vr to the web so we're not only playing a role in terms of getting the word out about these technologies, but we're also playing a role in terms of setting the standards tony morelan 14 40 is simply internet just for android dan appelquist 14 42 the work that we're doing is on samsung internet for android and the team that we're attached to a samsung internet for android if you have a samsung tv or if you have a samsung watch, you may also know that there are other versions of samsung internet they have the same logo and they are also based on chromium, but they're actually built by different teams within samsung divisions so there's some cross working between those different groups, especially because they're all using the chromium base and so they share a lot of knowledge and they share a lot of information but actually, the work that we're doing, we focus on samsung internet for android, tony morelan 15 20 when you have improvements that you want to make to the samsung internet browser are those released at the same time when new devices are released dan appelquist 15 28 so one of the things that we did very early on, and i think this was right around the time when i started in 2016, is we unlinked browser releases from device releases, we're now rolling out on a regular cadence, new releases of the browser that are released through play store and also through galaxy store and we do sometimes do releases that are timed to device releases, but those are still in the in the context of our of our regular software release schedule so and that's really important for the web, because the web needs to be evergreen when there's a security vulnerability, or some kind of new feature that web developers want to use, they don't want to have to wait for a new device to come out in order to be able to use that feature likewise, when there are features or technologies that are deprecated, from the web stack, you really want to, either because they're vulnerable, or they're, they're difficult to use, or they're just not very performant or however, you want to be able to make sure that you can update all the browsers to remove that feature tony morelan 16 31 and that's great to hear that, that the updates are not tied to new device releases, you know, because i'm sure that developers are wanting to get those updates just as soon as soon as possible and you can get those features out to the to the developer community that's right yeah, yeah so tell me what is the benefit of using samsung internet over another browser, like say google chrome, dan appelquist 16 51 one of the things that we pride ourselves on is a focus on user privacy so we think that we have better privacy features than google chrome and that's certainly a goal that we have and something that you can see, as evidenced through a lot of the features that we ship with the browser so for instance, we have secret browsing mode, which is secured by knox and also linkedin to our to biometrics on the device, so that you can secure it with your fingerprint or your face id or however, we also integrated into samsung pay currently, that's only in the us but there's a web feature called web payment, which integrates into samsung pay for us customers that allows you to pay directly from your web page using samsung pay using the on-device payment technology, we integrate into one ui so that's the samsung specific ui across the device, which our browser is based on top of as also as part of the whole privacy consideration we allow our users to download and install ad blockers we allow to download and install extensions, which can be privacy helping or can be other things like shopping related for instance, we also allow you to choose your own default search engine so we have for a while now allowed you to choose duckduckgo is a search engine, which is a very privacy focused search engine but with the release 11 2, that's about to come out we've actually even increased that list for and we have way more search engines that you can choose as your default search engine you can't do that with google chrome and we have our own built in smart anti tracking technology that uses machine learning on the phone to in a very privacy focused way shield your browsing activity from an unwanted tracking on the web, which is a major issue right now, for a lot of users tony morelan 18 49 you know, it's pretty safe to say that just about everybody at some point has had something hacked whether it's you know, a credit card or maybe it's an online account, so always happy to hear about, you know, new technologies that will definitely help keep the internet safer tony morelan 19 03 can we talk a little bit about revenue? tony morelan 19 04 how does samsung internet create revenue? dan appelquist 19 07 well, we are getting revenue from search referral that's the same as every other browser that's out there i mean, how do browsers make money browsers usually make money from search referral we also have opportunities for business development when it comes to our quick access bar, which is region specific so when you first load the browser, you're going to see a number of links that show up, you know, on your kind of quick access screen, that all of that is user configurable, and the user can change those whenever they want to it's about what the defaults are those are really how samsung is making money i think the other part of it is more of a strategic play there are billions of users using the web why would samsung want to see to that territory to somebody else? instead of being able to control that user experience and provide the best user experience, and we can, that's great so how does the web developer ecosystem differ from other developer ecosystems? one thing that is important to think about what the web developer ecosystem is that it's inherently cross browser, cross device and cross ios, and that's true of the web in general, the web needs to be able to exist across different browsers across different classes across different form factors you need to be able to bring up your web page and have it work on your television as well as your laptop screen as well as your phone responsive design and progressive enhancement have been some of the key technologies that web developers have been using to ensure that that can be the case, feature detection these kinds of things are really important when it comes to building websites you're not just building for one particular device you're not just building for one particular vendor you're you've really got to be listening to and paying attention to a lot of different voices, when you enroll in a developer program for a specific platform, you tend to be focusing on one particular device or one particular brand, one particular os and that also provides some clarity, you know, which can be a good thing however, when you're developing for the web, you need to pay attention all these different platforms and devices that's where something where mdn can come in, and why we're putting so much energy into that because it can be a place where developers can come and find out information across different platforms tony morelan 21 36 you had mentioned a little bit about progressive web apps for new developers out there can you explain what exactly is a progressive web app? dan appelquist 21 42 so a progressive web app is i mean, i mentioned technologies like progressive enhancement and responsive web design, which help developers build web applications that can that can work well across different browsers, different oss, different devices, different form factors the idea of progressive web apps brings that to the next level where we try and learn a little bit from the success of native applications on the mobile platform in particular, and are able to provide a very app like user experience for the web application itself so a really good example of a progressive web app, probably one of the best ones out there is the twitter pw a lot of people are removing twitter from their phones entirely and simply using you're removing the native app, i should say, from their phones entirely and just using the progressive web app, because it provides almost all of the same features, but in a much more lightweight and much more privacy centric kind of kind of way because when you're using the twitter progressive web app, it's been saved from the browser, and therefore it runs inside of the browser even though from a user perspective, it appears like any other application on the phone, it's actually running inside of the browser so it's running in the same context, as saw the other browser tabs that you have going so it's a bit like, i've called it having your cake and eating it too in terms of being able to build something really easily build something cross platform, but also be able to enjoy that real estate on the phone home screen push notifications that keep bringing the user attention back ability to have through a service worker kind of offline experience, all the kind of features that users expect from a regular native application they can begin to expect from these kinds of progressive web apps tony morelan 23 35 yeah talk a little bit about ar and vr as they relate to samsung internet can you share a little bit about what you were doing in those areas? dan appelquist 23 42 so samsung internet was one of the first browsers to launch the web vr api that api has actually been recently deprecated in favor of the web xr api, which is the api that my colleague ada has been sharing working group to create webex r is a way to bring ar and vr into the browser now, if you are familiar with kind of ar and vr, in a kind of game, console type environment or scenario, or with various specialized equipment, then you might be scratching your head and thinking, well, why? why do i need ar and vr in my browser is the target it's because the target audience for these kinds of ar and vr applications in the web are a little bit more like casual games are to the gaming industry we fully expected we have seen the development of web applications in the gaming space and also in the kind of enterprise space where they take advantage of the technology in the browser to enable you to deliver a kind of virtual environment, a shared virtual environment that provides a lot of those kinds of advantages to a rm vr experience, but you don't have to download any software, you don't have to make sure that your, your whole set of download software is correct and it works progressively across different environments so a couple years ago, we worked with bbc here in london to deliver a doctor who gave that was coming out alongside of the launch of one of their seasons of doctor who it's basically like a very simple navigating the tardis it was called the time vortex, navigating the tardis along a vortex and avoiding obstacles and that kind of thing but the reason they were they were so interested in web vr at the time, was that it's available across multiple browsers they have a public service mandate where they're trying to get that application into as many hands as possible into the hands of kids that may have like a, you know, an older phone that aren't going to have the latest up to date technology and an ar headset or a vr headset those are the kinds of use cases that i'm interested in how do we get these tools have ar and vr into everybody's hands? and i think the web is well positioned to be that platform definitely tony morelan 26 08 let's talk a little bit about success and challenges can you first tell me about some of the challenges that samsung internet has faced? dan appelquist 26 14 i think one of the challenges and i alluded to it before maybe is just recognition recognition of samsung internet as a as a key browser we know we are, we are increasingly driving that awareness amongst the developer community but we still run a cross a lot of people who just never heard of us or if they heard of us that kind of dismissed us alongside of all the other oem browsers we like to say we're not actually like any of the other oem browsers because first of all, we have enormous market share compared to our market share it doesn't even near mcateer doesn't compare to ours second of all, we put a lot back into the web platform and that's extremely important to us we put a lot back into the open source side of it and we put a lot back into the and standard cipher so driving that has been a challenge and continues to be a challenge but it's something that we took on and we understand that and i think we're turning that corner on that one tony morelan 27 11 sure and there's a huge value when there are multiple browsers out there i mean, if you go back to when internet explorer dominated the market, and then firefox came on board, that's when we started to see a much better browser experience correct? dan appelquist 27 23 yes and in fact, that's another kind of philosophical point that drives the work of our team is that we strongly we strongly believe in browser diversity it's not a web where one browser dominates, is not actually going to be a healthy web ecosystem we are based on top of chromium but we have made different ui decisions and different decisions in terms of browser features than chrome and that's something that we think is important and helps drive the ecosystem forward we also work with people through standards and through web developer advocacy in companies that are competitors, i mean, i work with people from apple in the context of web standards, and wcc quite often and choices that they make in safari help to drive the web forward in different areas than the choices that we make in samsung android, the choices that google makes in chrome it's a good example tony morelan 28 23 definitely so what are some of the areas of success for samsung internet? dan appelquist 28 28 so from the beginning, when we started things off in 2016, we, we started off with some ideas around how we were going to treat developer advocacy differently one decision that we took was to ensure that our team is attached to the engineering group that is producing samsung internet and so we have a strong connection to our own engineering team and we work very closely with them and we do joint work and when we've done our own events, for instance, we've had members of our engineering team come over from korea and speak at those events and we have a strong relationship with them and we see ourselves as primarily web developer engineers that are also doing advocacy so that's one element and i think the other thing that we're very keen on is promoting diversity and inclusion in the tech community in general and in the web developer community specifically so for instance, we have a diversity inclusion statement about conference participation many organizations have these now i'm very glad to see that many do we started rs in 2016 when we put that in place, i actually used as a template, a statement that the uk government digital service had come up with which so we were basically using, what they had put in place and adapting it for our needs with reference to their work, obviously, where we will not participate in an event that doesn't have good diversity credentials that isn't doesn't have a code of conduct an enforcement policy, that kind of thing that's why very often, if you attend any of our virtual meetings and meetups, you'll always see me at the beginning talking about the code of conduct and just reinforcing the enforcement procedure for it so we take that very seriously and we also put energy into events and activities that are specifically focused on driving better diversity and inclusion in tech so there's something called global diversity cfp day, which is a yearly event that happens across the world where you were people who are new to speaking on tech conferences can come and get mentorship from people who have more experience speaking in tech conferences about how to submit their proposals for tech conferences, and it's specifically focusing on getting more diverse speakers out there, and driving more diversity and inclusion into the tech conference circuit in general so that's something we participate in and we also sponsor events that are focused on particular on inclusion queer js is a very good example where we were we sponsored that and then we, we sponsored that in berlin and then we were very happy to see that it grew into a bigger thing after that, yeah, that's something that we're putting a lot of energy into and we've seen that come back to us in the form of, i think people really appreciate that anyway, the kind of developers that we want to work with appreciate that and we really appreciate that kind of feedback cycle tony morelan 31 31 that's great so what advice do you have for developers looking to build for samsung internet? dan appelquist 31 36 sure, you can follow us on twitter, first of all, at samsung internet you can also follow us individually i'm at torgo always talking about i'm torgo on twitter, to our geo and i'm always talking about web standards and other web technologies you can go to our developer hub, which is samsung inter dotnet and then links off to all kinds of places like our blog, we actually repost articles from our blog onto samsung into dotnet our blog is on medium so you can follow us on medium at samsung internet dev, you can attend an office hours event so if you go to meetup calm, and you subscribe to our meetup group, so we're running a series of events through that meetup group other than that, the best way to kind of keep tabs on what we're doing is to pay attention to our twitter and we're also by the way posting all of those events on the samsung developer platform on developer samsung com and you can pay attention to our linkedin page, we have a linkedin page, we search for samsung internet, you'll find it on linkedin and we're actually posting all of those blog posts and event notifications and all that kind of stuff there as well trying to engage with that community tony morelan 32 50 that's excellent but hey, dan, i really appreciate you taking the time to sit down and do this podcast with me, you know, yeah, it was a lot of fun to not only learn about you, but also learn about samsung internet dan appelquist 33 00 thank you really appreciate it outro 33 03 looking to start creating for samsung? download the latest tools to code your next app, or get software for designing apps without coding at all sell your apps to the world on the samsung galaxy store check out developer samsung com today and start your journey with samsung the pow! podcast is brought to you by the samsung developer program and produced by tony morelan
Learn Developers Podcast
docseason 3, episode 7 previous episode | episode index | next episode this is a transcript of one episode of the samsung developers podcast, hosted by and produced by tony morelan a listing of all podcast transcripts can be found here host tony morelan senior developer evangelist, samsung developers instagram - twitter - linkedin guests guy merin, senior director of engineering, surface duo developer experience, microsoft ade oshineye, senior staff developer advocate, google søren lambæk, developer relations engineer, samsung foldables, games not only do we chat about the emerging trends in the foldable industry but how companies are working together to help developers create for this new and innovative technology listen download to this episode topics covered foldable industry trends growth of foldables target audience making foldables mainstream benefits of the foldable form factor extending a traditional app to a foldable device process for supporting foldables foldable device example apps consumer adoption challenges developer opportunities resources for developers companies working together on foldables helpful links large screen/foldable guidance large screen app quality jetpack windowmanager jetpack slidingpanelayout jetpack windowmanager foldable/dual-screens surface duo layout libraries surface duo android emulator figma - surface duo design kit surface duo blog surface duo twitch surface duo twitter adopting native language discover quality apps on large screens foldables design/development perspectives learn about foldables case studies 5 steps to large screen designing understanding layout code lab testing window size classes jetnews different screen sizes migrate to responsive layouts compose/activity embedding unfolding gaming potential samsung remote test lab samsung developer program website samsung developer program newsletter samsung developer program blog samsung developer program news samsung developer program facebook samsung developer program instagram samsung developer program twitter samsung developer program youtube samsung developer program linkedin tony morelan linkedin guy merin, microsoft, linkedin ade oshineye, google, linkedin søren lambæk, samsung, linkedin transcript note transcripts are provided by an automated service and reviewed by the samsung developers web team inaccuracies from the transcription process do occur, so please refer to the audio if you are in doubt about the transcript tony morelan 00 01 hey, i'm tony morelan and this is the samsung developers podcast, where we chat with innovators using samsung technologies, award winning app developers and designers, as well as insiders working on the latest samsung tools welcome to season three, episode seven recently i hosted a roundtable discussion on developing for foldable devices not only do we chat about the emerging trends in the foldable industry, but how companies are working together to help developers create for this new and innovative technology enjoy today's show, we're doing something pretty special i've got three guests on the podcast all from leading companies in the foldable space i've got guy merin, senior director of engineering on the surface duo developer experience team at microsoft guy merin 00 53 hi tony, good morning great to be here tony morelan 00 55 excellent i've also got ade oshineye, senior staff developer advocate at google ade oshineye 01 00 hi nice to be here tony morelan 01 03 and i've also got søren lambæk, developer relations engineer at samsung søren lambæk 01 09 hello good to be here tony morelan 01 11 this is amazing i've got all of you on the podcast at the same time we actually haven't tried this format before so let's take him for a ride and see how much fun we can have let me start with guy over at microsoft tell me who is guy merin? guy merin 01 25 hey, yeah, hey, folks so i'm guy the journey in microsoft a few years back started that windows went through the windows mobile, because mobile gadgets and devices are really my passion and then the last five or so years, i've been working full time on android, building a couple of software products, and recently the surface duo so this mobile and android is really my passion and i'm really at my dream job now working with developers, you know, reaching out really great on the personal level, i got recently into mountain climbing so just last weekend, we had a big expedition to summit, one of the washington mountains i live in seattle in washington, okay and that was a very, very fun experience that i found a lot of similarities to, you know, projects we have at work, climbing a mountain and summit thing is really a project on its own with preparation and planning and found a lot of interesting similarities tony morelan 02 29 it gives you a lot of time to think also, i'm sure that when you're climbing so are you like with ropes and rappelling or yeah, rope really guy merin 02 38 is, is more snow so it's ropes and ice axes and stuff but oh, gosh tony morelan 02 45 that is great how many feet would you say? was the summit? guy merin 02 50 close to 11,000 tony morelan 02 52 wow, that is absolutely impressive what was your journey to get to the state of washington? were you born there? or is this? the accent i'm picking up? i'm not quite sure is from the northwest? guy merin 03 07 no, no so no, i was born and raised in israel okay and i moved over to washington eight years ago, i've been working at microsoft in israel, actually doing some fun stuff with windows phone in israel and then pretty much my wife wanted to move over to seattle and that that made us take the trip and we love it here tony morelan 03 32 so now let's move over to google tell me who is ade oshineye? ade oshineye 03 38 so i work in android developer relations i've worked all over the different aspects of google over the last 15 years before that was in consultancy, when i'm not at a desk in front of cameras and things i'm out with a camera, taking photos in zurich, where we have really nice mountains that i like to climb them by sitting in a train that just gently takes you to the top and then i also play badminton and play go so between that i'm pretty busy i tony morelan 04 05 wonder if i understand you actually were born and raised in england is that correct? yes ade oshineye 04 09 so i'm an east londoner but now i live in switzerland, which is strange and very different to east london but i also live in the middle of a whole collection of british shops, so that i can get british food very easily really? okay yes tony morelan 04 27 tell me how did you get involved with foldables at google? ade oshineye 04 30 well, let's see well, me specifically, i mean, i started out with the samsung flip and then we've got this planet of surface duo for us as a company, it's more around the whole beat together not the same idea that the point of the entity ecosystem is that all of these oem can try different things users can try different kinds of experiences developer can try to serve all of them and we power all of that with the platform tony morelan 04 57 and from samsung tell me who is søren lambæk? søren lambæk 05 02 hello, i work at samsung as a developer relations engineer and basically, i building relationships between the games industry and samsung there are so many mobile games out there so we were reaching out to them at a technical level and try to help their games to run smooth on certain devices on a more personal level, i am one of those artists that just got obsessed with programming sure so my background is actually a lot of with art, drawing and music and that kind of thing but i just could see, the programming hat was so powerful so i just, i got this obsession is programming tony morelan 05 48 excellent and i know that you guys can't see on the podcast but soren has some beautiful guitars behind him and before we hit the record button, we were all having a nice conversation about music now, i understand you were born in chile, but raised in england that correct søren lambæk 06 04 and so i was born i was born in chile that's correct and i was raised up in denmark, hence my name and my name is danish and okay because then i guess such a small country and at the time, i wanted to do get a career we didn't have any games industry in denmark so i decided i wanted to go to england and when university studying games design, because there was art, but then i realized programming that's where the future is, for me and then so i was one of the only students that went from art to programming is usually the other way around yeah, tony morelan 06 47 so yeah, i would definitely think so so let's talk foldables back in 2019, samsung released the galaxy fold, which was the first foldable device to really hit the mainstream market since then, other companies like microsoft, motorola, huawei, have released foldable devices and in such a short amount of time, we've seen some really great improvements with this technology guy, you've been from microsoft, what are some of the trends that you've noticed in the foldable industry? guy merin 07 17 some of the trends one we're seeing, as you said, more, more oems picking those up? are you seeing more and more companies bringing for the world? and it's really starting to become a commodity but the cool thing about it that each one has their own different angle to it so you know, for the microsoft one, it's, you know, mainly around productivity and two screens, for others is mainly around more real estate or something that is a small form that can then go to, to a bigger form and it's all really about the form factors and the posters that you can really do with it so how does the phone react when it's folded when it's open when it's tilted 90 degrees? and i think we'll see more of those in the future tony morelan 08 07 are they are you seeing different trends for the way developers are designing and building apps? ade oshineye 08 12 so i think we're seeing three main trends one is the oems exploring the space of possible designs, does the device folding fold out full vertically filled horizontally full three times, there's so many different things oems are doing second stylus is becoming more and more mainstream, that's changing the set of available postures and then the final thing is the way keyboards and trackpads are blurring the distinctions between phones, phablets tablets so the whole notion of what is an android app is becoming this flexible, multi-dimensional space and there's always people exploring that space and trying new things yeah, tony morelan 08 55 yeah soren, what about the growth in this industry? is this been something that you think, you know, over the past several years, it's really been, you know, going much higher? søren lambæk 09 04 yeah so last year, we had 150% growth, and we are expecting that in the future, more and more people seem to get foldable phones and when it comes to games, it does have like quite a lot of benefits because you can use the second screen if you're put it in like a folder but sure you can you can change this from full screen to a two completely different mode where the bottom screen, you can use it for items or mini map and that kind of thing tony morelan 09 35 yeah, yeah you know, this technology is so new that it's at this time, i think we're still trying to figure out what is this this target audience a day? what are your thoughts on who is the target audience for foldables? ade oshineye 09 49 well, i think a good way of thinking about it would be to look at the flips and the surface drill as capturing the two sets of ordinances we see there are very often younger people woohoo, looking for cool new experiences, i tend to see a lot of those people walking around with a samsung flip but then you also see a set of people at the high end with a lot more money tend to be more business people, they tend to have the larger the fold or a duel or something like that, that has a stylus that runs multiple apps at the same time, that sort of almost a replacement laptop and those are the two sets of people i tend to see using foldables tony morelan 10 25 guy, do you have any thoughts on them? on the demographic of who is attracted to foldables? guy merin 10 31 i don't see it as a demographic thing i think i think it will become a commodity that more and more users across the world will? we'll see i think right now we're still seeing trends, because he's on the higher end, of course, yeah so we're seeing trend around there but when this becomes more of a commodity, and i think it will, and more of a mainstream device, i don't think it's going to be a demographic thing, just like we've seen with other form, form factors that are spread across the world tony morelan 11 00 yeah, yeah in certain you'd mentioned about gamers and tell me your thoughts on you know why something like foldable device would be attracted to the gaming community? søren lambæk 11 09 well, obviously, a big screen will have a big effect, not only can you see like a lot of graphics do you like and can change and you can have like, a different benefits doing tony morelan 11 20 that so what would it take for foldables to become more mainstream? søren lambæk 11 24 the price is it's a major one for reforms are quite pricey sure, reducing the price wouldn't make it more accessible for a lot of people tony morelan 11 34 yeah and i also think that really trying to teach developers how to build apps, you know, more education on app adoption is also important søren lambæk 11 43 yeah, definitely, we see a lot of games developer don't even consider foldable phones yet so i hope that is something that is going to change, where they could like start maybe changing the ui before they actually building the game guy merin 11 58 i think it would only if i may add one thing i think it's is a triangle of three things there is, you know, the users and the users’ need to see the benefit of why they should, you know, try a foldable phone or a large screen and then what drives that is apps so the more apps that we see that utilize it, that gives them benefits over using just a single screen, smaller device, the more apps that will use things like side by side or split screen or drag and drop between and just productivity and thinks that users can get more out of these apps when running on these new form factors i think that's another key factor and i think the third piece of this triangle is, in order to make the app better on those, you need to support it, that sdk level and the platform yeah, that's a lot of work that has been done by everybody here so mainly by google, because they of course, own the platform so the more we will see those things as standard like jetpack compose so how do you support foldables? there? how do you support all the other sdks, the more they will come native, the better the apps will get, the better the users will benefit from them? and i think that triangle, doing it correctly, will make it much more mainstream in the future ade oshineye 13 20 i agree with that i think one other thing that we've been pushing is getting developers across the chasm of thinking about this so we have a code lab, we put together with microsoft shows developers how to build for a world where the devices can be radically different sizes i mean, on my desk here, i have a samsung flip and a samsung ultra and they are radically different sizes, one of them can fold to be even smaller so if you want to build for both of these devices, and all the things in between, you have to think about am i going to be a responsive design app or when adaptive app, i had to think about which layouts i'm going to support which postures are going to support which aspect ratios, which resolutions, and developers for a long time, we've been able to sort of not really think very hard about that because most phones for a long time were fairly similar sizes now, the same kindle app that has to fold nicely on a surface duo has to also work on a giant tablet, for example, we have duo and meet and the same apk more or less that runs on your phone also runs on your television when we think of this as large screens, the screens can be very tony morelan 14 35 large what about google's quality guidelines? so the challenge for ade oshineye 14 39 us with quality guidelines is we don't want to stifle innovation but we do want to make sure that when a user downloads an app from our store, that it works well on the device, and that there are there's a well-lit path for developers in how do i give users the best possible experience so we have fatal guidelines and implemented shouldn't advice on what is a high-quality experience and then we have tiers of quality, so that you don't have to take a big jump, you don't have to eat the elephant in one bite you can, i think it's eat the rhinoceros in one bite, you can do it in, in lots of little bites so there are steps you can take to improve your quality and we have an easy-to-understand website that shows you, here's all the things you haven't done yet and you can decide which ones to invest in and when tony morelan 15 29 yeah, and i'll mention here that i know throughout this podcast that you guys will be referencing lots of resources for developers to really learn more about how to create for foldables, i'll be sure to include links in the show notes so that you guys can easily find this content so guy, tell me who do you think would benefit by developing for the foldable form factor and why guy merin 15 52 i think everybody will benefit from it the bottom of the funnel is the apps and the user so the users would benefit the most but i think you're asking more about the developers, i think every developer should look at is how they said here before my app is not going to run now only on a single screen, small device, it will span across others, every developer should think about their app what else can i do now that i have more real estate? and again, if it's a game, okay, what do i do with the second screen? how will my game maybe if i run the game, in a split screen with discord on the other side, because i'm using that for gaming as well, to start thinking about all these new scenarios that your app can now do? how can i provide content to the app that sits just beside me with drag and drop functionalities with these kinds of things? and i think every app, every developer, can benefit from those and you should start thinking about that, because this is preparing for, for the future and for more and more of these devices showing in market yeah, tony morelan 17 02 and i know the other day, a day and i were actually having a conversation about multi app user journeys ade oshineye 17 08 so we've tried to move away from thinking of use cases or scenarios to what we call cjs critical user journeys and part of that is because if i'm at home during the pandemic, i tend to have google docs open with meeting notes and then google meat open that if you move that to a foldable, well, that's one screen each but then i need to drag and drop things across them which means both developers need to think, am i a good citizen? does my app play well with others? historically, developers have tended to think about the user journey only within their own app but if you're a video chat app, you need to think okay, how do i work well, with a game with video content, somebody's watching, if i'm a video app, do i have picture in picture, if i have picture and picture, it unlocks all sorts of interesting new user journeys for the user if i'm a game, and i support multi window scenarios, it becomes possible somebody to play a game and live, stream it or play a game and have a chat conversation going on at the same time so trying to think about the user journey that's not just inside your one app, but it's across your app and other apps or even across multiple instances of your app tony morelan 18 17 store and tell me, what should the developer with an existing app do to extend it to foldables? søren lambæk 18 23 so there's quite a lot of sdk is that can be used already jetpack? windows manager is an android library that can help you with detecting if your app is expanding over multiple screens or not tony morelan 18 39 what about specifically game developers? maybe someone who's developing, you know, for unity or for unreal? are there resources out there to help them? søren lambæk 18 47 yeah, so samsung got like, some tutorials that will help you to set up phone apps for unity and unreal, boston guy merin 18 56 tony, if i may i can add one thing on the first question, what can developers do with an existing app, we put up a three-step guide and it's not specifically for the microsoft surface device for large screen on older foldables and the really the three steps are crawl, walk, run so you should start with taking your app and just trying it out on these new form factors if you have access to one of these devices, just try it there if you don't, there is emulators for everything for foldables for a duo for a large screen so just try your app on the emulator that's step one just see that it behaves well on these new form factors using an email lender step two is what we call the low hanging fruit so don't super invest but start small, as they say, maybe think about how can my app behave when it's running within other apps? so maybe support drag and drop either is a source of or is or is a destination cause doing picture and picture, things like that these are things that are super easy that you know, there's samples, there's code snippets, and you can just go in and copy paste into your app and just support that these are really small additions you can do and then it will really shine on those new devices and step three, is where really all the magic can happen you know, you have more real estate now so there's many new design patterns, you can think about lease details, you can think about a companion plane and a few others so what now will you do in your app that, you know, you have more real estate, you can do things differently? this is step three, which is i think, you know, where all the big value will come but it's a journey towards getting there ade oshineye 20 43 definitely, i think one other thing you may want to include is, at the most basic level, you check things like if i rotate my phone, does your device crash? does the app crash? or does it handle it? and then use thing? okay, so you handle rotation, you don't lose state if i'm halfway through typing a message, and i accidentally rotate my tablet, do you lose my message? that's bad yeah so that continuity is an important thing, all the way up to things like handling hinge occlusion so if you've got a surface duo, there's a hinge down the middle, you've got to remember that there we have an api for that, handling different postures of the device, and even trying to see if you can use those postures to offer new functionality but for a lot of developers, it's stepping back thinking about all the different contexts in which people are going to try to use your app and then making sure that you've handled them tony morelan 21 31 yeah, and guy you had mentioned about them testing, i wanted to also bring up that samsung has their remote tests lab, where you can online access a real device for testing your app so another great resource for developers to, to work with guy merin 21 49 definitely, it's also that in the emulator, the emulator is also an amazing resource, because you can run it locally, you can run it on the cloud, we have some workflows that connect to a cloud emulator so every time you know we have a few samples, so every time we do a check in for the sample, it spins off an emulator and test it looks great so we have all these test steps and none of that is specific to us to the to the demo, you can run it with any other devices well, tony morelan 22 15 tell me what is the figma design kit guy merin 22 18 figma design kit is a tool for designers to start thinking about foldables and large screens and dual screens so when we started the journey with developers, we first were thinking about the developers, how do we support you with sdks and with samples and with documentation, that's step two, actually, step one is thinking about your designs and then we started looking at what are the tools that designers use so figma is one of them and there are others so we just created figma design kit for foldables so it lists out all the layouts that are possible again, the list detail, the companion pane and a few others, gives you all the frames and really helps you think about the scenarios you want to cover in your in your app for these new form factors and then you start working with the developers and the sdk, there's actually a step three that we're trying to do in the future, which is, how do we make it easy? taking a figma design kit or another slope and making that into code? that's going to be the next step in the future? tony morelan 23 30 are they tell me about the jetpack window manager and the jet news demo app? ade oshineye 23 36 so like many people, we have quite some quite old demos that were written in a world where you had a phone and you had a tablet and so we like everybody else had to think about, okay, how do we change this to handle different postures, different aspect ratios so we have an article where we walked through the process we went through to use jetpack window manager to handle a lot of these configuration changes to handle continuity, rotation, a lot of those things so we got actually pretty good article about this i think one of the things we don't touch on in that article that i think is really important, is if i have an existing app that people like, and it's too expensive for me to do a complete rewrite, how do i start adding some of the new things into it so we have a new thing called activity embedding, which lets you get a foot in the door of compose, or we're starting to add these new, more complex layouts so maybe your app was just, oh, i have a bunch of cards that go vertically up and down the screen but it's actually no longer a phone it's a device that folds out is not twice the size so now i need to think, okay, i need to go to a list detail view gmail is a good example of this you do that unfold or you rotate and now you have so much more screen estate the challenge is, how do i embed the new more complex layout index? system set of layouts i already have without having to do a rewrite so there's a lot of that functionality that we're trying to show people because we don't want to fall in the trap of the only way you can get to the new world is to burn everything down and start again we want to give people an incremental path from where they are to where they need to get tony morelan 25 18 i was at gdc, this past year in samsung had a great presentation this morning did you get a chance to see that that presentation at gdc? where they talked about developing for foldables? søren lambæk 25 30 yeah, yeah yeah, yeah, it was one of our team members, mike there was doing a presentation tony morelan 25 37 yeah, i'll make sure to include a link to that to that presentation it was great because they covered foldable optimizations for game engines like unity and unreal, talked about android jetpack apis, and window manager showed examples of things like flex mode and ui scaling, and even had an engineer from unity talk about adaptive performance 4 0 ade tell me what should a developer consider when writing a new app for foldables? ade oshineye 25 46 my immediate reaction to this is, first of all, should i use views? or should i use compose, but i'm talking to more and more of my colleagues, they all go? well, obviously, they should compose because composers the future so the official google recommendation, if you're starting from scratch, start with compose, it will mature as your app matures the other things to think about is what makes foldable special, it's the fact they have all these postures, they have all of these different kinds of usage scenarios that they offer and then you want to avoid littering your code with designs that are attached to a specific screen size, or a specific aspect ratio, or a specific resolution and instead, you've got to decide am i adaptive or responsive? will i try to scale the same design? or will i move the components around when the posture or the orientation or the size changes? it's a difference between an app with a list of cards and the cards just get bigger? and an app that says, well, when you rotate me, i go to a list detail view? tony morelan 26 52 guy, what are your thoughts on what a developer should consider when they're writing a new app for foldables guy merin 26 59 so i think a developer should consider a couple of things one, there's folding features specifically for duo, we have, we have a hinge in the middle so if you have like controls, do you want to put them in the middle, or maybe you want to lay them out a little? a little differently for game developers, we did a lot of work for example, with xbox so when you play a game, you can have the controls on one screen and the game on the other screen so the controls, you know, are now have their own dedicated space so maybe you can do some stuff with it so for example, the one thing we did is depending on where you are in the game itself, the controller themes and the way they look change so if you're now a pirate on a ship, and you're in a sword fight or something, the controller is changed to be a sword, for example, or things like that and then other considerations are the posters so what happens when the device is folded? what happens when it's open? what happens when you rotate it? and all these will change the layout of the app and show different controls and options for the use of yeah, tony morelan 28 12 yeah soren, what would you say are some of the common issues that could come up when designing around foldables? søren lambæk 28 22 i think it's important for developers to consider the ui because on the samsung fold, when the phone is folded, we got like a single display so the aspect ratio on that one is very different to when you're when you got it unfolded so the ui, you will have much less space for ui so that is something that's very important that the transition from going from single display to what's the display, that the ui will change so it fits, there's no point on like, you can see all the ui on when it's when it's unfolded and then when you go to the single screen, half of the ui is not a clickable or you can see it so that's very, very important that you test that on your on your phone tony morelan 29 11 yeah, and i know it's a gdc presentation that's one of the things that mike covered was how to have your game go from the single screen and then when you open up the device, how it transitions to the to the door screen søren lambæk 29 25 yeah, exactly ade oshineye 29 26 oh, actually, that reminds me one thing i, i keep mentioning continuity and mostly people think, oh, i have my device, let's say to tablet like this ultra i have in my hand and in in the vertical orientation that's easy and if i rotate, i don't want to lose my state that's typically what we've always meant by continuity but once you have a device that falls, especially if you've got something that has three screens and how to screen them into screens, i may launch something on the outer screen then i open it up and then the app has to move on or the activity as we found that out the screen to now maybe spread out across both screens and then if i fold it the other way, so i'm now on one of the inner screens, the app has to not lose state now we have a bunch of guidance on how you define normal apps, where it gets especially tricky is when it's things like camera, where you may not just be moving an activity across screens, but it may actually move it across cameras okay, so this is one of those places where, if you have a real device in your hand, you can see it and you can see how for a user, this would be a very comfortable, obvious thing, they would expect holding the device in their hands but for you sitting behind your keyboard, it might not leap out as you as an obvious thing for a user to do yeah, so if you sit with erica, with us a samsung flip, you can take a selfie on it, but you might just very easily rotating your hand and because you want to take a selfie with the other camera for your app that's a very complicated thing for the user it's the most natural thing in the world sure so it's important to think about continuity across the different surfaces of the foldable yeah, guy merin 31 07 yeah and let me give, let me give another example with an email app can be gmail, it can be outlook, it can be whatever it whatever you're using and i think foldable or dual screen is really a great way to read emails so if, if until now, i was used to, you know, in the morning to get to my emails on a single screen device so i just have a list of emails, and then i go into each one of them, read it, go back, go to each one of them, read it, go back reply, what have you, if you don't have a larger screen, you can have the least detail so i see all the emails in one place, i click them and then the other side, i see the actual email that i need to address and now if i have to, is a lengthy email, if i have to read it, i can rotate the device and then i get into this a form, that i across the whole screen, i just see the whole email as detail and then when i hit the reply button, it can go into this laptop mode that you know, the keyboard goes from the bottom and then i could start replying to it and when i'm done, i get back to the least detail up to my next email so it really can serve as a laptop replacement yeah, because you have a larger screen, you can do pretty much in a productive manner, which you can do with your regular pc or mac tony morelan 32 27 yeah, for sure so guy, do you think it's a misconception that developers need to do a lot of custom work, that's only going to be that's only going to add value to a foldable device guy merin 32 38 i think it's a misconception, definitely, there's actually not a lot of work you need to do as i said before, you could start small with just adding drag and drop functionality or picture in picture and that will work across every place, every form factor around large screen small screen, and you're using native api's and sdk to support a foldable, you don't need to pick up another sdk for it it's all supported natively and whatever you do will work across all these devices and again, in the future, it can work on the tv or other on a watch so whatever your app will do, consider all these layouts provide layout screens, for each one of those new form factors, a single app will work on all of it ade oshineye 33 28 yeah, i think something i did this weekend is i went and dug up all my old android devices, i have android devices, going back to the g one and even the ones before the g one that i'm not sure i'm allowed to talk about in public, all the way to the latest ones from today and as developer, handling all of these different scenarios, is actually increasing the maintainability of your app because if i think about the screen on the g one and the resolution of that, and i think about that, compared to the resolution, the pixel six, it's a huge jump, and the screens are so much bigger so think about the kinds of devices we'll have five years from now, how much bigger how much higher resolution will those screens be? how often do you want to rewrite your app between now and then? versus oh, it's just a bigger screen at all it's a different posture and being able to make it a relatively simple migration or maintenance that versus a yet another rewrite tony morelan 34 31 so tell me, soren, what are some good examples of existing apps that are taking advantage of the foldable form factor? søren lambæk 34 39 so we have seen a lot of retro games actually, you are utilizing the phone a lot so because retro games don't really have that much heavy graphics so they've got like, plenty of space that they can use so we have seen where people are using a virtual gamepad on one screen and using live small mini maps and that kind of thing so that's okay seems but i also think that like when you're watching it like a video and you start like folding it, and you just see the video slide up on just one screen, because it assumes that you want to put it on tape or something i think that is really clever and i would like to see more of that thinking tony morelan 35 19 in a day, what are some great examples of existing apps that are taking advantage of the foldable form factor? ade oshineye 35 24 so we see a lot, but actually, my two favorites were shown to me by guy, one was a battleships game where you basically have the device in a tabletop posture, and you basically rotate it the other way for the other person to play oh, i thought that was beautiful yes love that and the second thing he showed me was just the kindle yes so basically be able to have the kindle open like a book, but also be able to fold it the other way so like a like a cheap paperback, where you fold it and you hold him in one hand exactly i would never do that for any of my books, but been able to do that and like surface to that field like that is so nicely that i think was really compelling tony morelan 36 02 and that was the first thing when i when i pulled out the surface duo showed my wife, the first thing she did was grab it in, folded it around like it was a traditional paperback book that was so easy to hold she absolutely loved that that aspect of it guy tell me, what are some other examples of some great apps that are already taking advantage of a foldable, guy merin 36 25 i think two kinds of app one is apps for consuming and i think the kindle is a good example of flipping a page, which is supernatural i really liked that experience as well, but also apps around creation so for example, if you need to edit a video, or edit your photos, or edit the blog post, it's very easy with dual screen or with the foldable or our screen to have the actual video or photo on one side, and on the other side, all the controls, and then you hit a control and you see it real time, what happens, how does it change the other, it's really, really helpful to create and edit your memories that way so it's really a great creation tool, as well, not just for consuming tony morelan 37 12 yeah, i could definitely see that also be a great value with a program like adobe acrobat you know, i'm often editing pdfs and so i could see that would be a great use case for, you know, not only being able to read documents, but then you know, making edits ade oshineye 37 28 i can also imagine with that sort of notebook, passport, sort of novel types, device, where if it's light enough and thin enough, you can sort of fold it in half with a stylus, and just scribble it like you would have a normal notebook, basically, like a moleskin but it's a moleskin with an infinite number of pages there's, guy merin 37 49 there's also psychological sense here, about the folding, and that you can close it so for example, if i'm writing or scribbling or journaling with a stylus on the device, when it's open, when i'm done, consider if you're doing it on a regular notebook, what are you doing, you're closing it, and it gives you a sense that you're done you accomplished something and i think this is where foldables really shine because you're doing something you're reading an email, you're journaling, you're even playing a game, once you're done, you close it, even you hear that little click yes and it gives you a sense, you know, it's like checking a box in your to do and i think this is something that you don't see in other form factors and you see it only on this folding devices that really helps users stay in their flow and then move away to, you know, do something else that is not related to the phone so leave it off and you know, digital wellbeing and stuff tony morelan 38 46 yeah, it's funny that you say that, because that was the one of the first things i noticed when i closed my duo hearing that little click sound it's sitting on my desk i was like, ah, okay, put that away ade oshineye 38 56 yeah, yeah, that's actually not the interesting effectiveness is that with the foldables, initially, because of weight, and then eventually, because of new user journeys, they switch from being in your trouser pocket, at least for me to being in a jacket pocket and that's something changes all the places i use them tony morelan 39 14 interesting yeah and i know when i first got my hands on the z flip, folding it to that such small form factor and putting it in my pocket just felt so much better than some of the bulky devices that i seem to carry around with me søren lambæk 39 30 i actually heard that people who using the ac flip, use the phone less because they have to open it manually so for them, it actually helps them a lot to not like spend too much time on the phone so there, i guess there's some psychological effect ade oshineye 39 47 i mean, i've had the opposite with my flip in that because it's so small, and because it sorts of made me take more selfies i don't usually take selfies because well, i usually have a real camera with me, but i have this thing, it's small enough that it's in the back pocket of my jeans and it's just arms were nice and i would normally just take a photo of the place but as thing i can pull it out, then basically without having to unfold it, or unlock it just pointed on my face, click selfie, put it in my pocket again so for that one particular user journey, i use it more tony morelan 40 20 interesting yeah, i could, i could totally see that but tell me a day, what are some of the challenges that foldable technology needs to overcome to increase consumer adoption? ade oshineye 40 31 i mean, if i look at the variety of devices, i have the flip back pocket of jeans every time when it comes to the fold, i have to sort of look at the jacket i'm wearing and think about, okay, will the material the lining handles the weight, or should it go into my bag, if i'm carrying this surface duo, it's light enough that i can just casually put it in my jacket pocket, it'll be fine but it's too bulky for me to put in the front pocket of any of my jeans and it feels dangerous to put in the back pocket so weight is an issue cost is also an issue because the more expensive it is, the more careful you have to be when you put it away to think, will it be safe in this pocket but as these things get thinner, lighter, cheaper, and we discover more and more user journeys, i think that's going to be really interesting if i give an example, i have the surface level one, and it's great but every now and again, i see somebody surface two or two and i go, oh, they have a pen oh, that's interesting and i find myself thinking, well, that might be an interesting upgrade if it were thin enough and light enough, but then i'm thinking, but will it fit in my jacket? pocket? tony morelan 41 37 sure that's interesting guy tell me what do you think are some of the challenges that the foldable technology needs to overcome? i guy merin 41 45 think the first obvious one is the price point, they're still more expensive than other form factors so i think we're going to see the prices, the prices go down? for sure i think that would be probably my biggest one i think we did not hit the point of, you know, apps, enough apps are there, we'll see more and more apps, and then everybody will want to join the party i don't think we are in that stage yet and i think that will come soon tony morelan 42 13 and so on, what are your thoughts on what sort of challenges that the foldable technology needs to overcome? søren lambæk 42 19 the foldable phone at the moment is very bulky, and it's very heavy, it will be great that it was if it's lighter, i'd know that people that it actually puts people off some people that it is so bulky and heavy, where they will rather i get the flip phone for that reason i also think speaking of the flip, i think battery life is an it's very important i don't know how much bigger battery they can put in them without even giving more bulky and heavier but when you have like on the samsung one, there are three displays and if you use it for game watching films, it's really draining battery so that is i will say that is the big ones for me tony morelan 43 03 so guy, what resources would you recommend for developers interested in creating foldable apps, guy merin 43 09 i think you know; our modal is really meeting the developers where they're at so continue using whatever you're using if you're using a mac or pc, we have emulators for each one of those things so i would start with just following the recommendations you know, we have documentation samsung has google, start there, download an emulator, try it out and then just write a sample app, there was a code lab that we built with google, you could try there to test some of these new capabilities on the emulator on a specific device and then start your journey from there to commutations samples emulator we post a weekly blog, a weekly developer blog every thursday, that brings new information, for example, how to write again, how to use drag and drop, how to run side by side with another app, how to address the post changes, well, layout changes so we have a blog every week that covers code it's a developer blog with specific code and tips and tricks, try those resources and just reach out if you have a question and if you're blocked on anything, we are really here to help you out with your journey because we're creating the future and we want you to be successful with your app on all these new form factors tony morelan 44 34 yeah are there any conferences or events the that you know that you'll be attending? guy merin 44 40 definitely so google io was just completed a few weeks back, a lot of talks around large screens, you can still follow that and see some of the talks droidcon is coming up we just had droidcon san francisco a couple of days ago, and the next one is in berlin, and it's a worldwide conference google's probably going to have a few to prevent samsung has a few events microsoft build was just a couple of weeks ago and we also had to talk about tony morelan 45 08 foldables excellent and i know a day you shared with me a large list of links tells me, you know, what are some of these resources the developers can utilize ade oshineye 45 19 so for us, it's really three buckets there are introductory materials, such as our quality guidelines that i think are really important to sort of absorb into your bones so you can feel what a good experience will be like, and it will nudge you as you go on then we have a large collection of design resources, often at the material design website, but also woven through developers@android com and then the final piece is a set of resources for the developers things like how do i do testing the code library with microsoft but those three buckets of resources are the right ones for you to start with i'd also recommend come to door con berlin, were given a talk a teammate of mine, romano, france will be their co presenting with somebody from microsoft and again, you can go grill those people get lots of questions and of course, there will be future android events, where we'll have more stuff to share tony morelan 46 14 wonderful insight on what does samsung have to offer to help developers søren lambæk 46 20 so sometimes we got our own a game dev space where we posted blocks and tutorials, articles and we will have some when this podcast is out, we should have some tutorials available we also got the gdc presentation that mike did tony morelan 46 37 excellent so any more thoughts as we close the podcasts on this new technology in foldables ade oshineye 46 45 from my perspective, looking at my desk, i've got a flip duo, a samsung tab and that really captures just the variety of form factors that are happening on the android platform and i look forward to seeing more i think that's one of the things i learned here is that there's so much going on and there's so much more to come søren lambæk 47 06 i'm really looking forward to the future to see what new technology and what new devices coming out how the foldable phones will hopefully be more like lighter and more affordable and yeah, i'm really looking forward to see how developers is going to utilize them for all kinds of different apps guy merin 47 28 i think i think this is super exciting times, we are really in a pivotal point of, you know, something new, something a new generation of four factors evolving, and it's happening right now we started seeing the version one of the foldables and tools, we're now seeing a second version and a third version and i think we're going to see more of that and this is just amazing we are creating the future right now and i think developers are the most important part of it, because it will succeed based on the apps, and what developers will do with it and this is a great time now to join this ride and really create the future because i think 10 years from now, we will see things that really start happening right now with apps that take you to the next steps with foldables yeah, tony morelan 48 21 my key takeaway with the foldable industry is how many of these big companies in this industry are working together to further the technology it was great to have you know, someone from google from microsoft, and of course, from samsung, all on the podcast today before we close this out, i want to ask a question of each of you soren, what is it that you do for fun and when you're not at your desk working for samsung? søren lambæk 48 46 as i already said that i do like art to play music and draw and i have an eight-month-old son that's taking up a lot of my time at the moment tony morelan 49 00 wonderful wonderful yeah, congratulations on that thank you in a day, what is it the you do for fun when you can step away from your role at ade oshineye 49 09 google? so i do a lot of things but i think the main thing that occupies my time nowadays has been playing badminton it's an it's a huge part of the swiss culture and there's just a lot of people who play badminton, so it's a great game you can actually get seriously injured in it but you can also get very good at it so i'd recommend it tony morelan 49 32 in guy what is it that you do for fun up in the great northwest? when you get to put aside your responsibilities at microsoft i can see in your background now i noticed on your wall, you've got your own indoor rock-climbing gym guy merin 49 45 yeah, exactly so trivia in the last six months i've been training really, really hard to climb and summit some of the mountains around north washington goal is to get even bigger mountains but we did a couple of summits last weekend and really into climbing and something mountains now wow takes a lot of mental prep, nutrition, fitness level and i've seen a lot of similarities between the experiences i have with preparing for a climb, to even things i do at work it's really managing a project, a lot of insights i got from climbing that i apply in other places tony morelan 50 25 that's great that's great hey, i wanted to thank all of you for being on the podcast today it was wonderful to hear the different voices and get a chance to chat with you all ade oshineye 50 34 thank you very much for having us you closing 50 35 just looking to start creating for samsung download the latest tools to code your next app, or get software for designing apps without coding at all sell your apps to the world on the samsung galaxy store check out developer samsung com today and start your journey with samsung the samsung developers podcast is hosted by tony morelan and produced by jeanne hsu
Learn Developers Podcast
docseason 2, episode 1 previous episode | episode index | next episode this is a transcript of one episode of the samsung developers podcast, hosted by and produced by tony morelan a listing of all podcast transcripts can be found here host tony morelan senior developer evangelist, samsung developers instagram - twitter - linkedin guest drazen stojcic urarity urarity links urarity facebook - facebook com/urarity watchfaces/ urarity instagram - instagram com/urarity watchfaces urarity twitter - twitter com/uraritywatch urarity youtube - youtube com/user/romulicstojcic drazen stojcic linkedin - linkedin com/in/drazen-stojcic drazen is the 2020 galaxy store award winner for best watch face collection not only do we talk about his rise to becoming one of the top watch face sellers on galaxy store, but also his fascinating career path and it all started when he became an award-wining author, after writing his first novel at the age of 16 listen download this episode topics covered galaxy watch studio for tizen galaxy store galaxy store badges social media photography videography animations sdc19 best of galaxy store awards transcript note transcripts are provided by an automated service and reviewed by the samsung developers web team inaccuracies from the transcription process do occur, so please refer to the audio if you are in doubt about the transcript tony morelan 00 01 hey, i'm tony morelan and this is pow!, the samsung developers podcast where we chat with innovators using samsung technologies, award winning app developers and designers, as well as insiders working on the latest samsung tools welcome to season two, episode one on today's show, i interviewed drazen stojcic, the super successful watch face designer behind the brand, urarity, drazen is the 2020 best of galaxy store award winner for best watch face collection not only do we talk about his rise to becoming one of the top watch face sellers on galaxy store, but also this fascinating career path and it all started when he became an award-winning author after writing his first novel at the age of 16 enjoy tony morelan 00 48 so i have to start by saying i am extremely excited to kick off the new season of the podcast with one of my absolute favorite designers drazen from urarity drazen stojcic 01 01 hi hi, tony thank you for having me tony morelan 01 04 yeah, excellent i'm so excited to have you on the show let me first start by asking who is drazen stojcic? drazen stojcic 01 13 so well, i guess i could say the basics you know, i'm 38 years old i'm from europe, from croatia, and married and i've spent last four years designing watch faces for samsung devices and after a lifelong career in all sorts of media related stuff, i found myself in something that i really enjoy doing and it turned out i was pretty good at it and so now four years later, i'm i've received the award for the best watch face collection and is it's been like, you know, a crown after all that hard work and, and time and effort put into it tony morelan 02 07 so you're saying that if you started about four years ago, doing watch faces, that means you pretty much started at the beginning of this whole opportunity for designers to create watch faces for samsung so tell me like, how did you first learn about samsung wearables and, and then ultimately designing drazen stojcic 02 23 so i think it's a similar story with most early developers, you know, we are all a bit of gadget freaks and so i've had samsung, the very first samsung smartwatch was because i had a samsung phone as well and so when samsung made their first wearable, i was like all over it, you can customize it, you can do anything, it was just a device that could like measure your heart rate and stare at some very basic stuff, and had a camera on it correct and it had a camera on the wrist yes and you know, at that time, my whole life was around photography and so having, you know, a camera and a wristband that was like, awesome, you know, i just, i loved it and so when the new versions came out, obviously i was, i was upgrading and at some point, a friend of mine, who was my work colleague, actually mentioned, you know, you're pretty good at design and you all you have all this previous experience with i had some experience with designing mobile apps, for like 15 years ago, for before even android existed, you know, it was like, the very first touchscreen phones that showed up and i teamed up with a with a programmer, and we made a mobile keyboard and so i was doing the graphics and the design, and he was programming and so he knew all this because we talked about it and he said, you know, you have to watch you have the knowledge, why don't you try, you know, there's this cool software where you can just you don't need to know programming because i'm not a programmer and there's this cool software, you can download it and you can like make your own designs for your watch and so i downloaded the galaxy watch designer, and now it's a galaxy watch studio so and i loved it i loved it i within a week i had like, watch face ready, and i want to publish it yes it just started from that just you know, pure luck tony morelan 04 51 yeah, that's very similar to how i got my start i mean that you know, i attended this event at samsung where they you know, told everybody about gear watch designer yeah and came home that night and was so excited to be able to, in a sense, do programming without any coding so i could use all my graphic design skills, but yet create this, you know, interactive watch phase i mean, it's just, yeah, i bought in real quickly to it so i know that you've had quite the journey to get to the point where you are now as a watch face, designers doing lots of different, you know, jobs, but all within the same sort of family of everything related around media well, yeah so tell me how you got your start indesign drazen stojcic 05 37 so i guess i've always liked you know, even as a kid, i had like, these artistic tendencies so i would like draw a lot and i would paint and i would write and do all sorts of stuff, you know and so my first experiences were basically with computers, you know, and those were computers where you didn't even have an os on them i come from croatia, which went through an armed conflict war in the 90s and i was just a kid at that time, but after the war, my elementary school, got to the nation in, in computers, so none of the teachers had any experience with that and us kids obviously, never even seen a computer at that point and so i think it was like a un donation or some sort of a charity program and so yeah, and so they set up a classroom for us, that was like 15, or 20 of computers, and a teacher from arts and crafts was assigned to do something useful with those computers and he was an older gentleman who didn't know english, who didn't know it was just the oh, you figured this out and so he asked kids in the school, it was anybody interested and i always was fascinated by technology i think it was like four kids from the whole school that signed up for this that was like, first contact with, with computers and everything i did later on was, in some sense connected to it you know, i when i got my first home computer, i was just like, drawing stuff, all the all the time, i was just like learning software, sketching, stuff, making, i don't know, school, newspapers, stuff like that, you know, everything was, you know, one thing and then the next thing and so, after high school, i was into music at that time and so i ended up being on local radio station yeah and so because the station was part of like, a network that had newspaper and radio and, and a tv station, i spent next couple of years moving from one to the next and so i moved from the radio where i worked as a as a dj and tony morelan 08 07 so a dj, spinning music i mean, yeah, drazen stojcic 08 10 yeah that's great yeah, i actually really did some, like, nightclubs stuff so i would work during the day on the radio station and at night, i will be working like cocktail bars and really, tony morelan 08 22 dj drazen drazen stojcic 08 26 yeah, and so and, you know, this is all time before internet so there's no internet at this point and so obviously, being in a radio station gets you new music, and then you can, you know, use that music to put on parties and so, yeah, so it's like, using one job to make money on the side and so, and then i moved to the newspapers where i worked as a as a journalist, because i always enjoyed writing tony morelan 08 58 and i think i heard that you actually received an award when you were much younger for you you actually wrote, yeah, drazen stojcic 09 07 yeah, i wrote a novel when i was 16, actually and i, when i was 17, i got two major prizes for best first novel in croatia that's great from like, really a respected, you know, people in croatia who are basically in our top of the crops and so that was also a push that led me into journalism eventually, right and, and during my journalist days, i had a situation where we were a photographer that was supposed to cover an event with me, he couldn't make it and there was no one else and because at that time, people from my newspapers already knew that i was like into computers, and i have a like, always chasing something and so my editor said, you know, we just got these funny new digital cameras, maybe you could pick one up and just take two shots, it'll be fine for the print, you know, just try to keep people in frame, you know, it was and so that was my first experience with digital photography and i was instantly in love with that and so, actually, that day, i would always ask that i take my own shots and basically, i would, i would take photos of what i'm supposed to do, and i wouldn't, then i would spend the rest of the day shooting like, anything i could find and i would, i would intentionally only leave some of the photos that i thought were good i would leave them on the cart for photo editors so they can see that tony morelan 10 55 they can see your work that's great yeah, drazen stojcic 10 56 exactly and so after a while, i got a call from the from the photography editor and it was all like this transitional period where they were moving away from film and classic film cameras into digital yes and so he said, you know, are you? are you leaving these photos on the cards? because i kind of liked them? and i said, yeah, well, you know, i liked this thing you know, this digital photography seems to suit me and within a month, i wasn't working as a journalist anymore i just really, yeah, i just moved on to photography overnight wow and so my photography work, then, you know, i learned a lot of stuff from the, from the more experienced photographers there but i was also able to get on this train really early of, of this digital photography that was just coming in a lot of older photographers had a problem with this, they couldn't adapt so well so, so quickly, you know, it required working with software and all of that stuff that i basically was used to and so a few years later, i, i partnered up with a very senior and well-respected photographer here in my town and he had a big production company that was basically multimedia we had like a video cruise, we had cgi designers, we had sound crews, we had, you know, full multimedia production along with design and so i did basically the same thing i did before i did here so i would move from one to next position and i just kind of learned along the way, too, i have no formal education in either of these things yeah so it's all just learning from other people and learning on your own trying to, you know, get something new, i had a desire to express myself and so it was always something media related, and now share all of these things from the past and especially i don't know, there's a lot of, in my past a lot of work with marketing so working with marketing companies with like, production teams, and you'll learn what clients want, how they think how all of this kind of came together and lead into, into urarity tony morelan 13 34 yes, yeah, that's, that's, it's amazing i mean, i have to say, i'm extremely surprised to hear that you say that you don't have formal training yeah, but hearing about the experiences, all of the years, and all these different areas that you've, you know, had an opportunity to work in, it really shows because i think that's where you urarity stands out from many of the other watch face developers, it's all of the other assets that are required to be successful you know, when you see your videos in your photography, you can tell that someone with excellent expertise is putting this together, because it's not just a computer rendition or a 3d model that's rotating i mean, you actually are taking a camera on a dolly and doing rotation with it and to me, that's what really stands out because that's pretty unique to see from a from a developer, you know, marketing on samsung platform it gives it such a realness, you know, where you actually see the product and it gives confidence when you're thinking about it, should i make a purchase? so i think that is probably one of the biggest factors for your success when i see the work that you do i agree and that's basically the whole logic i started doing this right from the beginning because drazen stojcic 14 51 i kind of knew that it wasn't enough to make just the watch face itself look good so everything else to look at the same level, yeah, so, and obviously over the couple of last years i've, i've, i've advanced further and my, my designs have become better and my marketing materials as well but the core idea is still the same, you know, if you make, you can make the best watch face ever yeah, but if your presentations is not good, it's just the customers won't get it tony morelan 15 30 exactly so i understand that you've already is not just draws in that you actually have partnered with someone who has expertise in, in these areas of like social media and marketing and whatnot, that's helping you so tell me a little bit about the other person that is involved with, with the urarity success drazen stojcic 15 51 so at first, it was just me and you know, for probably first two years, i did all of this stuff on my own but then, as i advanced and as i got more and more customers and more and more of this production behind this, i realized that i needed help and my brothers do dumb, ugly he just came fresh out of college that had marketing as one of the major classes in it and so he knew about my watch faces, and he would frequently helped me he and i came up with the name the urarity tony morelan 16 35 yeah, so tell me that tell me the history that you came up with that name drazen stojcic 16 38 yeah so because my brother has this knack, for, for coming up with funny names for stuff and so we would frequently do that for like, all sorts of statements will make up names for the products or for name for names for companies or find, you know, funny word plays and stuff like that, when i figured out that i needed the brand, and i couldn't just, you know, be just me, it needed a brand name and so we're just talking about this and so a lot of people think that your urarity is basically you and urarity, which it is but the main idea behind it is basically because the first four letters of the word urarity actually mean watchmaker in creation tony morelan 17 29 that is great drazen stojcic 17 31 yeah, so we started from that, you know, it was like, because even today, you could see like these shops around the town that had like this art so it was just, you know, we're just making fun and your charity just popped up somewhere, because i knew it would work well in english although it is a bit of a tongue twister i still liked how it sounded and how it looked and i like this double meaning because it worked in, in our language as well and so he and i came up with this name and then over time, he just kind of started helping me more and more and at some point, i said, okay, now, i think you could probably handle a lot of this stuff better than me, because you actually do have an education process and so my brother has been helping me ever since he's basically the whole marketing and customer support and all of that is his work so i'm purely doing the creative stuff tony morelan 18 39 that's great that's great yeah, it gives you an opportunity to really focus on your expertise and, and allow him to focus on his expertise so is your urarity, pretty much your full-time job drazen stojcic 18 51 yeah, it has become over time for a long period i also did a lot of side jobs, but the pandemic changed a lot of that because this is a job that you can do from the comfort and safety of your home yes, and my side jobs that were mostly photography related basically, there weren't there anymore when all of this started and so for me, it was like the perfect the perfect job to do during these times where you had to stay at home a lot either i've actually used the opportunity to do a lot of the stuff that i would previously maybe put off so i did a lot of housekeeping you know in the store, cleaned up the descriptions and all that stuff that usually just you know, you don't have enough time to do all of that and i kind of fine tune to everything that we did so for us it's been a positive effect in that sense tony morelan 20 00 yeah, no, that's, that's, that's great i mean, there has been a lot of challenges during this past year for many people on all different areas, i will say you are not the first person who has said that, you know, this opportunity that samsung has provided to developers, you know, really the, you know, indie designers like yourself, you can still continue to work from your job where it is safe so that's, that's great absolutely and i mean, even before this, having the opportunity to work from home has been quite a refreshing change for me, because a lot of the work i did before, involved, a lot of traveling a lot of staying out of home, which is, you know, it's great fun for a drazen stojcic 20 42 while but then as you get older and you need, you get a wife and a house and all of a dog and all of that, of course, you prefer staying at home, it's not as a lot of people are thinking i don't want to stay at home no, i'm fine i'm not complaining tony morelan 21 05 so yeah, back when we were allowed to travel, that's actually when i first met you, because you came out to san jose and attended our conference sdc 19 so it was great to actually meet you in person, i was very aware of your work prior to that so when i actually got to put a face to the to the brand, you were already that was a great moment for me, i was honored to meet you so tell me about that what was that experience like for you to come out to san jose and get to actually see the samsung people in person and also be at the conference? drazen stojcic 21 35 i think it was probably the biggest milestone for me, it changed so much in terms of perspective of what this whole thing is about because up until that point, i would have contacts with people from samsung and from other developers as well and i still do, but you know, actually deciding to get on a plane and fly on to another side of the world, and then be a part of this great event and the whole buzz and all of these people from all over the world, it was just eye opening for me because as many developers or better to say designers in in galaxy store i don't have a lot of experience with these tech conferences and so, you know, coming to san jose meeting people from samsung meeting, meeting other developers having a talk with them, and just exchanging, you know, opinions and ideas and i loved it that that's it you know, i wanted to do this for real now yeah, i think that was the point where it shifted in my head that, okay, this is serious stuff and there's a great support from samsung, which it always was there but just putting a face to the name of all these various contexts they had, it just made all the difference tony morelan 23 02 and i have to say one of the highlights for me was sitting in a room with who i thought were the rock stars of the designers i mean, here i was, you know, chatting with you and next year was matteo dini and then bergen, tomas from vienna studios and i'm like, oh, my gosh, man these are the designers that are just making incredible watch faces on the store and we're all in this one room together, just you know, having great conversations so it was wonderful to be able to meet face to face with many of these top designers drazen stojcic 23 36 absolutely and i especially enjoyed talking with you i think it was one of the best conversations i had there just i think we clicked really early on and definitely you have two perspectives on the on the whole thing, you're started as a designer, and now you're in samsung, so you can kind of relate better to the stuff that we're talking about tony morelan 24 00 exactly yeah, that was one of the main reasons why i took the position and i think one of the main reasons i got the job was that samsung really wanted to have someone with that voice internally so that i could be the liaison between taking the suggestions and the challenges that the designers have and trying to give a route to solving some of those issues and making the platform even better exactly unfortunately this year, we couldn't have the conference because of the pandemic as many people know we did an online award show and i was absolutely honored to be a part of the team that awarded you the best watch face collection and you know without a doubt, your collection just is amazing you know i still i look at the animated watch faces you do i see the videos that you put behind your watch faces as far as the project goes, and you are clearly deserving of this top honor so tell me, how did you first learn that you were winning this award from samsung? drazen stojcic 25 10 okay, so first of all, it was really an awesome thing you know, i was just blown away by the fact that i got the award i never, i never really expected it, when i started making watch faces that will end up in me getting some sort of an award for this or making all of this success that that has happened in the past years, actually, that how i found out was because i got this strange email that said, you know, just to notice that there will be an online event at this time and date and let's stay in touch i mentioned this to matteo dini, you know, did you see there's going to be an online event? and, you know, he said, i didn't get any email about this she was the winner last year, she said to me, oh, wait, i know what this is you probably won an award so i basically found out about this from a matteo tony morelan 26 18 that's funny that's funny i want to kind of go back a little bit and let's talk about your actual workflow when it comes to designing watch faces what is the first thing you do? are you grabbing a pencil and a piece of paper and starting to sketch? do you just dive right into the computer? drazen stojcic 26 34 i think it really depends sometimes i will just get an idea from a totally random spot like one of my most successful watch faces, the inspiration for it came from the blue glow around an elevator button that i just liked tony morelan 26 55 and which watch face says that drazen stojcic 26 57 it was the pulse series yes, yeah and so i was in this elevator and he was like some hotel and then there was this button that was beautifully glowing, like pulsating blue and i was just looking at it and i loved it and so i wanted to use that glow and have the similar effect on a watch that i came home and i started i started up after effects and i made this blue ring that was glowing, but it just wasn't working, you know and so i started playing with motion and then i figured out that it'd be cool if it looked like it was coming out of the screen like it was slowly moving out to the edges and so i had this thing, and there were no watch hands, no numbers, and nothing else, just this pulsing thing and i loved it tony morelan 27 52 so you've created this glowing, really cool animation what's the next step? i mean, you've got to be able to turn this into a watch face so are you just playing around with different shapes to create the you know the form? drazen stojcic 28 05 because most of our watch faces are animated, i would do the animations and then i would just grab one on screen from the animation series and then i would start like playing in in just pure to the trying to figure out what can i do? where could i put some of this simple code stuff going to work one with another? where are the watch hands going to be? is this going to be a digital watch face? or an analog watch face? is it going to have like a lot of info or not a lot of info and so it's going back and forth so i would sometimes start with an animation and then edit it 15 times over until everything fits one within another and it's just it's really a tedious process once you start complicating things with animations and animations do complicate things is immensely you know, i sometimes envy designers that can make really awesome watch faces they're not animated, because i don't know how to do that so anyway, that's funny yeah, yeah and it's also funny when they tell me oh, you can make all these awesome animations and i'm thinking yeah, but you don't have to make them and you still make us and watch faces tony morelan 29 26 at that point, are you using illustrator or photoshop? drazen stojcic 29 29 yeah, i use a lot of software so i will use basically the whole adobe package so everything from, you know, premiere photoshop, illustrator, and i also use 3d software like cinema 4d or even sketchup for some of this stuff you know, if i just want to make a quick idea to see how it works it's just a whole bunch of stuff you know? various software's that i'm used to, from before, you know, there used to from my previous work so it's not like one thing, you know, i'm sure people could do just fine using probably one serious graphics software but because of the animations, it's just not enough you need to have like all this other stuff, too tony morelan 30 20 of course, just to mention, we both are very familiar with tomas just checked from vienna studios, still astounds me and if you haven't listened to this podcast, go back and listen to it i'll let you in on a little secret tomas uses powerpoint to create his design so when i hear you talk about, you know, all the complexity of creating these animations, and you know, truthfully, you know, you have to become somewhat of a pro with photoshop and illustrator really to leverage all the tools in there yeah, to hear that tomas uses powerpoint, i know that you were surprised as i was drazen stojcic 30 51 i was blown away i met tim us for the first time at sdc and, and we had a really nice time talking and so naturally, we came to the, to this talk about software, and you know, and he said, you're never going to guess what i'm using to make my watch faces i was thinking, maybe he's using like, i don't know, some game or something like that some of that free graphics software or something more simple and so when he said, powerpoint, it blew me away because and this is what i was talking about so there are developers, they can make really awesome successful watch faces with software that wasn't even intended for this year and, and they can have great success yeah, so it's, it's just so awesome and i have huge respect for what he does and, and i totally recommend also listening to that podcast it was so cool tony morelan 31 53 i will say one thing that you guys have in common would be the photography after you've created the watch face so just like yourself, tomas is doing real video recording of his watch faces you can see his gloved hands come on to screen and do all the tapping interaction on his face so again, it's extremely important to find your unique way to showcase your work and both you and in tomas have done that drazen stojcic 32 23 yeah, yeah tomas especially with in because he, he is a he makes premium, like high end premium watch faces that are basically like for, for general public and so him using the gloves and having all these nice backdrops and everything it just sort of fits within the brand and with the whole identity and everything that he does and so i when i start making videos, and i started right from the get go, because i realized that people needed to see this thing in action because it was animated i also wanted to set up like some of the basic standards, how i'm going to do this, what's going to be the approach and so most of my videos are like have colorful lighting, and a lot of motion they're always in motion i don't make static videos because that's also something i wanted to emphasize the animations give a lot of motion to the watch faces and so the videos are kind of like even more emphasizing that there's this you just need to figure out what is the main point what are you trying to do with your designs and then have that same idea taken from the watch face to the screenshots to your app description, to your videos to your online social media it just all needs to tie into one nice bow and then it works tony morelan 34 02 definitely i would say another thing that really stands out for me when i think of the brand urarity is color you do not shy away from color i can tell that you must spend a great amount of time thinking about color i know we're on a podcast and you can only hear us at this moment but i can actually see you and right now your background in your room is changing in color you must have some sort of led lighting the chest tell me about color and how important it is to you because i can tell it is a big factor drazen stojcic 34 34 yeah, it is it is and actually you know funny things you notice about the background because i would frequently set up my room lights to go with the with the colors on the of the watch face that i'm working on that's great or sometimes i will i will just like use these i have these cool led lights that you can customize and all that remotely and sometimes i will just like mix these colors in real life and just see what's, what fits you know what works? and a lot of it helps me having experience within photography, you learn what colors work one with another? how brightness functions, how do we perceive brightness on a screen, it's kind of like, when you're framing the shot for that photograph it's not that different from setting up various elements on the screen, because you're still trying to get that golden ratio or intuitively program to like certain shapes and certain forms and certain ratios, and certain colors as well yes and so depending on the mood, i guess i'm trying to make or the effect that i'm trying to get, i will use a lot of color, or i will use muted colors and some sometimes i don't think a lot of people notice it, but not all of my watch phases have like black backgrounds, although they look like they do, they have a slight tint, and it can be just the tiniest amount of maybe blue or green it and, and for me, it makes all the difference i spend huge amounts of time with color i don't stop until i'm perfectly satisfied and now having my brother in all of this a lot of the times i you know, i will be happy and he will say i'm not so sure i think you need to make like, i think you need to change this and then i was like spend another week changing colors so it's a long process it's not yeah, you know, you don't do it in one night tony morelan 36 42 i loved hearing what you said just about black that that truthfully, black is not just black, you can have warm black, you can have cold black and so i often do that where i'll use the color picker in photoshop and you know, if i've done my design, i'll try and find the sort of the feel of the of the face the you know, what's the tone of it and i'll sample that and then within color picker, i'll go down to the to the almost to black, but it has just a little bit of hint of that yeah, whether it's like an orange or a blue or something because that then like you said, it ties in that background, that the foundation of the watch face still picks up what feels like that ambient lighting from the other elements exactly drazen stojcic 37 25 that's exactly what i'm talking about i take a lot of time perfecting my watch faces and that's why i guess that's why i don't make a lot of them you know, i'm not like this super producer i didn't make like 100 watch faces a year? yeah, it's always maybe 10 or 12, or 15 tony morelan 37 48 so how many total? would you say you have available on the store? drazen stojcic 37 51 yeah, so at the moment, i think we have around 100 or 110 okay, i've made a lot more actually, in these four years, especially in the beginning, i would make a lot, a lot of i think a lot of developers go through this, they will just churn out just bump, bump, bump but after a while you see that? it's just it doesn't make sense it's very few hold backs, you know, let it sit for a while get everything polished to the very last detail and then once you're totally satisfied, then you publish yeah and so as time goes on, i'm more focused on making the watch faces as perfect as they can be, rather than getting them out as quickly as possible tony morelan 38 41 yeah and i think that also what comes into play is the support that comes around that watch face so what you have to do from a marketing standpoint, all of the different, you know, elements that are key to successfully marketing your watch face if you have hundreds and hundreds, it's hard to maintain that this way it sounds like you can focus on you know, a smaller collection, but still be able to then put a lot of time into the marketing drazen stojcic 39 05 side of things exactly the more watch faces you have the bigger problem you have down the road when it comes time to update and eventually does so i really think that this is a like a situation where you need to think about not the quantity but rather the quality because in the end, the customers also recognize this, you know, if they see you made 300 watch phases in a year and the year has 365 days, you know you're not sending the right message and i will frequently go and be very critical of my own work and so after a while i see a bunch of mistakes i did or i'm not totally satisfied with some of my older work and i will just remove it i will just take it, take it down, clean up the portfolio, polish it so when a customer comes, you know, they only see the very best, or at least the very best for this moment that i added i mean, you know, of course, yeah tony morelan 40 08 so would you mind sharing? how many downloads total? does he already have? drazen stojcic 40 15 so we're close to 700,000 downloads now, wow, stretched over a period of four years and a large part of this was paid watch faces, or, you know, i don't know, the exact percent, which was, some of them were free and will frequently use free watch faces to, to promote, or other things that will, for example, in terms of marketing strategies will frequently do like, buy one, get one? yes and stuff like that, you know, where a customer still gets a free watch face but, you know, we also turn them into a painting into a paying customer as well tony morelan 41 05 so let me ask you, how do you approach that? does the customer have to show proof of purchase? what's your, what's your approach to that? drazen stojcic 41 13 so we asked them to show us a screenshot of from their, from this store, or sometimes will like, be fine if they can just show a photo of their watch, with our watch face on it, or things like that, you know, any proof is fine we're not really playing detectives here or anything yeah so on one hand, we want to give something for free on another hand and a lot of these customers are our returning customers, because they, they are familiar with our watch faces and with our system, and we know a lot of them over the years, there's really been customers that have supported us right from the very start tony morelan 41 58 what's your approach with marketing on social? are you doing much in the way of that? drazen stojcic 42 03 when i started with watch faces, my main kind of venue was youtube, because of the animations and all of that, i just needed a video service that could, you know, show the watch faces in action so i was building up this youtube channel for a long time and then after a while, i also started doing facebook and instagram but it takes time, it really does and i didn't really realize how much it can be useful until my brother took over and start doing it like for real sure you know, he had only this one thing to focus on for example, our youtube channel is close to 2 million views now and we only have our watch face videos so that does kind of tell you a lot, there's a lot of things that you can do to promote your watch faces and so over time, we are also we've also teamed up with some of the more popular tech channels or people who are doing watch face reviews, or who have an interest in this and so we would team up with them, have them promote some of our work, give some of coupons for free sure, something like that some discount stuff like that and facebook has also been very good for us instagram, and, you know, i my brother does so much stuff that some of it even i don't know, you know, he's like, doing stuff on reddit, on the forums tick tock, really are the place yeah, i really don't mess into this so i gave him like free rein to do as he thinks because obviously, this is something that he does and knows better than, than me tony morelan 44 06 yeah okay excellent and i'm sure across all of this, you're leveraging galaxy store badges is that correct? drazen stojcic 44 12 yeah, absolutely you know, we, we were actually a part of the galaxy badge pilot program and so quickly, we, we kind of got this additional step into our workflow so we will use both individual badges for like certain watch faces, but we are also frequently using our, like, our main badge that leads to our whole portfolio because and as you mentioned, you know, we i think we have a strong portfolio so sometimes the first thing they see is the whole layout, everything we've done so and it's been very useful in terms of, you know, following the clicks and all of that the statistics and there's a lot of science in this, i guess it's very interesting when you start analyzing the data that you can get from these badges and clicks and all and see what works what doesn't yeah, yeah because obviously you're trying to maximize the effect, you're not going to spend time or, or money or effort into something that doesn't work tony morelan 45 19 yeah, definitely so tell me what is in the future for your entity? is there anything that we can anticipate? drazen stojcic 45 29 well, so as i mentioned before, we had a lot of success with our mechanical watch faces that have these highly customizable appearances and so for the last couple of months, i've been toying with this idea of trying to do the same thing, but with digital watch faces and getting that same wow effect for customers that, you know, oh, sorry yeah right, great so just today, i got my new the 21 ultra tony morelan 46 20 oh, did you okay, drazen stojcic 46 21 yeah, yeah, i just arrived this morning and so i, like 10 minutes before we started this, i had to transfer all of the data and settings from my old phone, of course, and one of the things that it transferred was also the alarms so i switched off the alarm at the old phone, but i forgot about the new one so that's why i went off tony morelan 46 47 that's too funny right so you were talking about in the future, doing some animations with digital? yeah, drazen stojcic 46 53 yeah so i mentioned before that we had huge success with our mechanical watch faces that that had really customizable appearances and so for the last couple of months, i've been playing with this idea of repeating that same thing, but with digital watch faces and it's, it may seem like it's a simple transition, but actually, it's not and it has its own unique challenges, because making digital watch faces is completely different idea behind it and different visuals, and it just needs a different approach and so i'm kind of messing with that i'm trying to find the best thing that that i think it will be like good first watch face to try and repeat that same success sure tony morelan 47 44 that's exciting to hear because i would love to see that your urarity face in a in a digital form so super excited to know that we can anticipate that so before we close off this interview, you know, i have to say your english is amazing you're from croatia, but you speak perfect english i know, there's a little story behind how you learn to speak english can you share that? drazen stojcic 48 07 yeah, sure so i mentioned before, you know, we had this war thing here when i was a kid and so during the war, it's not that different from the pandemic, you know, yeah, you spend a lot of time indoors, you know, you can go out, you can play your little kid and so it just coincided with this period where we got like, first cable tv and so before that, there was like, three channels all in one language and that was it and then, you know, we got like these cool things like cnn and cartoon network and all of that stuff and i didn't know a word of english other than, you know, seeing some of the movies and stuff like that and so i was just like, i would watch hours and hours of this and a cool thing was that it was subtitled so yeah and so just, you know, listening to the words and seeing the translation below, it just helps so much, you know, with the meaning and with the phrases and with the correct pronunciation and all of that stuff and then later on came to computers and with the computers, eventually there came a period where i did a little bit of online gaming, and then you would talk to people from all over the world and then you just hit too, you know, you got to start speaking and i would frequently talk to people from the us or from england, or even people from other parts of the world and you know, english was always something i enjoyed, and i just fit so perfectly and because i travel a lot, it's also proven to be really useful for me yeah, of course tony morelan 49 56 so what you're saying is that you learned english by watching ren and stimpy? drazen stojcic 50 01 yeah, pretty much that's pretty much tony morelan 50 04 that's great hey drazen, it’s been excellent to have you on the podcast thank you so much for joining me and much luck in the new year drazen stojcic 50 13 thank you for having me and just you know, i'm very, very happy and honored to be on the podcast i always enjoy talking to you and i hope that this year sdc will be possible and that we will meet in person and see the other developers as well, you know, i really missed seeing them last year tony morelan 50 37 yeah, no, it'll be great to get everybody back together exactly excellent all right well, thanks, drazen drazen stojcic 50 43 thank you, tony outro 50 44 looking to start creating for samsung download the latest tools to code your next app, or get software for designing apps without coding at all sell your apps to the world on the samsung galaxy store check out developer samsung com today and start your journey with samsung tony morelan 51 00 the pow! podcast is brought to you by the samsung developer program and produced by tony morelan
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