Samsung thought to have a market leader by confining certain apps to their product line (the same what that Apple does). Some of these apps have already been ripped from the phone in the form of .apk files that allow for installation on just about any Android OS with the right installer app (you can find them free in the Google Play store). We have already tested out the Flipboard APK and now we have heard that the voice assistant that Samsung was pushing on the S III has been ripped and pushed to the masses.

This would have allowed anyone running the Ice Cream Sandwich version of Android to install the APK and have Siri-like functions no their phone. Samsung was apparently not amused at this and in Apple fashion has moved in to block the application unless the hardware ID shows that it is coming from a genuine Galaxy S III. They have involved the voice service Vlingo in the block (the S-Voice app uses Vlingo) and now all commands just return a network error if they are not from the S III,

This is exactly the type of behavior that Samsung continually throws in Apple’s face about the iPhone and other Apple products. They claim that Apple is being anti-t competitive over the hoarding of this type of tech for a single phone and yet, here they are doing the same thing. I honestly could have seen it if they decided to limit this to all Samsung phones (S, SII Galaxy Nexus etc.) running ICS (even though that is still a little obnoxious), but they limited it to the S III. Considering the fact that the phone has not hit the market it most areas it makes the move even more elitist.

The sad part about this is that like Siri, there are ways around this. To be more specific there is a method to spoof the phone ID strings so that the service will see the phone in use as an S III no matter the type. We would not be surprised to see this “fix” roll out in the next few days as nothing annoys a dev like a company that puts in an arbitrary block on a service…

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