Yesterday a disturbing issue began to filter out from Galaxy Note 3 owners who had installed the Android 4.4 update on their phone and noticed that their third party S-View covers were no longer functioning correctly. At the time, there wasn’t any information beyond an old rumour from a few months ago that Samsung was planning to implement just such a software ‘feature’ to encourage the use of official accessories, well Samsung has now responded to the rumours via German site All About Android.
The quote shows that Samsung does believe that their original accessories are the best but believes that there is no link between Android 4.4 and incompatibility with third party accessories :
To ensure a pleasant and smooth user experience with Samsung products for our customers, we recommend that only original accessories from Samsung to use. Of course, customers can continue to rely on third-party accessories. The full functionality of our devices and accessories, however, can only be ensured with genuine Samsung components, since only in this way it is ensured that equipment and accessories are perfectly matched. A correlation between the Android version 4.4 and the supposed incompatibility of third-party accessories does not exist.
While the quote is a translation, it does pretty soundly look as if Samsung believes that there is no issues. With the Android 4.4 update still only rolling out in Eastern European countries it remains to be seen if the update will continue to be linked – even anecdotally – with third party accessories failing as it hits other countries.
If you have applied the update and are experiencing issues, there are a number of workarounds available which Chris outlined in his post :
- If you’ve got an original S-View case for your Note 3 and you don’t really like it much, you can butcher it and implant the identification chip in your third-party S-View case (XDA Developers) to get it working, or
- If your Note 3 is rooted, you can install an Xposed module that will trick your device into allowing the third party case to work (XDA Developers).
It will definitely be interesting to see if this continues down the track.
Did you update your Note 3 using the firmware update from the Polish rollout? Do you have a third party S-View cover? Did it stop responding?
I got 99 problems but a Samsung ain’t 1…
I’ll never turn my back on my precious Nexus!
Samsung are full of it. They’ve just been busted. They did the same thing re the sim card locking too. If it wasn’t a Samsung thing that caused it then how come an xposed module that intercepts a call from the Samsung framework fixes it?
Remember when tism sang “Australia, don’t become America” ? How about “Samsung, don’t become apple!”
I could only believe this if they stop the 4.4 roll out to fix the issue.