Samsung is making sure that Apple knows it’s not the only one in town when it comes to having people carrying around multiple devices with its logo on, and what better way to do that than to clone the features that let owners of iPhones, iPads and Macs sling data and app states across all three?
In truth, that might be doing Samsung Flow a disservice, because while the comparisons with Apple’s Continuity feature are obvious – including the Handoff part that allows calls to be sent from an iPhone to Mac or iPad – the new Flow from Samsung is actually pretty awesome in its own right, and it’s not often you can say that about Samsung’s often ill-conceived attempts to keep parity with what Apple is up to.
On the face of it, Flow is indeed eerily similar to Continuity in that it can have app states and notifications pushed from one device to another, but where Flow gets things right is the way it integrates with just about every application on the Google Play Store. That is, anything that can talk to Android’s share sheet can send information to Flow and from there Flow can send it to another device. It’s an important distinction to make and arguably gives Flow the edge over what is currently possible on iOS and OS X, but we’ll reserve full judgment until we’ve used it ourselves.
And that’s where the big negative comes into play. Currently, you’ll need multiple Samsung devices to make any of this work and we doubt Flow will be coming to the wider Android community any time soon. While it’s true that you’ll need multiple Apple products for Continuity to work too, it’s a fairly safe bet that there are more people with some combination of iOS devices and Macs than there are carrying around a Samsung phone and tablet.
We’re happy to be proven wrong though.
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