Samsung wants to be the AirPods of Android, and I’m fine with that
It’s no accident that Samsung’s latest Galaxy Buds4 and 4 Pro don’t look like any other popular earbuds. Samsung seems to have been using Apple’s playbook for two generations now, and with the Buds4 series, the copy is cleaner than ever, providing an experience closer to AirPods for Android users.
Starting with the Buds3 range, Samsung has reorganized the entire portfolio of earbuds into a common area: a perfect fit model for casual listeners, and a closed, in-ear Pro variant for those looking for serious ANC, both with a lollipop stem design. It’s the same line that Apple drew between AirPods and AirPods Pro, down to the price point, targeting the same levels of the ladder of premium earbuds. Heck, they even have a matching animation that blooms on your phone’s screen the second you crack the lid. If you’re marketing interchangeably, you may not immediately know whose product you’re dealing with.
Many lifelong Samsung users like myself see this as a problem, but to be honest, I’m prepared.
A real playbook
Pairing animations on both operating systems is almost the same.
Apart from the look and feel, what Samsung has been really building is the creation of an ecosystem, which I think is a bigger success than matching the design. Automatic switching between Galaxy devices, deep integration with the Galaxy Wearable app, SmartThings Find support, and One UI 8.5 integration that allows Galaxy phone owners to adjust ANC and audio settings directly from the device’s settings without opening a separate app. They are a web of dependency designed to make walking feel like loss.
Apple and Samsung are both betting that the phone in your pocket will replace the earbuds in your ears.
Apple didn’t win the earbuds market on hardware alone. It won by making AirPods feel like a natural extension of the iPhone. Samsung has learned that lesson carefully, and the Buds4 series represents their most comprehensive attempt to replicate the stickiness that comes with it. The fact that Apple holds about 20% of the global smartphone market while Samsung sits at 19% means that these two companies are betting on one thing: that the phone in your pocket will cut the earbuds in your ears.
Where Samsung continues
Many features are only available on Samsung Galaxy devices.
And I have to give credit to Samsung for taking some of those features a step further than Apple, especially in Audio. For example, where Apple gives you a binary choice of ANC in transparent mode, Samsung gives you a slider. It’s lockable to one of five different levels of both ANC power and ambient mode, allowing you to manually adjust how much world you want to bring in. It’s a small thing that the AirPods Pro haven’t bothered with.
Galaxy owners get custom EQ, and high-definition audio.
In addition, the custom EQ in the Galaxy Wearable app gives users real control over their sound, which AirPods Pro has never offered in a meaningful way. With Samsung, you get a 9-band custom equalizer and a handful of presets. Then there’s Samsung’s Seamless Codec, which produces high-resolution wireless audio at 24-bit/96kHz, while Apple’s one and only AAC codec offers 16-bit/44.1kHz audio quality. For the audio-conscious listener, these features alone are a significant difference.
Samsung also supports live language translation with Interpreter in all 22 languages, more than double the 10 supported by Apple’s Live Translation. That’s a reasonable limitation for international travelers trying to communicate across language barriers.
That said, Apple is not standing still. The AirPods Pro 3 still edge out the Buds4 Pro in ANC performance – averaging 90% noise reduction in our lab tests compared to Samsung’s 84%. And there are areas where Samsung has never been the same. AirPods Pro 3 combines hearing aid functionality with tuning based on personal hearing tests, hearing protection, and a heart rate monitor built into the earbuds themselves — features that bring them closer to a health device than a pair of headphones.
Do you think Samsung has earned its place as AirPods for Android?
14 votes
Android users have been waiting for this
Samsung offers more control over ANC and Audio EQ levels.
I think Android users have deserved a premium, earbud ecosystem for years, and no one has delivered it. Not the Pixel Buds, which Google treated as a side project. Not Sony, which makes excellent standalone earbuds that feel like orphans in any wider ecosystem. Not all of them. Samsung is the only brand to build an end-to-end experience because they really wanted to win that race.
In Android platforms, Samsung still has the best knowledge of the ecosystem.
Together, Apple and Samsung make up about 40% of the active smartphone base worldwide. That’s close to half of all smartphones used by one of the two companies. If you’re an Android user — and statistically, most people are — your best shot at the kind of seamless earbuds experience iPhone users have had for years are the Galaxy Buds. Samsung did that by looking at what worked and decided to build it on the other side of the road.
Is it brave? No. Is it original? Not particularly. But for the hundreds of millions of Galaxy device owners who just want things to work the way AirPods do, from automatic switching, deep settings integration, flexible ANC, Samsung’s willingness to follow a blueprint may be the most useful thing they’ve ever done.
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