Update: Samsung emailed us on August 15 to note that the registration open date has been pushed back to August 26, citing “adjustments to [their] registration system” required because of the “incredible response” they’ve had to the event.
Samsung is having its first big global developer conference this year, and the company’s platform debutante ball is happening October 27 – 29. Registration begins next week, Samsung has just revealed via email, with virtual doors opening Friday, August 16 at 6 AM PT/9 AM ET.
The registration itself is a bit of an event, as this marks the first time that Samsung has hosted its own developer event on par with those that Google, Apple and Microsoft have every year during the spring and summer months. The developer conferences of Google and Apple regularly sell out their entire allotment of tickets within minutes – barring technical problems that prevent devs from registering, the pace at which tickets go seems to get faster every year.
In that context, Samsung has a lot to prove when it kicks off ticket sales for its own event. Samsung’s platform approach is different to either Google’s or Apple’s – it’s tied to specific hardware, but uses OS software mostly provided by Google in the form of Android on the smartphone side. Samsung also makes smart TVs and other devices that developers can build for, with a broader range than Apple.
Samsung also commands the largest portion of the global Android smartphone market by far. Samsung shipped an estimated 72.4 million smartphones last quarter, or just under one-third of the global smartphone market, according to recent IDC numbers. That’s bound to attract a lot of developer interest, so Samsung should have no trouble filling seats at its new developer conference.
For that reason, if you’re a developer interested in attending, punctuality is probably a good idea, even if we don’t yet have a frame of reference to compare it against in terms of past conferences. Still, it’ll be very interesting to see what kind of interest this drums up, even if the different venue (with a different max attendee capacity) makes direct comparisons somewhat difficult.