There’s little to choose between Samsung’s new Galaxy flagships and Apple’s
Apple
latest iPhones—but recent updates mean this might be about to change.
Samsung’s mission to match iPhone is now so well advanced that there’s little to choose between the latest flagships. And Galaxy’s lead in the world of smartphone AI means iPhone is now playing a serious game of catch up. But that’s about to happen—and security and privacy looks like being the serious differentiator.
While Samsung’s AI announcements have been coming thick and fast for months, Apple’s planned iPhone AI upgrade remains mostly speculation. But two new updates nicely frame the battle that will take place when Apple releases iOS 18 in the fall and the world’s two leading premium handsets go fully head-to-head on AI.
Smartphone AI security and privacy is largely dependent on the on-device/off-device spectrum. At which point and for which offerings does the handset back your data off to the cloud where more heavyweight processing can be utilized. The trade off is that this AI might be working from sensitive prompts or even analyzing personal data. And while analyzing this on your phone is one thing, pushing it elsewhere is another.
This delineation is even more critical for two reasons—first, that the prompts and data shared with the cloud may well be stored, used for AI model training and even accessed by human reviewers; and second, that the privacy policies associated with the patchwork quilt of smartphone AI offerings are varied, confusing and complex.
Samsung’s answer to this problem is so-called “hybrid AI,” by which it means a mix and match between on-device and off-device with your security and privacy in mind. This, Samsung says “lets users limit some features to function entirely on-device, giving them greater control over what they do with their data.”
The company’s mobile lead, TM Roh, has stressed the need “to raise the standards of security and privacy in this new era of data-intensive mobile experiences—one of the reasons we’ve taken a hybrid approach that combines on-device and cloud-based AI.”
But unlike Apple’s end-to-end control of its iPhone ecosystem, Samsung’s is built on Android, and Android comes from Google
Google
, and Google is cloud-centric by design.
I have commented before that the Android/Samsung marriage creates an AI complexity for Samsung. Whether mostly perception or reality, Android is seen to trail iPhone when it comes to privacy and security, and Samsung is impacted.
At the end of last week, Samsung confirmed its AI commitment to Google, “as we work towards a shared vision of delivering the best Android ecosystem of products and services.” Alongside a photo of Roh with Google’s Rick Osterloh, who now leads Android’s hardware and software ecosystem, Samsung promised “exciting things coming up for the future of AI-powered Android and Galaxy experiences.”
And with perfect timing, as the Samsung/Google marriage was being heralded, we had news from Apple sources that its “soon-to-launch iOS 18 update will include AI processed entirely on the device,” as Kate O’Flaherty reported for Forbes.
This is what we expected originally from Apple, but later news suggested it was negotiating a deal with Google to access Gemini as the AI engine for iOS 18, meaning something more akin to Samsung’s hybrid approach. Now, again, it seems more likely that “iOS 18 on the iPhone 16 will provide all the AI features Apple is offering when its updated software launches, in the most secure way possible.”
If this plays out as reported, hybrid versus on-device AI will be the next privacy and security battle pitching Samsung versus Apple, Android versus iPhone. And while with hybrid the devil will be in the detail, the more straightforward “what happens on your iPhone stays on your iPhone” will win on simplicity grounds alone.
Mark Gurman highlighted this security and privacy AI rationale for Apple when he broke the latest twist in his Power On newsletter. “Apple has been developing a large language model… and all indications suggest that it will be entirely on-device. That means the technology is powered by the processor inside the iPhone, rather than in the cloud… And it will be easier for Apple to maintain privacy.”
Gurman also suggested that “Apple’s AI tools may be a bit less powerful and knowledgeable in some cases—the company could fill in the gaps by teaming up with Google and other AI providers,” but that suggests such offerings will be taken out of the core OS and will be provided as over-the-top AI apps and services instead. Much like today, where Apple’s own ecosystem is more locked down than third-party apps.
There is another catch here for both Samsung and Apple—hardware. As Samsung’s Roh acknowledged when announcing that AI would come to older devices, Galaxy AI “is highly impacted by hardware performance [and] a lot of resource is being invested in on-device AI given these hardware constraints.”
The same will be true for older iPhones when iOS 18 hits the streets—thus the likely “iOS on the iPhone 16” caveat for full-scale on-device processing. Newer hardware can be optimized for AI, it’s just not possible to do the same with older, general purpose processing and achieve anything close to similar results.
And so all eyes will now be on Apple’s WWDC in June, which will unveil the shape of its forthcoming AI offerings. Then we will finally know much more about how this AI privacy and security battle between Samsung and Apple is likely to play out…
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