Samsung introduces Flow, its own Continuity

One of the new features we’ve seen with Apple’s new iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite is Continuity, which allows Apple device users to switch tasks between devices. Samsung has just announced that it would be releasing it own version of Continuity called Flow. Samsung Flow is a similar cross-device platform to Continuity. Flow works in the same way a combination of Pushbullet and Continuity would, allowing Android users to toggle tasks on various devices, ranging from phones, tablets and TVs to smartwatches.

The catch with Samsung Flow is that it only works between Samsung devices at the moment. That’s not necessarily an issue, since many Samsung fans tend to remain with the company’s products in other tech areas as well. Flow uses Android’s sharing intents to make handing off content from one Samsung device to another. The platform is actually similar to a hybrid between an application and a syncing framework.

While you can do similar hand-offs with Pushbullet, Flow is different because once you have it installed on two or more Samsung devices, you can choose which device you want to share things with and it goes straight to Flow from where you can launch it on the other device. If you look at Flow closely, you can actually say that it’s a monopolized version of Pushbullet, so to speak. Nonetheless, Flow does have a neat feature Pushbullet hasn’t used yet, namely the ability to time shift your shares so that you can queue them. Flow then syncs the queue and when devices are close to each other, you can pick up things right were you left off from any of those Samsung gadgets.

Samsung is working on integrating Flow with a wide range of apps and in this respect, the platform is open to developers so that they can put Flow functions into their applications. With this development, Flow can share things mid-app, for example videos paused at the exact same moment, pages scrolled to the exact same line. While it might seem like a cumbersome platform, Flow does work easily thanks to the Android sharing intent it is based on. That means that even if developers don’t update their apps with Flow functions, you can still use them with Flow. Samsung Flow is still just a developer preview, but we expect to see it launch by the end of the year. The company hasn’t revealed when Flow would be released, so we’ll just have to keep an eye out.