With many phones in pockets, Samsung stands to gain as uses move from apps to AI

Last week we explored a structural shift that is quietly forming beneath our fingertips. Mobile phone operating systems are evolving from passive launchpads for apps into active orchestration layers for intent. With multi-agent AI embedded at the OS level, the unit of interaction begins to move from tapping icons to stating outcomes. Apps recede into the background, interfaces become conversational, and software starts to look like plumbing.

Technically, that trajectory is plausible. Economically, it is efficient. When friction collapses, layers compress. But there is a deeper force that will determine how fast this becomes real and who gets to profit from it.

The app economy is not merely a design paradigm. It is one of the most profitable economic architectures ever constructed. And profitable architectures do not quietly dismantle themselves.

The 30 percent engine

Apple and Google didn’t just create app stores. They created a global tax system on digital commerce, embedded directly into the operating system. The famous 30 percent commission became the symbol, but the more important story is the scale of the underlying river of money.

In 2024, global consumer spending in mobile apps and games reached roughly $127 billion, covering in-app purchases and subscriptions across Apple’s App Store and Google Play. This does not include ancillary revenues tied to app ecosystems such as advertising, IAP add-ons, or extended services tied to those interactions. Independent analysis estimates that Apple alone collected more than $90 billion in App Store revenue in 2024, dwarfing many standalone SaaS businesses. For Google, Play Store commissions represent a similarly lucrative enabler inside Android’s broader ecosystem.

App stores transformed operating systems into marketplaces. They converted distribution control into recurring, high-margin revenue. They turned software platforms into economic gatekeepers embedded in the very foundation of mobile experiences.

If OS-level agents reduce reliance on traditional app interfaces, the transaction choke point shifts. And when the choke point shifts, the economics must shift with it. That transition will not be accidental. It will be engineered.

Commission migration

As intent becomes the interface, commissions will not simply evaporate, but are likely to attach to the new chokepoints. I can’t believe that platforms will surrender their economic leverage. The rent will move upstream and be reattached to whichever layer brokers transaction intent most effectively.

Search engines monetized ranking. App stores monetized distribution. Agentic operating systems will monetize orchestration. And platforms will find new ways to capture value. How they do this is still to be determined: payment-rail fees, identity certification charges, routing premiums for preferred vendor options, metered AI compute usage, and revenue-sharing arrangements tied to agent intermediated orders. Whatever the mechanism, I expect it will be attached to the layer that touches the consumer’s declared intention, not the app.

That is how platform economics evolve.

Samsung has everything to gain

This is where I think the S26 release makes the story truly provocative. Samsung has long been a colossus in mobile hardware, but missed the capture of App Store economics. In 2024, Samsung shipped more than 220 million smartphones worldwide, maintaining its status as the largest global smartphone vendor, ahead of Apple. In recent quarters, Samsung has repeatedly held roughly 20 percent share of the global market, regularly leading all OEMs in smartphone volume.

>> Tom Snyder: Galaxy S26's agentic AI could hollow out the app economy

Put plainly, Samsung’s hardware footprint dwarfs every other smartphone maker. Hundreds of millions of devices with Samsung branding are active across the world right now. Yet Samsung has never commanded the app ecosystem the way Apple and Google have. Samsung makes the phones, but it has not controlled the toll booths of digital commerce that ride on top of them.

Bixby, Samsung’s AI layer, is at best an afterthought. Samsung Pay, while widely supported, never matched Apple Pay’s integration depth or volume. The operating system layer — where app stores and intent lives — has been effectively owned by others.

That is poised for change.

Samsung’s incentive structure is different. It is not defending a legacy commission model. It is hungry for its place at the center of digital value capture. And since Samsung doesn’t have app store revenue to replace, they are incentivized to change a paradigm that Apple or Google may be reluctant to give up.

If OS-level agentic interfaces become the dominant interaction paradigm, Samsung’s hardware dominance becomes a strategic advantage. Instead of defending an app store cut, Samsung can push beyond the app store paradigm altogether, building an intent layer that does not merely facilitate volume but controls it.

Samsung now has the scale in hardware shipment and user base to make such a play credible. It produces more phones than any other manufacturer and reaches over a billion smartphone users worldwide, representing a massive installed base whose data, identity, and transaction potential could be orchestrated directly through an agentic OS layer that Samsung champions.

Hardware is the quiet superpower

The data economy is built on real-time data streams. Real-time streams originate in hardware: GPS coordinates, camera feeds, microphone inputs, biometric authentication, motion sensors, and environmental data. Software interprets these signals, but hardware generates them.

Agentic AI accelerates software abundance. When code can be generated on demand, workflows assembled dynamically, and integrations orchestrated reactively, the scarcity of defensible apps and fixed interfaces dissolves quickly. Interfaces become utilities. Platforms become agents.

In that environment, three assets grow scarce and valuable:

●     Ownership of hardware that generates data,

●     Identity and trust systems that secure transactions,

●     And the intent routing layer that translates desire into execution.

If you control those, you control the flow of digital economics. Samsung already owns the first, has access to the second, and is positioned to contest the third at scale.

Ownership of the intent layer

The shift ahead is not fundamentally about whether apps disappear. It is about who controls the layer that translates intent into action. That layer is the gateway to transactions, routing choices, market visibility and ultimately to who captures economic value in the data economy.

Apple and Google will defend their existing ecosystems, attaching new forms of tolls to the agent layer. But Samsung enters the game with an upside that neither Apple nor Google fully enjoyed at the same stage: it does not need to protect a legacy fee base. It can invent the toll booth for the agent era.

The technical capability to move beyond apps is now emerging and economic realignment is inevitable. The strategic battleground is defined. The question is not who builds the next great app, but who owns the intent layer, and therefore who quietly directs the flow of value across the next chapter of digital interaction. The S26 plants a stake in the ground that the market is shifting. If users choose to communicate intent directly to the OS (via AI), then I expect that stake will hold.