The Samsung platform emerges: Registration opens for Samsung's first-ever developer conference

Samsung has opened registration for its first-ever Samsung Developer Conference, which will be held October 27-29 in San Francisco.

The conference will help developers create apps on Samsung’s popular smartphones, tablets, and and smart TVs. In other words, we’re seeing the emergence of the Samsung platform.

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“Samsung is excited to offer developers a single place to learn how to develop, market, and monetize applications and services that may span smartphones, tablets, and televisions,” the company’s president of media solutions WonPyo Hong said in a statement. “As convergence of user experiences and as consumers utilize more devices, even at the same time, the opportunity for developers to be innovative has never been better.”

The conference will take place at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco and costs $299 per ticket. It will feature in-depth looks into new Samsung SDKs, the company said, as well as a “deep dive” into the Samsung Service Platform and application interfaces (APIs) that span Samsung laptops, phones, tablets, and TVs such as ChatON, Group Play, Samsung AdHub, Context Aware, and more. Other sessions will include topics such as building “certified applications,” working with Samsung’s KNOX environment, which enables more secure bring-your-own-device management for IT departments, and Samsung’s Enterprise API.

With this developer conference, Samsung is announcing to the world that it is not just a vendor of smartphones and tablets that happen to run Android, and not just a maker of TVs that happen to talk to Facebook. Rather, the company is building out a vision of a connected, intelligent array of devices that interoperate smoothly and may use Android … but also comprise a platform on top of Android.

The Korean company is in a great position to do so.

Last year, it sold an astonishing 400 million phones. This year so far, Samsung has sold almost twice as many smartphones as its next four competitors combined. Add to that its leadership position in TVs and significant role in the declining-but-still-important PC market, and Samsung has all the ingredients — except console gaming — to create a full and integrated entertainment and computing platform.

The company is already capturing 95 percent of global profits in the Android handset industry — something that Google is quietly very concerned about. It’s loaded up phones like the Galaxy S4 with features that overlay and obscure pure Android. And it’s building its own app store to compete with Google Play.

Setting up its own developer conference is yet another step down the road to exerting even more control over the Android ecosystem.