Samsung announce Flow to provide Apple Continuity like platform for droiders

Samsung Flow is a new platform from Samsung that will help users transition activities across devices and time (no, you cannot do time travel and you cannot send a task back in time). In short, Flow is Samsung’s response to Apple’s  Continuity or well, you can say that it is indeed Samsung’s way of implementing Apple Continuity.

With Samsung Flow, you can pause or leave a task where it is in one device and continue the task on another device. If you are not going to have a device ready in short time, you can hibernate the activity so that it can be resumed at a later point of time. Once you are back using the device, if you think of discarding the task, a simple swipe away will do. These devices will get in sync automatically when they are near each other.

How to use flow? On the devices that you need the continuity, you need to install ‘Flow’ application. Flow app uses Android’s ‘Share’ action to transfer/defer activities.

Flow FAQ:

• How does Flow differ from existing cross-device platforms?

  With Flow, we’re exploring how to allow your activities to seamlessly transition across devices and across time. Users aren’t limited to just transferring their activities; they can also defer them to the right time.

  Flow also takes a unique approach to application support that allows Flow to work existing, unmodified applications and allows developers to customize their applications with minimal effort to achieve truly seamless cross-device experiences.

• Which devices does Flow currently support?

  For the initial phase of our beta, Flow is only available in the United States.

  As of now, Flow supports:

  Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge
  Galaxy Note 4 and Note Edge
  Galaxy S5
  Galaxy Tab S
  Galaxy Alpha

• How do devices with Flow communicate?

  Flow uses Bluetooth LE to advertise a device’s availability, and it uses Wifi (if devices are on the same network) or Bluetooth (if they’re not) to communicate between devices.

• Does Flow use a central server to store your device collection and deferred activities?

  Flow is a pure peer-to-peer platform; your devices communicate directly (and only) with each other. That approach does mean that your devices need to be near each other and powered on to synchronize your device collection and deferred activities, but it also means that your deferred activities are completely private to your devices.

• How does Flow differ from other “save it for later” applications?

  Existing applications that let you save activities for later focus on saving content, primarily web pages and videos. By contrast, Flow provides a platform that allows any application to defer any type of user activity until later. Flow also lets applications control how users resume their activities, whether via the original or another application.