> If someone senior at Samsung said to their vendor "good Bluetooth or you lose the Samsung account", that would provoke some, um, intense conversations at the vendor between sales and engineering.
The problem: There aren't that many suppliers left in the field, and Broadcom knows that their customers are pretty much locked in. The notable exception is once again Apple, they have proven that they can and will go and implement the technology on their own if their suppliers fail to meet their expectations.
Besides that they also lack the amount of control over the software side. Google is the entity that controls the stack, not Samsung - their responsibility ends at the kernel / HAL interface.
So why should Samsung invest more than the bare minimum when they can't get anything measurable in return?
The problem: There aren't that many suppliers left in the field, and Broadcom knows that their customers are pretty much locked in. The notable exception is once again Apple, they have proven that they can and will go and implement the technology on their own if their suppliers fail to meet their expectations.