Samsung wants to be the AirPods for Android, and I’m okay with that

It’s no accident that Samsung’s latest Galaxy Buds4 and 4 Pro look offly similar to a certain other pair of popular earbuds. Samsung has seemingly been running Apple’s playbook for two generations now, and with the Buds4 series, the copy is cleaner than ever, offering the closest experience to AirPods for Android users.

Since the Buds3 lineup, Samsung restructured its entire earbuds portfolio around a familiar division: an open-fit model for casual listeners, and a sealed, in-ear Pro variant for those who want serious ANC, both with a lollipop-stem design. That’s the same line Apple drew between the AirPods and AirPods Pro, right down to the price tier, targeting the same rungs of the premium earbuds ladder. Heck, they even have pretty much the same pairing animation that blooms across your phone screen the second you crack the lid. If you swapped the branding, you might not immediately know whose product you were holding.

A lot of lifelong Samsung users like me see this as a problem, but honestly, I’m warming up to it.

The real playbook

The pairing animations on both operating systems are nearly identical.

Aside from the lookalike aesthetics, what Samsung has really been building is ecosystem architecture, which I think is a bigger achievement than matching the design. Auto-switching between Galaxy devices, deep integration with the Galaxy Wearable app, SmartThings Find support, and One UI 8.5 integration that lets Galaxy phone owners adjust ANC and audio settings directly from device settings without opening a separate app. They’re a web of dependencies designed to make leaving feel like a loss.

Apple and Samsung are both betting that the phone in your pocket will determine the earbuds in your ears.

Apple didn’t win the earbuds market on hardware alone. It won by making AirPods feel like a natural extension of the iPhone. Samsung has studied that lesson carefully, and the Buds4 series represents their most complete attempt yet at replicating the stickiness that comes with it. The fact that Apple holds roughly 20% of the global smartphone market while Samsung sits at 19% means these two companies are betting on the same thing: that the phone in your pocket will determine the earbuds in your ears.

Where Samsung goes further

Most features are exclusive to Samsung Galaxy devices.

And I have to give credit to Samsung for taking some of those features a step further than Apple, especially in Audio. For example, where Apple gives you a binary choice for ANC on and transparency mode, Samsung gives you a slider. It locks to one of five discrete levels for both ANC strength and ambient mode, letting you manually adjust how much of the world you want to let in. It’s a small thing that AirPods Pro still hasn’t bothered with.

Galaxy owners get a custom EQ, and higher resolution audio.

Additionally, the custom EQ in the Galaxy Wearable app gives users actual control over their sound, which is something AirPods Pro has never meaningfully offered. With Samsung, you get a 9-band custom equalizer and a handful of presets. Then there’s Samsung’s Seamless Codec, which enables higher-resolution wireless audio at 24-bit/96kHz, while Apple’s one and only AAC codec offers 16-bit/44.1kHz audio quality. For the audio-conscious listener, these factors alone are a significant differentiator.

Samsung also supports live language translation with Interpreter across 22 languages, more than double the 10 currently supported by Apple’s Live Translation. That’s a fair edge for international travellers trying to communicate across language barriers.

That said, Apple isn’t standing still. The AirPods Pro 3 still edge out the Buds4 Pro on raw ANC performance — averaging 90% noise attenuation in our lab testing versus Samsung’s 84%. And there are areas Samsung simply hasn’t matched yet. The AirPods Pro 3 include hearing aid functionality with personalized hearing test-based tuning, hearing protection, and a heart rate monitor built into the earbuds themselves — features that push them closer to a health device than a pair of headphones.

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Android users have been waiting for this

Samsung offers more control over ANC levels and Audio EQ.

I think Android users have deserved a premium, cohesive earbuds ecosystem for years, and nobody delivered one. Not Pixel Buds, which Google has treated like a side project. Not Sony, who makes excellent standalone earbuds that feel orphaned from any broader ecosystem. Not Bose. Samsung is one of the only brands to build an end-to-end experience because they really wanted to win that race.

In the Android arena, Samsung still has the best ecosystem experience.

Together, Apple and Samsung account for nearly 40% of the global active smartphone base. That’s close to half of all smartphones in use belonging to one of two companies. If you’re an Android user — and statistically, most people are — your best shot at the kind of seamless earbuds experience iPhone users have had for years is a pair of Galaxy Buds. Samsung made that possible by looking at what worked and deciding to build it for the other side of the aisle.

Is it bold? No. Is it original? Not particularly. But for the hundreds of millions of Galaxy device owners who just want things to work the way AirPods work, from auto-switching, the deep settings integration, the adaptive ANC, Samsung’s willingness to follow the blueprint might be the most practical thing they’ve ever done.