10 ms·

Samsung's future is Tizen, not Android

102 points by kumarshantanu 14y ago

myko 14y ago
I'm not sure how successful these phones will be if they don't have Google's permission to provide Google Play, and I can't imagine Google would give them that.
- quarterto 14y ago
  The Kindle Fire is doing just fine with Amazon Appstore in lieu of Google Play.
  - takluyver 14y ago
    That has Amazon's massive content library as a draw, though. Samsung does have an app store, but since their Android phones come with Google Play, I don't know how well populated their own is.
  - jonknee 14y ago
    The Kindle Fire is not a phone. Not having Google Maps/Gmail/Google Now/Google Chat/etc isn't that big of a deal on your reader or tablet, but it's a lot bigger deal on your phone.
    - myko 14y ago
      Also current users of Samsung phones would be pretty upset if they bought a new one and couldn't download the apps they've already purchased via Google Play.
- joshayto 14y ago
  I agree. I think Google Play, more so it's mass of Android apps, is a big-ish draw for people. Although really it's only a handful of apps "real" people actually care about (Think Gmail, Twitter, Angry Birds etc...). However from a Google point of view, Samsung has a bit too much power for their liking... I see Google with Motorola, moving even more so into hardware and pushing their "pure" Android Nexus brand more and more. They've piggy backed on Samsung's Android marketing for a while and it's been good for both. But now they're too much of a threat to Android, like the article, potentially moving to a different OS that could further fragment the market. I think mainly Samsung will wait a see how Windows Phone goes, to see if they change OS. Maybe even launch a Tizen or whatever OS phone to test the water before jumping the Android ship... It's just like a real life version of Game Of Thrones... Game of Smartphones (maybe not...)
RyanZAG 14y ago
While I'm sure Samsung would love to replace Android with Tizen, I doubt they will actually be able to do it. While Apple and Google make it appear easy to create an OS that users enjoy using, the reality is that it is incredibly difficult. Just look at Windows Phone - I'm fairly sure that Microsoft is more able to create a technically superior OS to Samsung, and I think the amount of money Microsoft has poured into Windows Phone advertising shows the amount of marketing talent that is likely being used. Yet Windows Phone is a dismal failure even with Nokia's huge manufacturing bulk behind it. The only sensible conclusion I can come to is that making a desirable mobile OS is far more difficult than it appears, and that there are numerous 'below the water line' effects that make a mobile OS popular. I very much doubt that Samsung is going to be able to transition the bulk of their Android users to Tizen. I also believe attempting it will be a mistake with both HTC and Sony having very strong challengers to the S4 this year. Any deficiency in the S4 to try and swing customers to Tizen will just mean an erosion of market share as consumers move to HTC/Sony/ZTE etc. I expect Tizen to get decent traction in China, India and SE Asia in the lower-price tiers, but I can't see it unseating Android in any shape or form.
- james-skemp 14y ago
  I have Windows Phone 7.5 that I love. But my next phone will be Android. Yes, Windows Phone rocks, but they don't have the apps iOS and Android have. And while I can certainly browse sites directly (preference anyway), web developers forget about it during testing. Not that I blame them, since being one myself I know it's still a niche group. If their OS can run Android apps ... they're already ahead of MS.
  - spqr 14y ago
    What types of apps are you looking for? Personally I'm on my third iPhone (3G, 4, 4s) and apps are the things i use the least. I plan to switch to Nokia Lumia 928 when it comes out next month (hopefully). It seems that the app situation (for anyone that cares about it) has gotten significantly better in the last few months alone.
- MatthewPhillips 14y ago
odiroot 14y ago
I for one welcome this move. It seems Tizen somewhat follows Maemo's way. Let's hope Samsung is not going to stuff it with loads of bloatware. I wish as well the ecosystem is more like Firefox OS's than iOS's in terms of openness -- I don't know what to think about current Samsung moves regarding Android.
- tuananh 14y ago
  talking about bloatware, I can't understand the urge to put a bunch of apps like 'S Health' pre-installed on S4. Android OEM is stepping on the same path as Windows OEM did.
- darklajid 14y ago
  Owning a Samsung 'Smart TV' that, as soon as it is connected to the internet, forcefully downloads the worst crapware I've seen in my life with no option to hide or remove that stuff (according to research online and customer service) I'm convinced that I do not want a Samsung controlled device again and don't share your high hopes, even if we're talking about totally disconnected branches of a huge company. (Incidently I got a S3 before this weekend as a corporate phone. I didn't even once boot it before flashing ClockworkMod / CyanogenMod)
RexRollman 14y ago
I don't know if Samsung would move to Tizen but I can certainly understand the desire to completely control both the hardware and software.
bsaul 14y ago
On a more technical aspect: does anyone knows whether the HTML5 apis tizen offer will be fast enough to cover all the needs for "nativ" apps ? I was building a HTML5 phonegap app very recently on a samsung galaxy Tab 2 and couldn't help notice how sluggish the overall feeling was, even for extremely basic UI animations (had to switch to 3D CSS transformations to make sure 3D hardware was used). If I understood correctly, Tizen will use HTML5 for pretty much anything. So i'm a bit scared of the performances..
- kyrra 14y ago
  Do you mean "canvas" instead of HTML5 for your phonegap app?
  - bsaul 14y ago
    nope. using 3d css transforms sometimes speed css transitions up by making sure 3d graphic card is used. that's a secret tip i learned on ios and it works on android as well.
- MatthewPhillips 14y ago
  APIs are neither fast nor slow. I guess your asking if their WebKit port is going to be fast? Probably not, WebKit on ARM is still not that fast. I don't know what JS engine they'll use, likely JavaScriptCore but that's not very fast on ARM either.
  - bsaul 14y ago
    i did ask for apis, because i thought that laybe, as javascript is at the core of their UI, they would hardwire stuff directly to native code to speed things up. that's just wild guess, because it seems so suicidal to me to have a whole OS GUI written in html5/js right now.. especially when you know that Samsung is selling so many cheap smartphones.
shadowmint 14y ago
"For most Samsung smartphone owners, TouchWiz is Android, and since Tizen could easily get a TouchWiz-like user interface, the average consumer wouldn't notice a thing." You've got to be kidding. Do you remember the demo? www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJ1y7CpIaVA Smooth. :/ To be fair, I'm sure they're working on the UI, but UI is something that's hard to get right. It took android what, 4 years to reach a point where it's actually nice to use. ...and you think maybe consumers are just stupid and won't be able to tell the difference between a smooth responsive and well designed UI and a rubbish new UI (as all new UIs are, to start with)? yeah...
- acchow 14y ago
  The article got another equivalence wrong too - that Google is Android. > Add all of this together and it becomes clear what Samsung is going for. The company wants to decrease its dependence on Google, and Tizen is the way they're going to do that. He is conflating independence from Android as independence from Google. How? What will it use for Maps? Search? Email? Wifi-assisted location data? Moving off Android is about as Google-independent as moving off Chrome.
- MatthewPhillips 14y ago
  If you believe that about Android your conclusion doesn't follow; Android and The Galaxy line was selling well before your 4-years-in point of niceness.
- objclxt 14y ago
  I am one of the few people who's had the (mis)fortune of developing for Bada, one of Tizen's predecessors. For a while, I was using a Wave 3, which was basically a nicer Galaxy S2 running Bada (I could never quite understand why Samsung went to the trouble of designing a very nice metal unibody handset and then saddling it with Bada). People in the office who weren't developers would on occasion pick up the Wave and genuinely believe it was running Android. Samsung had ported TouchWiz over to it, and whilst there were some clearly noticeable differences in terms of performance most people didn't care enough to pick this up. I think you give people too much credit. All I know is that back then Samsung put a lot of effort in making Bada look, feel, and behave like TouchWiz on Android. I haven't looked at Tizen recently, but I don't see why they wouldn't do the same here.
Zigurd 14y ago
This is unlikely. Samsung and Intel need to learn how to cooperate on Tizen. There is no agreed Tizen road map. No unified governance. HTML5 is an unproven, and some would say disproven, mobile app platform. Browsers, compilers, SDKs, and frameworks are immature. There are no success stories despite several tries. Samsung, and its likely carrier partners, have no ecosystem comparable to Apple's or Google's. The only 3rd party ecosystem success story is Amazon with the Android-derived Kindle Fire. I believe it is possible to compete with Apple and Google, but Tizen is not close to being able, as it is today. At this point Tizen is well behind Windows Phone, Blackberry, Sailfish, B2G, and even Ubuntu in being ready to compete. Having a decades-long duopoly will be boring in many ways, so I hope somebody gets their act together. But it's serious business. Hobby projects will go nowhere.
mayankj08 14y ago
One of the major factor that makes ios and Android so popular is no. of apps in their respective stores. Even if Samsung comes with their own OS building such a huge repository of apps takes time. So i don't think so that Samsung would launch it's OS without comparable no. of apps in Tizen too.
candl 14y ago
Samsung should have made their Bada smartphones eligible for an upgrade to Tizen as the OS is supposedly capable of running Bada apps. This would at least establish a user base. Instead all of Bada adopters got screwed badly. I don't think anyone is going to fall for the same trap again.
- objclxt 14y ago
  A lot of the Bada models are pretty low specced. They're all using single cores with low amounts of memory. Tizen may be backwards compatible with Bada apps, but I doubt the vast majority of Bada handsets out there are capable of running Tizen without problems.
venomsnake 14y ago
Dear millions of people that have our Galaxy line devices as the center of your digital lives would you kindly switch to this new os, while we convince all the devs to support yet another OS and iron all the kinks. It will go smoothly. Microsoft are playing the OS switching game for a few years now and this is working great for them. While I do think that Tizen may be a future, there are huge investments in Android already to make it the future. While their support for Tizen makes some sense as a way to keep google's feet close to the fire and have alternative in case G start to move the OS in wrong direction, a major push to replace Android will be stupid.
tjoff 14y ago
I can't imagine a worse android experience than what TouchWiz offers. And if you remove the android ecosystem from that they will have nothing an enthusiast or power user would ever want in a Samsung phone. Building cheap entry-level phones seemed like the right thing to do, Tizen won't be polished in the beginning (as no OS is) and people buying high-end devices today expect that it is. I'm assuming they don't want to associate Tizen with budget or low quality phones but I really can't see how Tizen will be anything but a spectacular failure in america and europe at least.
- Kiro 14y ago
  I like TouchWiz so not sure what you're talking about.
- corresation 14y ago
  I can't imagine a worse android experience than what TouchWiz offers How so? To be fair a lot of the features of TouchWiz ended up being borrowed and integrated directly into Android (just as there was borrowing from SenseUI). These competitive forces have helped Android evolve.
  - tjoff 14y ago
    Sure TouchWiz has features, it's the implementation and UI that stinks. I have a friend that always said that "Samsung can't do software" and I thought that was a bit hyperbolic. Samsung is a huge company and just because one parts screws up doesn't mean, well, anything really. But I guess I just had barely used any samsung devices that required software. I can honestly not mention a single piece of samsung software or device that wasn't seriously hindered by the software. From TVs that show hideous grey bars (when the aspect ratio doesn't match) that will blind you in dark scenes (just because the TV frame is grey (note that you can't even change this in the menus)) instead of black bars like all other TVs, to well, TouchWiz... Take the sound notification you got in samsung phones (was this around the time of galaxy SII? (and not the 90's that you'd expect)) where the phone would make a sound notification when the battery was charged to 100%. With no way to turn it off. I dare say the most common use case when charging a phone is during the night, a lot of people have their phone alongside their bed and this meant that they would be waken a few hours later. All samsung devices with software in it has at least a few of these annoyances that makes it obvious - no one, has ever, used this thing outside of a lab. But that's just small details. TouchWiz is horribly slow. No, it really is catastrophically bad. I tested the Galaxy tab 10.1 in a few stores, in everyone the interface was seriously slower than any of the competitors (with the same hardware). But I figured that this was because of people installing and abusing demo devices. Then I was to help a friend with their brand new tab 10.1, I even witnessed the unpacking and out of the box and it was just as horrid as in all the stores. The brand new top of the line $500 tablet behaved as a bloated, cheap, first generation device. And it hasn't gotten better with time. Samsung completely ruined the Galaxy S. Compare it to the Nexus S, pretty much the same hardware and the Galaxy S was by comparison barely usable unless you installed a custom rom on it. At which point it suddenly became a great phone. The touchwiz calendar and messaging applications (in galaxy SIII) looks like they have been designed by a 10-year old starting to learn photoshop (seriously, I just can't believe my eyes everytime i use a Samsung android phone). The UI isn't even remotely consistent with... anything. Everything they tweaked and touched has been for the worse. Yes they have their own features, mostly features that are fun the first five minutes (if you are a ten year old) but at best doesn't annoy you after the first week.
programminggeek 14y ago
The platform lock-in has never been about the OS, it's always been about the apps. Why do you buy a Nintendo system? Because of the OS? No, because of Mario. Why do you buy Windows? Because of the OS? No, because of Office or some PC game or maybe Visual Studio. Samsung can't rid itself of Android until it has a way to run android apps on Tizen or possibly just to pay devs millions of dollars to port their apps.
- alanctgardner2 14y ago
  It is right in the article that android apps run on Tizen.
  - anonymous 14y ago
    I see. We're witnessing OS/2 mobile edition.
corresation 14y ago
Samsung's future is to always try to minimize dependencies and to maximize options. Replace "Samsung" with any company at any time and you have simple good corporate governance. This is not insightful, and there seems to be a new harvest of "the Balkanization of Android begins!" articles, despite there being absolutely nothing new in that respect for years. For those not aware, Samsung has always pre-loaded their own app store, their own messaging, their own chatting, etc, to negligible results. Further Samsung has always "de-emphasised" Android, as like others they want to commoditize their compliments, and it makes no sense to talk up the features that most of their competitors have as well. And for what it's worth, Android itself is the least dependency Samsung has on Google. The Play store, gmail, maps, Google Now, and so on -- these are all non-Android specific information services that most people can't go without, and most users would simply reject any device that doesn't have it.
invdevm 14y ago
Contrary to what most people might say here, Tizen as well as Firefox OS will lead the future generation of mobile devices. Just watch and listen.
mmahemoff 14y ago
Yes, it's clear this is where Samsung's going. Neither Google nor Samsung mention Android much these days. BUT Samsung will have to lift its developer relations game 10x if they want people writing apps when it starts to come out. As for a compatibility layer, that's a lot easier to say than do, so native apps will still be critical. Look at https://www.tizen.org/ https://www.tizen.org/ Tizen 2.0 SDK is out? Where's 1.0? Tizen isn't out yet. Why are you talking about SDKs on the hero banner anyway? What's Tizen? Why should I care? Developer docs are out of the '90s: https://developer.tizen.org/documentation/dev-guide?redirect=https%3A//developer.tizen.org/help/topic/org.tizen.gettingstarted/html/cover_page.htm https://developer.tizen.org/documentation/dev-guide?redirect... iFrames? End of the day, developers will flock to where the users are. But a new platform needs to win developers to bring the users on, even with Samsung's distribution channels. I really want to see some solid competition to Android. I can only hope all this is early beta stuff because they'll need to speak developers' language if they want people writing apps. As for the emphasis on HTML5, the hobbyist HTML5 niche is well-occupied by Firefox OS. And BB, Windows, and Ubuntu are also pushing HTML5.
sverige 14y ago
I am an early adopter when it makes sense. Smartphones have never made sense to me as a replacement for my desktop machine. I only recently switched to a smartphone because my trusty Nokia finally died. It made phone calls very well, by the way, and worked OK for texting and keeping a calendar, which are the three things that I mostly use the "smartphone" for. So, I recognize that I'm not like most here, but maybe that gives me "the Emperor has no clothes" view of all this. I have to say that I'm not at all impressed with Android or Google Play. First, the UI isn't all that great. The gestures are not all intuitive, and sometimes are the opposite. (For example, why does holding my finger still on a zoomed page mean "zoom back out" when there's another gesture that I understand that will do the same thing?) Second, 4G isn't available a lot of places I go, and I live in one of the 20 biggest cities in the U.S. Surfing the web on a Samsung phone feels a lot like surfing the web using Windows 98 over a 56k phone line 15 years ago. Third, more than half the time when I download apps from Google Play, the download fails and I have to retry. Along the same lines, Google wants to update shit I don't use and never will use (Gmail, Youtube, I don't know what all - 9 apps recently) - which brings me back to the slowness and unreliability of downloading generally. And I now have to dive into the details of how to unlock the thing so I can remove the apps I don't want and don't use, taking the risk of bricking the handset. I don't want to know this stuff. I have enough stuff I have to know. Fourth or fifth or wherever I am, the app store is messy and the apps want permissions I can see no good reason to give them. (For instance, why would a calculator app need access to my f'ing phonebook?) I welcome any and all competition to the way things are now. The smartphone world right now feels a lot like AOL in the late '90s. "Oh, no one's going to leave Google or iOS when they have all these cool apps they paid money for!" That's bull and the handset manufacturers and phone companies and OS / app store owners know it, which is why they made unlocking phones illegal. As soon as someone figures out how to make it reliably easy to unlock phones and put another OS on it that still works with your phone company's system, the handset becomes a commodity. (Too bad the BSD folks aren't too interested. The entire phone network was built on UNIX (TM). Should be a relatively simple thing to make it work.) And as soon as someone makes an app store accessible to anyone regardless of phone OS, people will go there to get apps for their OS. The walled garden play has been tried before and inevitably fails in the end because people want control of their devices. This is one of the communities that should be making it happen, but what I hear mostly is "Oh, it can't be done! You don't know how hard it is!" There are a lot of us waiting for someone to break the oligarchies that have sprung up to take control of this market. Please do it. You might even get rich in the process.
gcb0 14y ago
The day Google gets HP to launch a nexus phone, all other manufacturers will have no change in Android high end market. Since the nexus one ALL nexus devices are buggy and crippled.
- ttflee 14y ago
  Up-voted. For my now-stolen and ever-crippled Nexus-One.
- gcb0 14y ago
  *chance
Marazan 14y ago
Wasn't it last year that Samsung was replacing Android with Bada?
mtgx 14y ago
I'm sure Samsung wishes that, but you haven't even seen Tizen as a consumer product and you've already decided a winner? That seems like a big overreach. We've seen mobile operating systems that actually looked or worked better than Android or even iOS before, and yet they still failed miserably.
jusben1369 14y ago
There's a risk that the assumption is Google cares a lot about Android. I think Google just cares about there not being closed platforms that threaten their ability to drive search/advertising revenue. If Samsung drives Tizen and happily supports Google's products I'm not sure either cares.
- gonzo 14y ago
  and with Rubin out, the de-emphasis on Android has begun. Google is likely trying to move back to a position of neutrality. It will put apps for its services on any phone / platform that 'matters'.
laureny 14y ago
The title should be rephrased "Samsung wants its future to be Tizen, not Android". I doubt they will succeed, though.
15charusername 14y ago
Don't forget Samsung produce more than just phones, even if Tizen doesn't take off for phones, Samsung do a lot of other embedded Linux stuff. As for Tizen's success on phones, apart from lower end devices (where you probably don't want many custom apps just a solid base, symbian style), I see the appeal of all you're devices (TV, Fridge, Car, etc) running a consistent UI with plenty of magic and auto-configuration running behind the scenes and I'm not seeing many low end devices with Android yet.
Nursie 14y ago
I'll buy a high-end Samsung Tizen device. Given my record though, that'll be the kiss of death for the platform.
jjsz 14y ago
I expect Cyanogenmod and it's variants especially Paranoid Android to gain traction with HTC and Sony phones. Tizen is the WebOS of 2013, nobody wants a Tizen.
- Apocryphon 14y ago
  Samsung seems to be actually making hardware for Tizen, though, unlike HP.

102 points by kumarshantanu 14y ago

myko 14y ago

I'm not sure how successful these phones will be if they don't have Google's permission to provide Google Play, and I can't imagine Google would give them that.

quarterto 14y ago
The Kindle Fire is doing just fine with Amazon Appstore in lieu of Google Play.
- takluyver 14y ago
  That has Amazon's massive content library as a draw, though. Samsung does have an app store, but since their Android phones come with Google Play, I don't know how well populated their own is.
- jonknee 14y ago
  The Kindle Fire is not a phone. Not having Google Maps/Gmail/Google Now/Google Chat/etc isn't that big of a deal on your reader or tablet, but it's a lot bigger deal on your phone.
  - myko 14y ago
    Also current users of Samsung phones would be pretty upset if they bought a new one and couldn't download the apps they've already purchased via Google Play.
joshayto 14y ago
I agree. I think Google Play, more so it's mass of Android apps, is a big-ish draw for people. Although really it's only a handful of apps "real" people actually care about (Think Gmail, Twitter, Angry Birds etc...). However from a Google point of view, Samsung has a bit too much power for their liking... I see Google with Motorola, moving even more so into hardware and pushing their "pure" Android Nexus brand more and more. They've piggy backed on Samsung's Android marketing for a while and it's been good for both. But now they're too much of a threat to Android, like the article, potentially moving to a different OS that could further fragment the market. I think mainly Samsung will wait a see how Windows Phone goes, to see if they change OS. Maybe even launch a Tizen or whatever OS phone to test the water before jumping the Android ship... It's just like a real life version of Game Of Thrones... Game of Smartphones (maybe not...)

RyanZAG 14y ago

While I'm sure Samsung would love to replace Android with Tizen, I doubt they will actually be able to do it. While Apple and Google make it appear easy to create an OS that users enjoy using, the reality is that it is incredibly difficult. Just look at Windows Phone - I'm fairly sure that Microsoft is more able to create a technically superior OS to Samsung, and I think the amount of money Microsoft has poured into Windows Phone advertising shows the amount of marketing talent that is likely being used. Yet Windows Phone is a dismal failure even with Nokia's huge manufacturing bulk behind it. The only sensible conclusion I can come to is that making a desirable mobile OS is far more difficult than it appears, and that there are numerous 'below the water line' effects that make a mobile OS popular. I very much doubt that Samsung is going to be able to transition the bulk of their Android users to Tizen. I also believe attempting it will be a mistake with both HTC and Sony having very strong challengers to the S4 this year. Any deficiency in the S4 to try and swing customers to Tizen will just mean an erosion of market share as consumers move to HTC/Sony/ZTE etc. I expect Tizen to get decent traction in China, India and SE Asia in the lower-price tiers, but I can't see it unseating Android in any shape or form.

james-skemp 14y ago
I have Windows Phone 7.5 that I love. But my next phone will be Android. Yes, Windows Phone rocks, but they don't have the apps iOS and Android have. And while I can certainly browse sites directly (preference anyway), web developers forget about it during testing. Not that I blame them, since being one myself I know it's still a niche group. If their OS can run Android apps ... they're already ahead of MS.
- spqr 14y ago
  What types of apps are you looking for? Personally I'm on my third iPhone (3G, 4, 4s) and apps are the things i use the least. I plan to switch to Nokia Lumia 928 when it comes out next month (hopefully). It seems that the app situation (for anyone that cares about it) has gotten significantly better in the last few months alone.
MatthewPhillips 14y ago

odiroot 14y ago

I for one welcome this move. It seems Tizen somewhat follows Maemo's way. Let's hope Samsung is not going to stuff it with loads of bloatware. I wish as well the ecosystem is more like Firefox OS's than iOS's in terms of openness -- I don't know what to think about current Samsung moves regarding Android.

tuananh 14y ago
talking about bloatware, I can't understand the urge to put a bunch of apps like 'S Health' pre-installed on S4. Android OEM is stepping on the same path as Windows OEM did.
darklajid 14y ago
Owning a Samsung 'Smart TV' that, as soon as it is connected to the internet, forcefully downloads the worst crapware I've seen in my life with no option to hide or remove that stuff (according to research online and customer service) I'm convinced that I do not want a Samsung controlled device again and don't share your high hopes, even if we're talking about totally disconnected branches of a huge company. (Incidently I got a S3 before this weekend as a corporate phone. I didn't even once boot it before flashing ClockworkMod / CyanogenMod)

RexRollman 14y ago

I don't know if Samsung would move to Tizen but I can certainly understand the desire to completely control both the hardware and software.

bsaul 14y ago

On a more technical aspect: does anyone knows whether the HTML5 apis tizen offer will be fast enough to cover all the needs for "nativ" apps ? I was building a HTML5 phonegap app very recently on a samsung galaxy Tab 2 and couldn't help notice how sluggish the overall feeling was, even for extremely basic UI animations (had to switch to 3D CSS transformations to make sure 3D hardware was used). If I understood correctly, Tizen will use HTML5 for pretty much anything. So i'm a bit scared of the performances..

kyrra 14y ago
Do you mean "canvas" instead of HTML5 for your phonegap app?
- bsaul 14y ago
  nope. using 3d css transforms sometimes speed css transitions up by making sure 3d graphic card is used. that's a secret tip i learned on ios and it works on android as well.
MatthewPhillips 14y ago
APIs are neither fast nor slow. I guess your asking if their WebKit port is going to be fast? Probably not, WebKit on ARM is still not that fast. I don't know what JS engine they'll use, likely JavaScriptCore but that's not very fast on ARM either.
- bsaul 14y ago
  i did ask for apis, because i thought that laybe, as javascript is at the core of their UI, they would hardwire stuff directly to native code to speed things up. that's just wild guess, because it seems so suicidal to me to have a whole OS GUI written in html5/js right now.. especially when you know that Samsung is selling so many cheap smartphones.

shadowmint 14y ago

"For most Samsung smartphone owners, TouchWiz is Android, and since Tizen could easily get a TouchWiz-like user interface, the average consumer wouldn't notice a thing." You've got to be kidding. Do you remember the demo? www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJ1y7CpIaVA Smooth. :/ To be fair, I'm sure they're working on the UI, but UI is something that's hard to get right. It took android what, 4 years to reach a point where it's actually nice to use. ...and you think maybe consumers are just stupid and won't be able to tell the difference between a smooth responsive and well designed UI and a rubbish new UI (as all new UIs are, to start with)? yeah...

acchow 14y ago
The article got another equivalence wrong too - that Google is Android. > Add all of this together and it becomes clear what Samsung is going for. The company wants to decrease its dependence on Google, and Tizen is the way they're going to do that. He is conflating independence from Android as independence from Google. How? What will it use for Maps? Search? Email? Wifi-assisted location data? Moving off Android is about as Google-independent as moving off Chrome.
MatthewPhillips 14y ago
If you believe that about Android your conclusion doesn't follow; Android and The Galaxy line was selling well before your 4-years-in point of niceness.
objclxt 14y ago
I am one of the few people who's had the (mis)fortune of developing for Bada, one of Tizen's predecessors. For a while, I was using a Wave 3, which was basically a nicer Galaxy S2 running Bada (I could never quite understand why Samsung went to the trouble of designing a very nice metal unibody handset and then saddling it with Bada). People in the office who weren't developers would on occasion pick up the Wave and genuinely believe it was running Android. Samsung had ported TouchWiz over to it, and whilst there were some clearly noticeable differences in terms of performance most people didn't care enough to pick this up. I think you give people too much credit. All I know is that back then Samsung put a lot of effort in making Bada look, feel, and behave like TouchWiz on Android. I haven't looked at Tizen recently, but I don't see why they wouldn't do the same here.

Zigurd 14y ago

This is unlikely. Samsung and Intel need to learn how to cooperate on Tizen. There is no agreed Tizen road map. No unified governance. HTML5 is an unproven, and some would say disproven, mobile app platform. Browsers, compilers, SDKs, and frameworks are immature. There are no success stories despite several tries. Samsung, and its likely carrier partners, have no ecosystem comparable to Apple's or Google's. The only 3rd party ecosystem success story is Amazon with the Android-derived Kindle Fire. I believe it is possible to compete with Apple and Google, but Tizen is not close to being able, as it is today. At this point Tizen is well behind Windows Phone, Blackberry, Sailfish, B2G, and even Ubuntu in being ready to compete. Having a decades-long duopoly will be boring in many ways, so I hope somebody gets their act together. But it's serious business. Hobby projects will go nowhere.

mayankj08 14y ago

One of the major factor that makes ios and Android so popular is no. of apps in their respective stores. Even if Samsung comes with their own OS building such a huge repository of apps takes time. So i don't think so that Samsung would launch it's OS without comparable no. of apps in Tizen too.

candl 14y ago

Samsung should have made their Bada smartphones eligible for an upgrade to Tizen as the OS is supposedly capable of running Bada apps. This would at least establish a user base. Instead all of Bada adopters got screwed badly. I don't think anyone is going to fall for the same trap again.

objclxt 14y ago
A lot of the Bada models are pretty low specced. They're all using single cores with low amounts of memory. Tizen may be backwards compatible with Bada apps, but I doubt the vast majority of Bada handsets out there are capable of running Tizen without problems.

venomsnake 14y ago

Dear millions of people that have our Galaxy line devices as the center of your digital lives would you kindly switch to this new os, while we convince all the devs to support yet another OS and iron all the kinks. It will go smoothly. Microsoft are playing the OS switching game for a few years now and this is working great for them. While I do think that Tizen may be a future, there are huge investments in Android already to make it the future. While their support for Tizen makes some sense as a way to keep google's feet close to the fire and have alternative in case G start to move the OS in wrong direction, a major push to replace Android will be stupid.

tjoff 14y ago

I can't imagine a worse android experience than what TouchWiz offers. And if you remove the android ecosystem from that they will have nothing an enthusiast or power user would ever want in a Samsung phone. Building cheap entry-level phones seemed like the right thing to do, Tizen won't be polished in the beginning (as no OS is) and people buying high-end devices today expect that it is. I'm assuming they don't want to associate Tizen with budget or low quality phones but I really can't see how Tizen will be anything but a spectacular failure in america and europe at least.

Kiro 14y ago
I like TouchWiz so not sure what you're talking about.
corresation 14y ago
I can't imagine a worse android experience than what TouchWiz offers How so? To be fair a lot of the features of TouchWiz ended up being borrowed and integrated directly into Android (just as there was borrowing from SenseUI). These competitive forces have helped Android evolve.
- tjoff 14y ago
  Sure TouchWiz has features, it's the implementation and UI that stinks. I have a friend that always said that "Samsung can't do software" and I thought that was a bit hyperbolic. Samsung is a huge company and just because one parts screws up doesn't mean, well, anything really. But I guess I just had barely used any samsung devices that required software. I can honestly not mention a single piece of samsung software or device that wasn't seriously hindered by the software. From TVs that show hideous grey bars (when the aspect ratio doesn't match) that will blind you in dark scenes (just because the TV frame is grey (note that you can't even change this in the menus)) instead of black bars like all other TVs, to well, TouchWiz... Take the sound notification you got in samsung phones (was this around the time of galaxy SII? (and not the 90's that you'd expect)) where the phone would make a sound notification when the battery was charged to 100%. With no way to turn it off. I dare say the most common use case when charging a phone is during the night, a lot of people have their phone alongside their bed and this meant that they would be waken a few hours later. All samsung devices with software in it has at least a few of these annoyances that makes it obvious - no one, has ever, used this thing outside of a lab. But that's just small details. TouchWiz is horribly slow. No, it really is catastrophically bad. I tested the Galaxy tab 10.1 in a few stores, in everyone the interface was seriously slower than any of the competitors (with the same hardware). But I figured that this was because of people installing and abusing demo devices. Then I was to help a friend with their brand new tab 10.1, I even witnessed the unpacking and out of the box and it was just as horrid as in all the stores. The brand new top of the line $500 tablet behaved as a bloated, cheap, first generation device. And it hasn't gotten better with time. Samsung completely ruined the Galaxy S. Compare it to the Nexus S, pretty much the same hardware and the Galaxy S was by comparison barely usable unless you installed a custom rom on it. At which point it suddenly became a great phone. The touchwiz calendar and messaging applications (in galaxy SIII) looks like they have been designed by a 10-year old starting to learn photoshop (seriously, I just can't believe my eyes everytime i use a Samsung android phone). The UI isn't even remotely consistent with... anything. Everything they tweaked and touched has been for the worse. Yes they have their own features, mostly features that are fun the first five minutes (if you are a ten year old) but at best doesn't annoy you after the first week.

programminggeek 14y ago

The platform lock-in has never been about the OS, it's always been about the apps. Why do you buy a Nintendo system? Because of the OS? No, because of Mario. Why do you buy Windows? Because of the OS? No, because of Office or some PC game or maybe Visual Studio. Samsung can't rid itself of Android until it has a way to run android apps on Tizen or possibly just to pay devs millions of dollars to port their apps.

alanctgardner2 14y ago
It is right in the article that android apps run on Tizen.
- anonymous 14y ago
  I see. We're witnessing OS/2 mobile edition.

corresation 14y ago

Samsung's future is to always try to minimize dependencies and to maximize options. Replace "Samsung" with any company at any time and you have simple good corporate governance. This is not insightful, and there seems to be a new harvest of "the Balkanization of Android begins!" articles, despite there being absolutely nothing new in that respect for years. For those not aware, Samsung has always pre-loaded their own app store, their own messaging, their own chatting, etc, to negligible results. Further Samsung has always "de-emphasised" Android, as like others they want to commoditize their compliments, and it makes no sense to talk up the features that most of their competitors have as well. And for what it's worth, Android itself is the least dependency Samsung has on Google. The Play store, gmail, maps, Google Now, and so on -- these are all non-Android specific information services that most people can't go without, and most users would simply reject any device that doesn't have it.

invdevm 14y ago

Contrary to what most people might say here, Tizen as well as Firefox OS will lead the future generation of mobile devices. Just watch and listen.

mmahemoff 14y ago

Yes, it's clear this is where Samsung's going. Neither Google nor Samsung mention Android much these days. BUT Samsung will have to lift its developer relations game 10x if they want people writing apps when it starts to come out. As for a compatibility layer, that's a lot easier to say than do, so native apps will still be critical. Look at https://www.tizen.org/ https://www.tizen.org/ Tizen 2.0 SDK is out? Where's 1.0? Tizen isn't out yet. Why are you talking about SDKs on the hero banner anyway? What's Tizen? Why should I care? Developer docs are out of the '90s: https://developer.tizen.org/documentation/dev-guide?redirect=https%3A//developer.tizen.org/help/topic/org.tizen.gettingstarted/html/cover_page.htm https://developer.tizen.org/documentation/dev-guide?redirect... iFrames? End of the day, developers will flock to where the users are. But a new platform needs to win developers to bring the users on, even with Samsung's distribution channels. I really want to see some solid competition to Android. I can only hope all this is early beta stuff because they'll need to speak developers' language if they want people writing apps. As for the emphasis on HTML5, the hobbyist HTML5 niche is well-occupied by Firefox OS. And BB, Windows, and Ubuntu are also pushing HTML5.

sverige 14y ago

I am an early adopter when it makes sense. Smartphones have never made sense to me as a replacement for my desktop machine. I only recently switched to a smartphone because my trusty Nokia finally died. It made phone calls very well, by the way, and worked OK for texting and keeping a calendar, which are the three things that I mostly use the "smartphone" for. So, I recognize that I'm not like most here, but maybe that gives me "the Emperor has no clothes" view of all this. I have to say that I'm not at all impressed with Android or Google Play. First, the UI isn't all that great. The gestures are not all intuitive, and sometimes are the opposite. (For example, why does holding my finger still on a zoomed page mean "zoom back out" when there's another gesture that I understand that will do the same thing?) Second, 4G isn't available a lot of places I go, and I live in one of the 20 biggest cities in the U.S. Surfing the web on a Samsung phone feels a lot like surfing the web using Windows 98 over a 56k phone line 15 years ago. Third, more than half the time when I download apps from Google Play, the download fails and I have to retry. Along the same lines, Google wants to update shit I don't use and never will use (Gmail, Youtube, I don't know what all - 9 apps recently) - which brings me back to the slowness and unreliability of downloading generally. And I now have to dive into the details of how to unlock the thing so I can remove the apps I don't want and don't use, taking the risk of bricking the handset. I don't want to know this stuff. I have enough stuff I have to know. Fourth or fifth or wherever I am, the app store is messy and the apps want permissions I can see no good reason to give them. (For instance, why would a calculator app need access to my f'ing phonebook?) I welcome any and all competition to the way things are now. The smartphone world right now feels a lot like AOL in the late '90s. "Oh, no one's going to leave Google or iOS when they have all these cool apps they paid money for!" That's bull and the handset manufacturers and phone companies and OS / app store owners know it, which is why they made unlocking phones illegal. As soon as someone figures out how to make it reliably easy to unlock phones and put another OS on it that still works with your phone company's system, the handset becomes a commodity. (Too bad the BSD folks aren't too interested. The entire phone network was built on UNIX (TM). Should be a relatively simple thing to make it work.) And as soon as someone makes an app store accessible to anyone regardless of phone OS, people will go there to get apps for their OS. The walled garden play has been tried before and inevitably fails in the end because people want control of their devices. This is one of the communities that should be making it happen, but what I hear mostly is "Oh, it can't be done! You don't know how hard it is!" There are a lot of us waiting for someone to break the oligarchies that have sprung up to take control of this market. Please do it. You might even get rich in the process.

gcb0 14y ago

The day Google gets HP to launch a nexus phone, all other manufacturers will have no change in Android high end market. Since the nexus one ALL nexus devices are buggy and crippled.

ttflee 14y ago
Up-voted. For my now-stolen and ever-crippled Nexus-One.
gcb0 14y ago
*chance

Marazan 14y ago

Wasn't it last year that Samsung was replacing Android with Bada?

mtgx 14y ago

I'm sure Samsung wishes that, but you haven't even seen Tizen as a consumer product and you've already decided a winner? That seems like a big overreach. We've seen mobile operating systems that actually looked or worked better than Android or even iOS before, and yet they still failed miserably.

jusben1369 14y ago

There's a risk that the assumption is Google cares a lot about Android. I think Google just cares about there not being closed platforms that threaten their ability to drive search/advertising revenue. If Samsung drives Tizen and happily supports Google's products I'm not sure either cares.

gonzo 14y ago
and with Rubin out, the de-emphasis on Android has begun. Google is likely trying to move back to a position of neutrality. It will put apps for its services on any phone / platform that 'matters'.

laureny 14y ago

The title should be rephrased "Samsung wants its future to be Tizen, not Android". I doubt they will succeed, though.

15charusername 14y ago

Don't forget Samsung produce more than just phones, even if Tizen doesn't take off for phones, Samsung do a lot of other embedded Linux stuff. As for Tizen's success on phones, apart from lower end devices (where you probably don't want many custom apps just a solid base, symbian style), I see the appeal of all you're devices (TV, Fridge, Car, etc) running a consistent UI with plenty of magic and auto-configuration running behind the scenes and I'm not seeing many low end devices with Android yet.

Nursie 14y ago

I'll buy a high-end Samsung Tizen device. Given my record though, that'll be the kiss of death for the platform.

jjsz 14y ago

I expect Cyanogenmod and it's variants especially Paranoid Android to gain traction with HTC and Sony phones. Tizen is the WebOS of 2013, nobody wants a Tizen.

Apocryphon 14y ago
Samsung seems to be actually making hardware for Tizen, though, unlike HP.