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Samsung Focusing On Phone Software
itwbennett writes "With the much-acclaimed Galaxy SIII in its pocket, don't think that Samsung is looking at Amazon's success with the Kindle and Apple's success with its iOS devices and saying to themselves, 'No, we'd rather not have that kind of diverse revenue, we'll stick to razor-thin hardware margins,' writes blogger Kevin Purdy. And that's not the only reason that Samsung might decide the time is right to maintain its own OS, or at least an Android fork: There's also the looming spectre of Google-Motorola."
Samsung already has their own OS, bada, and it's crap.
Forking Meego would be cool.
Exec 1: Congratulations! Between you and Apple, you have utter dominance in the mobile market! You're also more profitable than every other Android manufacturer in the world!
Exec 2: We are? Quick, stop what we're doing! Change everything! It's the only way we'll continue this success!
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Now I can honestly say that I like Samsung's hardware a lot. I have a HDTV from them and I own a Nexus S. The build quality's always solid, the designs are nice and the phone screens are lavish.
However, Samsung's never seemed to me to be even remotely competent with software. TouchWiz has been described as anything from mediocre to disastrous, especially now that Android's default UI (with ICS) is fairly sleek. Unless they have plans to entirely scrap that and hire a better software team, I don't see how they can expect to actually fork Android. They'd either lose on all the Google-provided updates or have to have an extensive integration process every time a new version comes out. This might work with revisions, but large changes (like say, the jump from Gingerbread/Honeycomb to ICS) would require tremendous amounts of work for little benefit, in the end. Not following the lead set by Google would mean trailing in API implementation, having to maintain their own development kits and tools, and probably fracturing the environment with them sticking out like a sore thumb. Android app devs already have enough of a headache supporting three concurrent OS versions.
They're better off taking advantage of Google's platform. I doubt they'll change it much with the Motorola acquisition, which was in large part a land grab in the patent war. At worst, Samsung will lose their privileged Nexus maker status, which while important in terms of image doesn't translate into that many sales.
There's nothing MeeGo about Tizen. Some existing projects from Intel might make their way in, but nothing of MeeGo proper is present. As it stands, Tizen is just SLP made public with investment from Intel and more public than LiMo (albeit without any sort of community input that I can see.)
Other than that, the current Tizen push to have no native software at all, focusing entirely on HTML5 software (which, in the face of Android and iOS support for native development is suicide.) As someone who attended the Tizen summit in San Francisco back in May, this has greatly discouraged me and sharply tempered my interest in the platform. I'll keep my ears open and fiddle with my reference unit, but it looks like I'm stuck with my N900 for yet more time until something drops that can actually replace it (hopefully giving me the option of root that I want.)
> Unless they hire a bunch of the top guys from XDA, their software will continue to be absolute shyte no one wants on their phone :(
You mean, like the guy behind Cyanogen? He's been a Samsung employee for about a year now. It's not a coincidence that Samsung has suddenly become one of the first-ported platforms for new versions of Cyanogen. Hiring him was a brilliant move for Samsung, because it allowed them to outsource the long-term development of their phone operating system for EOL'ed phones to an army of highly-skilled unpaid volunteers. Since he's an official Samsung employee, they can even let him have access to sourcecode, SDKs, and datasheets that companies like Qualcomm won't allow them to release to the general public. Thus, when a new version of Android gets released, he can personally churn out a new kerneland kernel modules for everything Samsung has soucecode access to within a matter of days He doesn't have time to indiscriminately REWRITE much beyond a few carefully-chosen phone models, but for any task that mainly comes down to dropping in the new kernel source and running make, Samsung phones are literally weeks to months ahead of HTC phones now.
That said, it's a good thing Samsung doesn't lock bootloaders and has Cyanogen's founder working for them, because their own in-house operating system development efforts have historically sucked donkey dick. Sprint's history of Samsung phones is littered with the corpses of unloved phones released with operating systems that were already considered old the PREVIOUS YEAR. The SPH-i300 shipped with PalmOS 3.5... when all the new apps at Palmgear needed 4. The SPH-i500 shipped with glorious 4.1, when all the new apps at Palmgear needed 5. Every phone had the potential to be great, but ended up getting ruined by arriving a year late and a few excessively value-engineered dollars short of tolerability.