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Samsung's Position On Tizen May Hurt Developer Recruitment
CowboyRobot sends in an article about how Samsung's constantly shifting plans for its smartwatches are making it hard for developers to commit to building apps. Quoting:
"Samsung's first smartwatch, released in October last year, ran a modified version of Google's Android platform. The device had access to about 80 apps at launch, all of which were managed by a central smartphone app. Samsung offered developers an SDK for the Galaxy Gear so they could create more apps. Developers obliged. Then Samsung changed direction. Samsung announced a new series of smartwatches in February: the Gear 2, Gear 2 Neo, and Gear Fit. Unlike the first device, these three run Samsung’s Tizen platform. ... This week, Samsung made things even more interesting. Speaking to Reuters, Yoon Han-kil, senior vice president of Samsung’s product strategy team, said the company is working on a watch that will use Google’s Android Wear platform. In other words, Samsung will bring three different watches to market with three different operating systems in under a year."
So basically they're just throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks? I suppose that's one way to avoid choosing the wrong platform ...
if your strategy is throw shit at the wall and see what sticks then you need to throw a variety of shit at the wall
This really rustles my jimmies.
I don't wear a wristwatch you insensitive clods
(I do have one around my neck on a lanyard along with a flashlight when I am at work)
They tried regular Android, it didn't work. So they used their own platform. Now Google had an Android platform specifically for these types of devices, so they are going back to Android.
In the case of Android Wear, if a developer targets that platform, they won't be limited to *just* Samsung.
This doesn't surprise me. While Android Wear likely won't compete much with the "mostly dumb" smartwatches that consist of only a display and UI for the phone they're tethered to (Sony Smartwatch, Pebble - both of these are able to achieve hardware cost reductions and battery life that Android Wear will never be able to match, putting AW consistently in a different price/functionality market segment than SW and Pebble), Android Wear was a DIRECT competitor for Galaxy Gear - both are in the "High standalone functionality" category. At least by hardware design, that is - a watch running Android should be able to operate almost entirely standalone, using a phone only as a data connection in a manner similar to Google Glass. Unfortunately Samsung totally fucked up Gear and while its hardware capabilities should have made it MORE capable of standalone operation than any other smartwatch out there, Gear wound up the LEAST capable of standalone operation instead - being the ONLY smartwatch which required one of a few specific models of phone as opposed to "any Android phone" (Sony) or "any Android phone or iOS" (Pebble)
By virtue of being in direct competition with Gear (e.g. identical market segment) AND the fact that it's superior, Wear is going to *crush* Gear. (Wear won't likely crush Pebble or Sony Smartwatch since they have the capability to play in a much lower-cost market segment than Wear will be able to due to having significantly lower hardware requirements.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
This is what Samsung ALWAYS does. They are constantly pitting internal teams/projects against each other.
I worked for a start-up that did some work for Samsung. Almost every phone we got from them had a different operating system and had an ugly collection of unlicensed development tools to develop applications for that phone. They seem to like the 'try everything' approach. It may come from the fact that a bunch of their customers (the phone companies) would only make a decision to promote a phone when it was near completion with no guarantee that any Samsung phone would be picked. Phones not picked up by a carrier would not sell well enough for them to bother with mass production.
It's most likely that the three different platforms mentioned were developed and evangelized by three different teams at Samsung that never talked to each other. Each team probably thinks their solution is *the* solution.
When I worked at Samsung, divisions were heavily siloed, and often the first time you heard about what they were doing was when you saw it on a news site. Even within the same platform, teams were heavily divided. Our software dev outreach teams didn't even have a way to talk to the hardware design teams.
I don't understand the belly-aching. When I wrote code for Apple II machines, I had to know both BASIC and assembler. PC? Batch scripting, VB, C++, C#, SQL, InstallShield and still a little assembler. Web and mobile? Javascript, Java, Perl, PHP, Ruby, C#, ASP, Objective-C plus a few dozen "platforms", "frameworks" and what-not cobbled together with JSON, XML, CSS and various template and scripting syntaxes.
So, you have to learn three platforms to keep up with a line of devices? Boo hoo. Besides, an "app" should be something you can crap out in a month or two - these generally aren't monolithic platforms like Office - even the context-switching-disabled should be OK.
At least with the Gear 2, the native Tizen API isn't in use. While apps are written in a Samsung SDK, it should in theory make it a lot easier to deploy apps developed for the Gear 2 to Android versions as well.
Long ago IBM split itself in to 7 internal subdivisions that could to a certain extent compete. At the time all of IBM's equipment ran on chips made by IBM for IBM products. The florida area sub-unit which didn't actually make any computers, put one together from intel chips. It was dubbed the PC. The OS was contracted out to some kids from Seattle.
Sony's products division is constantly at war with it's content division, leading to the constant hedging on content protection that defeats their products by using non-standard formats with DRM.
Perhaps Samsung, which is really a humungously diverse set of industries, just has different competing segments within itself. Each has a strategy that is aimed at competing with the other divisions strategy but has to be distinctly different due to the internal politics, just like IBM's PC did.
Its not s strategy to do everything, that's just the result.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Masturbation counter/timer.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Needing to hand-translate a program into a separate language for each platform violates don't repeat yourself.
They can't copy Apples product, so to be "innovative" they will produce lots of crappy variations and hope like hell someone likes they stuff.
I think that Samsung and Google are doing it all wrong.
They are still making smartwatches be "companion devices" to smartphones, yet you still have to write custom code to run on the device.
I think that the best type of smartwatch would be one that would act as a dumb terminal to the phone. Let it act as a second screen to the phone with a few button/touch actions plus a few sensors that feed data in the other direction. That would satisfy the most common use cases where a smartwatch would be useful. The others could be hard-coded not as apps but as system features.
This would be best for the developer, as you would only have to develop one app - not two.
This would be best for the user, as the program code on the "watch" could be simple you would need only a microcontroller that runs at tens of megahertz, and you get long battery life approaching what you are used to get in a watch.
But of course, such a device would be too cheap to make and Samsung would not be able to sell it at a premium...
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
Just put your phone in a ziploc bag when your lovers piss and shit on you. You don't need to live-tweet it (and if you do, get a water proof case).
Can google force Samsung to release products with their android Wear platform ?
Google control the android OS :
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/googles-iron-grip-on-android-controlling-open-source-by-any-means-necessary/
They may say, we won't certify your new android product if you don't use your new platform !
I can see how you bet against the Newton: you were way ahead of your time,
knowing that it would be a "tablet", when in fact was a PDA (Personal Digital Assistant),
term itself coined by John Sculley
I have nearly quit bothering to try to support any 'new' things that come out from food places - anything I *like* will end up getting pulled anyway. I'm still bitter over the scrapping of the McDLT. The McDonald's Chicken Strips? Gone. Wendy's breakfast stuff? Liked them - gone. Wendy's super bar? Gone. I suspect the Taco Bell gorditas will go within 6 months of me developing a regular taste for them. It's a shame, because I want to support innovation, but the larger companies don't seem to be able to commit to things long term any more. Yes, the McDLT was... 5 years? That's about the longest I've ever seen any variation from a menu core last.
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