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Could Tizen Be the Next Android?

Posted by Soulskill on from the yes-no-maybe dept.

MollsEisley writes: Right now, Tizen is still somewhat half-baked, which is why you shouldn't expect to see a high-end Tizen smartphone hit your local carrier for a while yet, but Samsung's priorities could change rapidly. If Tizen development speeds up a bit, the OS could become a stand-in for Android on entry-level and mid-range Samsung phones and eventually take over Samsung's entire smartphone (and tablet) lineup.

9 of 243 comments (clear)

  1. Well if that happens, it'll be bye bye Samsung. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Samsungs extensions on Android are bad enough - if they had an entire OS they controlled? Stuff that!

  2. A guess by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    No, it can not. Android is already entrenched, and in a market where not even microsoft can dislodge it despite reasonable efforts Samsung can definitely forget about doing so.

    1. Re:A guess by TheRaven64 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Symbian, particularly EKA2, was a very well designed system. It was let down by its slow adaptation to changing requirements. The userspace APIs were designed for a world where 4MB of RAM meant a high-end device. You suffered some difficulty programming because it was the only way to make sure things fitted in this little space. When 128MB started to mean a low-end device, this was a problem - the cost wasn't worth paying to be using 10% of the device's RAM instead of 15%. It wasn't helped by the in-fighting at Nokia that resulted in a load of different potential replacements.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  3. It will be their biggest mistake by aibot.slashdot · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It will be just an other obscure mobile OS - But If Samsung actually start to manufacture Tizen devices over Android. They will loose the market just like NOKIA did a few years before.

  4. Android is the next Android by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    What market gap does it fill?

    As I see it, Android's big problem is privacy, we're just waiting for the time when politicians and journos realize that every App on their Android phone is tracking them, their kids, their families, and their personal and private lives.

    When that happens, the public will get a rude wake up call, and so a fork of Android will likely be the next Android. A fork that is privacy focused.

    Tizen at the moment can run Android apps, but then why wouldn't you simply fork Android and ditch the Google/Facebook/Skype/Samsung etc. spyware?

  5. Wat need does it fulfill better by obarthelemy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    (apart from Samsung's need for pressure points vs Google ?)

    Tizen needs a unique selling point. Being "a Mobile OS that works" isn't one, that need has been met years ago, and nobody wants Yet Another Smartphone OS for the sake of it.Maybe there's a need at the extreme low-end, next to Microsoft's Asha line (not a resounding success), and a tad below Android One. Maybe Security could be a selling point (except it doesn't seem to be doing much for Blackberry). Maybe there's a fringe of teach-heads who deem Tizen more linux-y than Android and keep agitating about it for that reason (not a big market).
    As it stands, the most unfulfilled need I see is the carriers' desire to take back control of our phones, and I'd rather that one stay unfulfilled.

    --
    The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
  6. Well... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It's hard to be optimistic about the fate of a competitor starting from behind(and with Samsung, not exactly a bastion of taste, UI/UX expertise, or other software virtues, as the most visible player) and up against Android(which arguably has some seriously fucked design problems, but is actively being worked on and has Google's vast cloud-dominion behind it), iOS(which has zero users who aren't Apple; but usually manages to show the virtues of having a competent dictator), and WP(currently pretty tepid marketshare; but is a testament to the fact that MS can actually bring some talent to bear on a problem if somebody beats the hubris out of them enough times in a row).

    That said, despite my low hopes, it sure would be nice to see it do better. Despite years of development, Android still bears some serious scars of either things that seemed like a good idea at the time(presumably back when supporting extremely resource constrained devices was still a consideration, in the period not long after it was developed as a successor to the OS used in 'sidekick' devices) or which simply didn't pan out(the not-actually-a-JVM-really-we-swear turned out not to be fast enough, so they added native extensions, and ARM turned out to more or less steamroller the competition in the smartphone space at about the same time, so nobody actually cared whether cross-platform worked or not, except Intel, who simply wrote up another shim to handle ARM native components). They say...nice...things about how well the audio system performs, as well.

    It ships on a wide variety of devices that you can actually buy, today; but Android is pretty hard to get enthusiastic about as a pile of stuff dumped on top of Linux. A slightly less dysfunctional pile of stuff wouldn't be revolutionary; but it would be nice.

    1. Re:Well... by mSparks43 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I'm going to talk a little bit of personal experience and opinion.

      What matters in tech is the "ultra high end".
      That is - what is "simply" the BEST device you can get.
      Right now it's the Samsung S5
      few years before that it was the HTC one
      few years before that it was the iPhone.

      Then there is everybody else who follows.
      Android was a success because the "best" devices (tablet and phone) ran it. we then set the stage for the rest of the market to follow.
      Similar story with games consoles and next gen video.
      PS3 was the best device -> Blueray became the market standard.
      And openGL vs DirectX

      personally, while I see it as there is just "no other choice" than android. I, and the rest of the "best in class screw the price" buyers don't like android enough to choose an android device over a better one that does what I need. Not by a long stretch.

      Gives us a simple formular
      You can't set the market standard using substandard devices.

      bring me a 16 core, 4Ghz phone, with a ton of ram and 3 days battery life and whatever OS you put on it will be the new standard.
      As long as Android is the OS on the leading edge devices it will remain the standard, as soon as it isn't it will loose share fast.

  7. Nope by DrXym · · Score: 4, Interesting
    What does Tizen do that Android doesn't? Or Windows Phone for that matter? It's just another software stack running over a kernel. Performance and battery life is likely to be little different.

    The only reason it exists at all is because Samsung sees Google taking 30% off of app sales and services and it wants that 30% for itself. That might be a wonderful motivating factor for Samsung to push this thing. For everyone else... not so much. Consumers will just see a new platform which has doesn't have the apps they want to use. App developers will just see yet another lame duck platform that they must spend inordinate effort to support or ignore completely.

    Unless Samsung money hats devs and hand out free phones like candy, they're not going to get the buy-in to their platform. And even if they do it's no guarantee - Nokia and Blackberry both went down that route trying to buy devs and it didn't pay off.