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Could Tizen Be the Next Android?
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.
Samsungs extensions on Android are bad enough - if they had an entire OS they controlled? Stuff that!
If Tizen development speeds up a bit and SAMSUNG really start to manufacture more Tizen devices than Android. Then Samsung will loose its no.1 position ( Just like NOKIA).
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.
Let's be clear that Tizen is actually the child of Nokia's and Intel's Linux-based OS that was known as Meego, which owed much of its existence to Nokia's Maemo Linux platform and Intel's Moblin. That's a lot of history, and Samsung has added more and more. Half-baked? What a bizarre term.
I deny that I have not avoided attaining the opposite of that which I do not want.
most likely the next Meego
(Or if its more lucky the next Firefox OS or Ubuntu Phone)
No Apps => Noone buys it
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.
The Galaxy Note PDAs are what I want out of a phone. I've bought into the Android ecosystem, to change that (i.e. get rid of Play Store and the content from that) would leave me no where to go. No other manufacturer currently makes PDAs.
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
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?
(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.
Hipster shit is just too mainstream for you?
If they want to have a chance, they must not have just bundled with a few new phones. It should have good enough ports for other samsung devices (even done officially by samsung) and open enough devices from other major manufacturers. They need to build a critical mass of actual users and a community behind it. And need to be very open. If they want (or must do, if done by another company) may keep some key part (i.e. optional android compatibility app/libraries) as what they sell or license of it and is not fully open source, but the rest should be.
Meego/Maemo failed mostly because it was available mostly on one particular device from one particular manufacturer. They could learn the lesson this time.
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.
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.
Needs fat trimming. If Samsung could pull off Tizen as Android alternative, I'd clap my hands. Competition on dominated market is always good. Even if market consists of open source projects. God damn! This sounds so cool! Open Source project competition! :)
Will now every second article on slashdot be about Samsung ?
it looks terrible, doesn't have apps, compatibility (fixable), other company support, dev loving. I get that some beancounter is probably saying "hey, we pay Google 5 bucks per phone, if we didn't have to pay that, we'd make more profit", but breaking everything isn't the solution. And how they ignore their users for years over touchwiz, I'm not too trusting that Tizen will give users what they want. It /can/ be fixed a bit, by making a Cyanogenmod like version of it, release the base code somewhere, like ASOP for Android, and it would get some love from the dev community I'm sure. But will/can samsung set it free? From past experience they want everything kept very close.
Waiting for an amusing sig.
Tizen could replace Android within Samsung products.
It needs to be better from both the users' perspective and from Samsung's.
In my opinion that should be a "native code" system, not a Javascript one.
Native code needs fewer computing resources and thus less energy.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
This might be possible if Android were frozen in time, so Tizen could catch up. Unfortunately for Samsung, while they're developing something like Google Now, Google will be developing the next generation. It will be very hard to catch up while Android continues to move forward.
On the other hand, Samsung has huge market share. Of there is anything keeping people on Samsung, some hardware trick or something that only Samsung can offer, they might get enough Tizen users not because people want Tizen but because they want Samsung.
Hardware companies don't want to pay Google for Google Play services, so I'm watching this trend closely - if one or two big hardware companies got behind Tizen, FireFoxOS, WebOS, or one of the others, they could make a good Android competitor. Right now there's too much fragmentation and not enough momentum behind any one OS.
Apart from Apple zealots people don't care what OS runs their smartphones so long as it looks nice - which is where Windows phone falls off a cliff.
Sailfish OS?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailfish_OS/
All the arguments made for Tizen were made a few years back for Bada, another Samsung "for entry level phones" OS. It worked on a technical level. At one point it was selling reasonably well in some European markets. I have a Bada phone I bought for development. If you're in the US and never saw Bada, it's because it never made it to the US, and now it's history. Really not sure why Tizen is going to fare differently.
Virtually serving coffee
I wonder if this could be a future foundation for a non-apple mobile ecosystem that has an emphasis on native (i.e. non-VM) apps. Samsung is also a collaborator with Mozilla on the Rust programming language and Servo brower engine. Rewritting the entire mobile ecosystem in a safer, faster language on a platform they have more influence over may be their long game. Our entire mobile ecosystem was written during a phase of rapid expansion where releasing first and going viral took top priority. IMHO everything ever written for a smartphone is more or less a prototype, and any ideas worth keeping will probably be reimplemented over the course of the next decade or so.
we will know if it makes the big time when Microsoft decides its worth suing for "unspecified patent infringements"
Having jumped ship from the iPhone to Android once Android matured and re-purchased all my apps ranging from $.99 to $89.00, I have no desire to switch platforms again, even if many or even "most" Android apps run on Tizen via ACL.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
It makes sense to me That they would create a new OS. Have you ever read their Privacy Policy?
Common http://www.samsung.com/us/comm.... I have a SamSung_HDTV_32F6300AFXZA It's a Smart TV and lots of bells and whistles as a TV or media player, but I only use it as a computer monitor due to the Privacy Policy.
Which is different than the common one, and the third one you have to agree to while setting up a HDTV.
I do take the time to read privacy policies and ToS's, of all of them SamSung's shows them as being one hell of a data collecton agency; I had thought Rovio.com (Angry Birds) was bad, it's mild in comparison. I also have a Samsung phone and knew of there policies up front, there are two play stores Google and Samsung's, I won't install anything from Samsungs. The phone is loaded with clouds and social sites, which they any collect data you post, replies, and stored items; a HDTV every keystroke or remote key pressed is recorded and kept stored, there is also the ability to add a web cam for Gestures. You know so when you yell at the kids waving your arms around the HDTV goes spastic, and Xbox was shouted out of doing the same thing.
The policies if you really read them come into full effect when you sign into Samsung.com which one has to do for support like drivers and anything else needed to "add to your (item here)'s experience". Kies for a Samsung Phone that is the utility to back up, and transfer items with; while every other company has it readily available, you have to sign in to for.
While Kies isn't really required let alone needed, most don't know that.
One line states that Samsung and it's affiliates can access your equipment and collect whatever they want, and at any time;
one can opt out of one collection site but you won't get AD's that relate to you (I laughed).
The Privacy Policy I read long before the phone or TV states if you have legal issues with Samsung, they claim jurisdiction in some province in South Korea, which you have previously agreed to.
Samsung is much like Google in that they collect everything, yet you use them.
The last Android, without the apps and vendor ecosystem. Or the last Blackberry, without the successful legacy... Windows Mobile, without the name. Firefox OS, without the mindshare for a successful browser. We can really invent many irrelevant comparisons and they don't stop being stupid.
The big question is: Can they attract developers? If not, they'll need to be able to run Android apps natively. Once you are doing that, why not just run Android, an OS where somebody else bears most of the development cost?
I can see Samsung being more successful at this than Amazon was, but Samsung also doesn't have the motivations Amazon had/has for doing so.
Android has matured and leads in apps. And it's freely available for a wide range of devices already. I don't see anybody coming close to the package Google can offer, tie-in services included. Apple sells hardware - their services are a loss. MS sells business software, subscriptions to MS Office, Consoles and now tablets. AFAICT they are behind in comodity computing now.
Google makes money selling *you*. They can give away all their stuff for free, including their services. As soon as one vendor has to pay extra to adapt Tizen, there will be a strong incentive to look into Android again. Or Chrome OS as the case may be. All Google needs to do is perhaps offer a few cheap-and-easy co-branding options for their OS.
Google wants to bring the second half of humanity online, along with any hardware vendor that cares to emphasise the bottom line.
I think they have a very good chance of succeeding.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I regard Android as an abomination, basically engineered to geo-locate us, sell us stuff, isolate us from the web, 'give' us tons of mutually incompatible insecure 'apps' all in an unnecessary thick 'sauce' of Java, the COBOL of the 1990s. See also, this rant: http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/... and this: http://blog.codinghorror.com/a.... Of course, it's Google too, though, in principle, open-source, another huge reason to avoid.
So I'm waiting for Linux phones, essentially I probably trust Canonical more than I trust Google. That may make me a fool, we'll see...
On y va, qui mal y pense!
That isn't automatically a massive issue. Apple came into the smartphone market (shock horror for some that they didn't actually create it) after MS and some others. Google themselves came into the market after Apple. Apple continues to sell devices even though they were considerably behind Google on some functionality (and I'm sure the reverse is true).
If Samsung can ensure that Android apps run perfectly well on Tizen, including Google apps like maps etc, then they're 80%+ to offering a mobile OS I'd move to if the handset was one I wanted.
Maybe Tizen will gain success, but only if the user-interface is done by a entirely new team. And I will appreciated that! But everyone which has had used software written by Samsung doesn't like it, for my case it is a television. Instead of entering the new number on the UI and calling insert() on a std::vector() /* don't know there internal language*/ to move a program to a new channel, the force you to push the up/down buttons for serveral minutes. To bad, in the 21st century we are facing more than 1000 "imaginary" programs and channels. In my case I just want move one single program from channel 889 to 4, std::vector.insert(4, ...) /*done*/.
Android? I don't like it, it is Android/Linux and not GNU/Linux. Just a bastarized version of Linux (Stallman was right about GPLv3). So you can choose between a lot of crap of Google which tracks you (and why is the regular mail client so awful?) or a lot of patching and customizing by vendors (HTC), which means actually no updates after some months.
Solution: Jolla (former Nokia), true GNU/Linux on ARM with Qt5 and Wayland. Thanks!
If Samsung can ensure that Android apps run perfectly well on Tizen, including Google apps like maps etc, then they're 80%+ to offering a mobile OS I'd move to if the handset was one I wanted.
The problem is they can't. Look at Blackberry in this department. Blackberry probably has the most mature Android stack running over BB10 / QNX but it's no damned good for apps that want to run background services, or support in-app payments, or use the Google services which the impl doesn't support. Then you're talking about forking the code to produce a BB compatible version stripped of that stuff or rebuilt with a 3rd party library. And Blackberry has another issue - Android apps, run over some Frankandroid layer which almost certainly impacts on launch times, performance and memory footprint.
I doubt the experience by Samsung would be much different. And doubtless Samsung would want to tie apps to their own store. Just the hassle of releasing an app twice, potentially in two different build flavours is enough to put devs off doing it at all. Look how bereft the Amazon store is compared to Google's. It costs time and money to support two builds through two stores of basically the same app. Doing so adds no benefit to the user or the developer. It's just a hoop they're supposed to jump through because yet another behemoth wants all the pie to themselves.
Android compatibility can be a double-edged sword. Without it, they might not have the apps to attract users and without the users, they won't attract the developers to make apps. They fall into the chicken-egg problem that Blackberry has found itself in. Even if the underlying OS is vastly superior, customers won't flock to it without the apps.
On the other hand, if all Android apps work on Tizen, then customers might ask why they should buy a Tizen device instead of a "real Android" device.
Switching off of Android to their own OS is a very risky venture. They might supplant Android, but more likely it will blow up in their face and other Android manufacturers will gain ground/pass them by.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Betteridge's Law of Headlines again.
appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars
Really hope not, as the last thing the world needs is another locked up portable media player with a mobile network connection.
I had high hopes for Around 3.x/4.0, but since then Google has bent over backwards to placate big media while trying to pass the changes off as security improvements.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
All Google services are blocked in China, so there are hundreds of millions of Android phones with no access to the play store. At the same time, most mobile phone manufacturers are designing their phones for the Chinese market and following Chinese trends. Tizen could do very well there. The communists think they are helping their own domestic tech companies, but they are really just helping Samsung and other non-googles.
Yep! And if you title your comment Betteridge's Law of Headlines you can get marked +5 insightful while contributing the same amount (nothing) to the conversation. Karma whoring is a beautiful thing.
ha h aha hah
ah ahaa ha...
no
wow slashdot too much repeating really? go fuck yourself
Is Tizen running X-windows?
That is one thing I like about my N900: I can pretty easily compile old x-windows programs, and I can ssh to a remote machine and pop up a remote program. Or I can just copy my python-gtk scripts to my phone and they just work.
My experience with all tablets and phones by Samsung (and other devices too) has been most underwhelming, especially with regards to support. Yep! You can count with your device being supported for about 3 months. You will NEVER get any software updates besides that. Still on android 4.2 for a ~1 year old Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0. No intentions of going above that. Sure... let me think about my next Samsung purchase will be... NEVER!
I once saw a full grown man in tears while he was trying to write a simple Tizen app.
I attended a Hackthon once where a team was trying to write a Tizen app, and at the end of the Hackathon none of them were speaking to each other.
Seriously, it's like pulling teeth. I've been an Android/IOS/Blackberry developer for more years than I care to admit, and I'd rather carve "Hello World!" into my own flesh than write it in Tizen.
If Samsung wants to muscle Apple and Google on app/software sales, don't they have the might to create an independent app store for their phones? I don't believe there is anything that would prevent it as Amazon sells Android apps independent of Google's app store. That would be much less risky and complex than trying to introduce yet another smartphone OS into what is already available.
No one has really managed to provide competition to the iTunes ecosystem (I consider the iOS App Store as part of this ecosystem) or Google's Play ecosystem.
Samsung has tried multiple times to begin establishing their own ecosystem, and those attempts have consistently failed. In many cases (myself included), those attempts drove people away from Samsung's products. (The most annoying thing I remember about Touchwizz was the constant bombardment of "register for Samsung blah" shit - you couldn't disable the pestering without either giving in or rooting the device and nuking Samsung's bloat. With ICS on the GS2, they broke things to the point where various parts of Android, even the fucking launcher, broke if you removed any of the bloat.)
Really the only entity I know of who has any chance at this point of establishing themselves as a third player in the mobile market is Amazon - they have a pretty decent ecosystem. In fact they've done reasonably well in set-top-box style and tablet-style hardware, and while the original Fire Phone was a catastrophic failure, Amazon is one of the few organizations with the ability to recover from something like that.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Tizen is Enlightentment (yeah the Rasterman version - well at least the interface): Google "Tizen Enlightenment" and see what pops up. Rasterman was heading this way for ages and said this was the future of linux.
Yes it is.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
I've got an N5 now, but to say Apple was behind Google in the early days of android is.....silly. I had an iPhone 2g and a Tmobile G1. The iPhone blew android out of the fucking water at the time.
I've a fair bit of experience here but: do you know how the average consumer buys a phone? By average I mean of the millions that make an iphone or whatever successful? They walk in to a store, all hurr-durr, ask "what's good?" and get lead to either an iPhone, or a Galaxy whatever, depending on which store they walked into, and how many northface jackets they're wearing that day, because that's what makes money for the sale. The consumer doesn't see past the brand and barely registers the device runs android vs iOS or fuckall 3.0, they just go "ooo, Galaxy, my friend loves hers!" and plow down 800 fucking dollars for a facebook and angry birds device.
If I was running their phone OS dept, and I received an order to take ownership of the app market, I would just focus on that.
Why invent a new platform when all you need is your own store. Look to the Amazon fire phone.
It's one thing to try to lock customers in to your eco system, it's another thing entirely to get developers to port their stuff to a new platform.
Android is open source, more importantly, it's the top mobile platform what's the problem? If there are things in there that's not to your liking, fork, but always maintain that app API compatibility.
"Developers! Developers! Developers!" -Ballmer
If Samsung abandons Android for Tizen, it'll simply be surrendering the Android market to everyone else - Motorola, Sony, HTC, et al.
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?
There is already a fork Android project out there w/ the goals you mentioned: it's called Replicant Not sure what state that project is in.
Not the same thing. 6 years ago, there was a void in the mobile market : iOS is only for iPhones, Symbian is designed for low-specs devices with little scalability and Windows CE/Mobile is a mess.
We needed an open system for modern smartphones and Android came out ahead.
Nowadays, we have no such needs. In fact, in most cases, the only reason for wanting something other than Android is to stay away from Google : a political reason rather than a technical reason. And this can partly be archived by just using AOSP, like some Chinese manufacturers do.
Maybe Samsung will partner with ATI/AMD :-)
I was once on a contract helping to develop automotive Tizen. This was about a year and a half ago. We were never able to build it without error from the officially released Intel sources. Never once. The build was a completely broken mess, with Intel basically saying that no one should really need to build from the source.
Even discounting all the obvious market problems that people mention - like Samsung obviously trying to attract customers while simultaneously competing with them - the whole thing is a listless mess. This is kind of like saying "Is [some obscure, broken, Linux binary distro] going to be then next RedHat, or maybe take over the Windows desktop?"
Um, no. Never ever ever.
If Tizen development speeds up a bit, the OS could become a stand-in for Android
wrong, samsung will make both. they made 52 different smartphone models last year. samsung has enough money to do everything 10x, and they do.
Well if nothing else, Tizen provides Rasterman with a full time job and indirectly benefits the E19 window manager, e.g. making it ready for the Wayland apocalypse. :)
Betteridges Law of Headlines finally proven wrong?
Pepto Bismol will fix that