Samsung Woos Developers As It Eyes Tizen Expansion Beyond Smartphones

New submitter Manish Singh writes: Why is Samsung, the South Korean technology conglomerate which has the tentpole position in Android, becoming increasinglu focused on its homegrown operating system Tizen? At its annual developer summit this week, the company announced new SDKs for smartwatches, smart TVs, and smartphones, and also shared its future roadmap.

Comments

Tizen? Don't make me laugh

[StevenMaurer]

I worked on a contract in which an auto manufacturer was trying to use that abomination, and we could never even get the source to compile. Literally a year later, it came out that Samsung was trying to use both git/gerrit and Perforce as version control for it, mixed between different teams:

Time went by and Bad Things started to appear. Git/gerrit was official in some teams, but Perforce was official in other teams (even working on the same component). Some patches went there, some there. The management finally decided Perforce code should be used as THE source for building OS images. Again, they only forgot to tell everyone else to stop using git

Both repositories diverged to the point of being almost incompatible. Issues in Perforce code were given to git teams, which resulted in a litany of WTFs. After all, there’s not many things more fun than being tasked with fixing a bug in code that you physically don’t have. ASAP. Meetings took place, arrangements were made to rectify the situation. Months later, the situation is still the same.

One implication was code review process. With gerrit in place, that was a non-issue. But the Korean teams didn’t (and still don’t) understand the notion of code review and pushed everything directly to the repo. The quality of some patches was so bad that enforcing code review became top priority for non-Korean teams. Finally, a solution was developed – MS Word based code review. Each changeset needs to be attached to a bug in the tracker. Each bug can have a Word document attached with a request for code review. That document is a three pages long form with information so useless, nobody even wants to read it. At the end there’s a place for copy-pasting a diff for each file changed, with the explanation why. Reviewers are supposed to fill a Word form with details about which line they comment on and what their issue with it is.

Submitting a patch, clicking through the awful issue tracker and filling the form takes literal hours. All this because using git with gerrit was too tough. Fortunately, the review form has fields listing times taken by various steps in fixing a bug. Maybe someday someone will read how long pushing the code actually takes.

No, they won’t.

Luckily, that contract was short term. But because I put it on my resume, I got a few head-hunters inquiring about it. Quickly though, interest waned. Not hard to see why...

Re:Android is where the money is

[Jack Griffin]

I bought into the Samsung hype, fancy TV, best of breed mobile devices, I even have a Samsung Microwave. But as an owner I find their service to be among the worst I've ever come across. When my phone stopped working, they said it was water damaged and not covered by warranty. After weeks of phone calls and letter writing I had to take them to court to get a replacement. Ironically at about the same time, my daughter's iPod stopped working in a similar manner. 2 minutes in the Apple store they replaced it on the spot despite it having a cracked screen. I still won't own any Apple devices due to their overly restrictive interface, but they know how to treat their customers

Samsung recently pushed out an updated firmware for their LED TVs which breaks Plex, the most popular app for Samsung TVs. This issue is all over the Internet and Samsung's response is deafening silence. They won't roll back or even offer an alternate FW version, customers are left on their own and treated like shit.
I'll never buy another Samsung product no matter how good the specs are. Backup service is equally important and these guys are the worst at it.

Re:Problem with Samsung being Android's "Tentpole"

[Stormwatch]

I have a Galaxy Note II, and I must agree. The hardware is solid (although the design is rather dull), but this thing would be nearly unusable if I couldn't install a different launcher. TouchWiz is a huge step backwards if you're used to "stock" Android.

How the fuck...

[AmazingRuss]

...do projects even GET to this point? Who is running the place? Curious George?