
Samsung's future is Tizen, not Android - kumarshantanu
http://www.osnews.com/story/26865/Samsung_s_future_is_Tizen_not_Android
======
RyanZAG
While I'm sure Samsung would love to replace Android with Tizen, I doubt they
will actually be able to do it. While Apple and Google make it appear easy to
create an OS that users enjoy using, the reality is that it is incredibly
difficult.

Just look at Windows Phone - I'm fairly sure that Microsoft is more able to
create a technically superior OS to Samsung, and I think the amount of money
Microsoft has poured into Windows Phone advertising shows the amount of
marketing talent that is likely being used. Yet Windows Phone is a dismal
failure even with Nokia's huge manufacturing bulk behind it. The only sensible
conclusion I can come to is that making a desirable mobile OS is far more
difficult than it appears, and that there are numerous 'below the water line'
effects that make a mobile OS popular.

I very much doubt that Samsung is going to be able to transition the bulk of
their Android users to Tizen. I also believe attempting it will be a mistake
with both HTC and Sony having very strong challengers to the S4 this year. Any
deficiency in the S4 to try and swing customers to Tizen will just mean an
erosion of market share as consumers move to HTC/Sony/ZTE etc.

I expect Tizen to get decent traction in China, India and SE Asia in the
lower-price tiers, but I can't see it unseating Android in any shape or form.

~~~
uchi
"Yet Windows Phone is a dismal failure even with Nokia's huge manufacturing
bulk behind it. The only sensible conclusion I can come to is that making a
desirable mobile OS is far more difficult than it appears, and that there are
numerous 'below the water line' effects that make a mobile OS popular."

I don't have any empirical data to back this up, but in my personal opinion a
large reason why Windows Phone just isn't doing so well is because of brand
association with 'Windows' and 'Microsoft'.

Microsoft's general appeal to the public is not one of hip and chic and new,
which is what Windows Phone marketing has generally been about. Microsoft is
associated with corporation and money and monopoly. The appeal of Windows OS
to users is that people just use it and it works and sometimes it does things
they don't understand and they get viruses and they get angry at it and they
have to use Excel and Word. Even if Windows as a product is stellar the old
moniker still lurks and it's very difficult to move away from that. People buy
Windows because it's Windows. Good or bad. Doesn't matter. And Microsoft
clearly has the OS marketshare muscle to force people onto Windows 8 despite
it not being very favorable to many at all. Microsoft is just seen as an
unappealing 'businessy' corporation for the general public. It doesn't at all
attract the young or relatively middle aged chic users that it wants so hard.
Windows is just seen as a business brand in general.

Apple already has a well known established brand and image, and Samsung is
relatively faceless to the western market (and quite respected in the east) so
much so that it can shape its brand image still (Going for the Apple look).
Microsoft is simply just too well known to market Windows Phone as Windows
Phone.

I honestly believe that if they just set up a different Mobile branch with a
new name, rename Windows Phone to something else, and removed some of the
"Windowsy" stickers on the Phone's OS, it would sell very very well. As an
operating system the core apps work very well together and it's honestly
better than Blackberry's and stands as a fair contender with Android in terms
of polish. The only real problem is that it's just called Windows Phone.

That, and Microsoft just loves to drop support for older phones (2+ years
old). That's a big no-no. Fucking over your already small userbase because
you're churning out bigger and more powerful phones to go after the cash prize
of young consumers does not bode well. It shows your greedy cunty side and
will obviously detract already existing customers... which makes developers
not so willing to make apps on your platform, however open and easy and
inviting it may be. You are not Android. You do not offer the upgradability
option like Android.

But unfortunately Microsoft's goal is to unify all of their products under a
few 'key' Windows things. Skype is increasingly becoming more Microsofty and
hotmail was turned into outlook. Neither of those things as brands are exactly
super appealing. Microsoft is trying to centralize everything a la Google with
it's wide plethora of apps and services while simultaneously creating a walled
garden of windows only products like Apple.

When I think of outlook I think of being at work and dealing with business
emails. I hate that. I don't want to tell you what I think about when I think
of Internet Explorer. Associating that with Windows Phone doesn't make me
happy. I don't want to take my internet explorer experience with me on the go.

When I think of Android I think of an open platform and flexible. Google's
default apps are very open and clean and simple. Chrome mobile is just primary
colors and white and sharp with some text. It doesn't fuck around but it
doesn't look businessy either. Same goes for the gmail app. The plethora of
adequate white space between apps and their overall simple and clean design
shapes Google's image as an open and simple company. In general, that's always
been how Google has marketed itself and it's products. Windows is trying to
copy that same design style to some degree in Windows Phone, but it just
doesn't work. That's not the company's history.

Now, going back on topic. Samsung is going to spend a few years actually just
making Tizen work as an OS and polishing it, unless they somehow hijack a lot
of grunt developers overnight or something. iOS has gone through a lot of
polish and testing and Android has taken years to work as well as it is
currently today. Yes yes, TouchWiz _is_ Android to many Samsung users. But
under the hood Android does quite a bit more than what TouchWiz lets you
believe. And there's lots of things that you only learn about once you let
something loose in the wild.

Sleep deprived walltexts. I am sorry HN.

~~~
smacktoward
"Microsoft is associated with corporation and money and monopoly."

This is a good point, but I think it'd be closer to the mark to say that
Microsoft is associated with _work_.

People are often forced to use Microsoft products when they are at work. They
frequently have little say in how these products are selected or configured.
They're told that The Company has made those decisions for them, so they
should just shut up and learn to love them, all hail The Company.

This is not an association that will make people leap joyfully to buy the same
products when they are deciding what to spend their personal money on.

This is part of why I have been baffled at MS's insistence on branding Windows
8 and Windows Phone, both of which they desperately want individual consumers
to buy into, as "Windows" products. Windows is work. Products to be sold to
individuals need to be positioned more like play to be appealing.

~~~
azakai
Spot on. For most people, Microsoft products are what your boss tells you to
use. Psychologically, there is just no appeal in buying them outside of work.

Microsoft was smart not to call XBOX "Windows Console" or such, but probably
silly to call their mobile OS "Windows Phone".

~~~
stock_toaster
I wonder if they had called it "XPhoneOS" and targeted some type of gaming
integration/compatibility with XBOX/XBLA if they would have had better luck.

------
Zigurd
This is unlikely.

Samsung and Intel need to learn how to cooperate on Tizen. There is no agreed
Tizen road map. No unified governance.

HTML5 is an unproven, and some would say disproven, mobile app platform.
Browsers, compilers, SDKs, and frameworks are immature. There are no success
stories despite several tries.

Samsung, and its likely carrier partners, have no ecosystem comparable to
Apple's or Google's. The only 3rd party ecosystem success story is Amazon with
the Android-derived Kindle Fire.

I believe it is possible to compete with Apple and Google, but Tizen is not
close to being able, as it is today. At this point Tizen is well behind
Windows Phone, Blackberry, Sailfish, B2G, and even Ubuntu in being ready to
compete.

Having a decades-long duopoly will be boring in many ways, so I hope somebody
gets their act together. But it's serious business. Hobby projects will go
nowhere.

------
shadowmint
"For most Samsung smartphone owners, TouchWiz is Android, and since Tizen
could easily get a TouchWiz-like user interface, the average consumer wouldn't
notice a thing."

You've got to be kidding.

Do you remember the demo? www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJ1y7CpIaVA

Smooth. :/

To be fair, I'm sure they're working on the UI, but UI is something that's
_hard_ to get right. It took android what, 4 years to reach a point where it's
actually nice to use.

...and you think maybe consumers are just stupid and won't be able to tell the
difference between a smooth responsive and well designed UI and a rubbish new
UI (as all new UIs are, to start with)?

yeah...

~~~
objclxt
I am one of the few people who's had the (mis)fortune of developing for Bada,
one of Tizen's predecessors.

For a while, I was using a Wave 3, which was basically a nicer Galaxy S2
running Bada (I could never quite understand why Samsung went to the trouble
of designing a very nice metal unibody handset and then saddling it with
Bada).

People in the office who weren't developers would on occasion pick up the Wave
and _genuinely believe_ it was running Android. Samsung had ported TouchWiz
over to it, and whilst there were some clearly noticeable differences in terms
of performance _most people didn't care enough_ to pick this up. I think you
give people too much credit.

All I know is that back then Samsung put _a lot_ of effort in making Bada
look, feel, and behave like TouchWiz on Android. I haven't looked at Tizen
recently, but I don't see why they wouldn't do the same here.

~~~
defrndr
True. My brother had a the first Wave and I'll say that, in terms of built
quality, it was one of the Samsung's best phone ever. It was built like a tank
and had a unique look to it. Bada in itself was not bad, if you could ignore
the lack of apps. The OS blatantly copied the best of both iOS and android. A
lot of people really did not care, at that time, whether it was Bada or
android; they just bought it because it looked good.

------
venomsnake
Dear millions of people that have our Galaxy line devices as the center of
your digital lives would you kindly switch to this new os, while we convince
all the devs to support yet another OS and iron all the kinks. It will go
smoothly.

Microsoft are playing the OS switching game for a few years now and this is
working great for them.

While I do think that Tizen may be a future, there are huge investments in
Android already to make it the future. While their support for Tizen makes
some sense as a way to keep google's feet close to the fire and have
alternative in case G start to move the OS in wrong direction, a major push to
replace Android will be stupid.

------
bsaul
On a more technical aspect: does anyone knows whether the HTML5 apis tizen
offer will be fast enough to cover all the needs for "nativ" apps ? I was
building a HTML5 phonegap app very recently on a samsung galaxy Tab 2 and
couldn't help notice how sluggish the overall feeling was, even for extremely
basic UI animations (had to switch to 3D CSS transformations to make sure 3D
hardware was used). If I understood correctly, Tizen will use HTML5 for pretty
much anything. So i'm a bit scared of the performances..

~~~
MatthewPhillips
APIs are neither fast nor slow. I guess your asking if their WebKit port is
going to be fast? Probably not, WebKit on ARM is still not that fast. I don't
know what JS engine they'll use, likely JavaScriptCore but that's not very
fast on ARM either.

~~~
bsaul
i did ask for apis, because i thought that laybe, as javascript is at the core
of their UI, they would hardwire stuff directly to native code to speed things
up. that's just wild guess, because it seems so suicidal to me to have a whole
OS GUI written in html5/js right now.. especially when you know that Samsung
is selling so many cheap smartphones.

------
tjoff
I can't imagine a worse android experience than what TouchWiz offers. And if
you remove the android ecosystem from that they will have _nothing_ an
enthusiast or power user would ever want in a Samsung phone.

Building cheap entry-level phones seemed like the right thing to do, Tizen
won't be polished in the beginning (as no OS is) and people buying high-end
devices today expect that it is. I'm assuming they don't want to associate
Tizen with budget or low quality phones but I really can't see how Tizen will
be anything but a spectacular failure in america and europe at least.

~~~
corresation
_I can't imagine a worse android experience than what TouchWiz offers_

How so? To be fair a lot of the features of TouchWiz ended up being borrowed
and integrated directly into Android (just as there was borrowing from
SenseUI). These competitive forces have helped Android evolve.

~~~
tjoff
Sure TouchWiz has features, it's the implementation and UI that stinks.

I have a friend that always said that "Samsung can't do software" and I
thought that was a bit hyperbolic. Samsung is a huge company and just because
one parts screws up doesn't mean, well, anything really.

But I guess I just had barely used any samsung devices that required software.
I can honestly not mention a single piece of samsung software or device that
wasn't seriously hindered by the software. From TVs that show hideous grey
bars (when the aspect ratio doesn't match) that will blind you in dark scenes
(just because the TV frame is grey (note that you can't even change this in
the menus)) instead of black bars like all other TVs, to well, TouchWiz...

Take the sound notification you got in samsung phones (was this around the
time of galaxy SII? (and not the 90's that you'd expect)) where the phone
would make a sound notification when the battery was charged to 100%. With no
way to turn it off. I dare say the most common use case when charging a phone
is during the night, a lot of people have their phone alongside their bed and
this meant that they would be waken a few hours later.

All samsung devices with software in it has at least a few of these annoyances
that makes it obvious - no one, has ever, used this thing outside of a lab.

But that's just small details.

TouchWiz is horribly slow. No, it really is catastrophically bad. I tested the
Galaxy tab 10.1 in a few stores, in everyone the interface was seriously
slower than any of the competitors (with the same hardware). But I figured
that this was because of people installing and abusing demo devices. Then I
was to help a friend with their brand new tab 10.1, I even witnessed the
unpacking and out of the box and it was just as horrid as in all the stores.
The brand new top of the line $500 tablet behaved as a bloated, cheap, first
generation device. And it hasn't gotten better with time.

Samsung _completely ruined_ the Galaxy S. Compare it to the Nexus S, pretty
much the same hardware and the Galaxy S was by comparison barely usable unless
you installed a custom rom on it. At which point it suddenly became a great
phone.

The touchwiz calendar and messaging applications (in galaxy SIII) looks like
they have been designed by a 10-year old starting to learn photoshop
(seriously, I just can't believe my eyes everytime i use a Samsung android
phone). The UI isn't even remotely consistent with... anything.

Everything they tweaked and touched has been for the worse. Yes they have
their own features, mostly features that are fun the first five minutes (if
you are a ten year old) but at best doesn't annoy you after the first week.

~~~
corresation
I'm not really looking to defend Samsung -- their TVs and blu-ray players have
terrible software (though on the gray bar bit, clearly that was an entirely
intentional choice. Plasmas do that specifically because otherwise you will
very quickly have a center portion of the screen that is dimmer than the outer
portion, so the gray balances the wear. While LCD is supposedly immune to
this, I once had a set that suffered the aspect ratio "burn-in" issue,
retaining the obvious demarcation over weeks of use and multiple restarts),
however having owned the Galaxy S II and now GS III, I have absolutely no
issue with TouchWiz. Further it's notable that Samsung had a hardware
accelerated browser that functioned much better than Android's offering before
Google did.

You're kind of veering to the point of insulting people who might actually see
credibility in TouchWiz (the whole "if you're ten years old" thing), which, I
guess...whatever. But as someone who has quite appreciated Samsung devices I
just don't have the complaints.

~~~
tjoff
I actually forgot that it probably had to do with a plasma tv, that's true,
there is a reason for it.

"You're kind of veering to the point of insulting people"

Not my intention, but I guess it's my way of responding to the gimmicky
features Samsung pushes - instead of focusing on usability. Something that I
think the galaxy S4 promo videos demonstrate quite clearly. It's great that
they try but in the end it ruins the experience (it shouldn't need to, but it
does in my opinion).

If Galaxy S4 was a stock android device I'd buy it. With TouchWiz... I just
can't...

~~~
Nursie
So what is touchwiz?

I've a Note and never really noticed what it is or does. I replaced the
launcher with Apex, just because and... I'm just not sure what touchwiz is at
this point or how it might be making my experience worse?

------
programminggeek
The platform lock-in has never been about the OS, it's always been about the
apps. Why do you buy a Nintendo system? Because of the OS? No, because of
Mario. Why do you buy Windows? Because of the OS? No, because of Office or
some PC game or maybe Visual Studio.

Samsung can't rid itself of Android until it has a way to run android apps on
Tizen or possibly just to pay devs millions of dollars to port their apps.

~~~
alanctgardner2
It is right in the article that android apps run on Tizen.

~~~
anonymous
I see. We're witnessing OS/2 mobile edition.

------
mmahemoff
Yes, it's clear this is where Samsung's going. Neither Google nor Samsung
mention Android much these days. BUT Samsung will have to lift its developer
relations game 10x if they want people writing apps when it starts to come
out. As for a compatibility layer, that's a lot easier to say than do, so
native apps will still be critical.

Look at <https://www.tizen.org/>

Tizen 2.0 SDK is out? Where's 1.0? Tizen isn't out yet.

Why are you talking about SDKs on the hero banner anyway? What's Tizen? Why
should I care?

Developer docs are out of the '90s:
[https://developer.tizen.org/documentation/dev-
guide?redirect...](https://developer.tizen.org/documentation/dev-
guide?redirect=https%3A//developer.tizen.org/help/topic/org.tizen.gettingstarted/html/cover_page.htm)

iFrames?

End of the day, developers will flock to where the users are. But a new
platform needs to win developers to bring the users on, even with Samsung's
distribution channels.

I really want to see some solid competition to Android. I can only hope all
this is early beta stuff because they'll need to speak developers' language if
they want people writing apps. As for the emphasis on HTML5, the hobbyist
HTML5 niche is well-occupied by Firefox OS. And BB, Windows, and Ubuntu are
also pushing HTML5.

------
jusben1369
There's a risk that the assumption is Google cares a lot about Android. I
think Google just cares about there not being closed platforms that threaten
their ability to drive search/advertising revenue. If Samsung drives Tizen and
happily supports Google's products I'm not sure either cares.

~~~
gonzo
and with Rubin out, the de-emphasis on Android has begun.

Google is likely trying to move back to a position of neutrality. It will put
apps for its services on any phone / platform that 'matters'.

------
gcb0
The day Google gets HP to launch a nexus phone, all other manufacturers will
have no change in Android high end market. Since the nexus one ALL nexus
devices are buggy and crippled.

~~~
ttflee
Up-voted. For my now-stolen and ever-crippled Nexus-One.

------
RexRollman
I don't know if Samsung would move to Tizen but I can certainly understand the
desire to completely control both the hardware and software.

------
odiroot
I for one welcome this move. It seems Tizen somewhat follows Maemo's way.
Let's hope Samsung is not going to stuff it with loads of bloatware. I wish as
well the ecosystem is more like Firefox OS's than iOS's in terms of openness
-- I don't know what to think about current Samsung moves regarding Android.

~~~
darklajid
Owning a Samsung 'Smart TV' that, as soon as it is connected to the internet,
forcefully downloads the worst crapware I've seen in my life with no option to
hide or remove that stuff (according to research online and customer service)
I'm convinced that I do not want a Samsung controlled device again and don't
share your high hopes, even if we're talking about totally disconnected
branches of a huge company.

(Incidently I got a S3 before this weekend as a corporate phone. I didn't even
once boot it before flashing ClockworkMod / CyanogenMod)

------
candl
Samsung should have made their Bada smartphones eligible for an upgrade to
Tizen as the OS is supposedly capable of running Bada apps. This would at
least establish a user base. Instead all of Bada adopters got screwed badly. I
don't think anyone is going to fall for the same trap again.

~~~
objclxt
A lot of the Bada models are pretty low specced. They're all using single
cores with low amounts of memory. Tizen may be backwards compatible with Bada
apps, but I doubt the vast majority of Bada handsets out there are capable of
running Tizen without problems.

------
laureny
The title should be rephrased "Samsung wants its future to be Tizen, not
Android".

I doubt they will succeed, though.

------
15charusername
Don't forget Samsung produce more than just phones, even if Tizen doesn't take
off for phones, Samsung do a lot of other embedded Linux stuff.

As for Tizen's success on phones, apart from lower end devices (where you
probably don't want many custom apps just a solid base, symbian style), I see
the appeal of all you're devices (TV, Fridge, Car, etc) running a consistent
UI with plenty of magic and auto-configuration running behind the scenes and
I'm not seeing many low end devices with Android yet.

------
myko
I'm not sure how successful these phones will be if they don't have Google's
permission to provide Google Play, and I can't imagine Google would give them
that.

~~~
quarterto
The Kindle Fire is doing just fine with Amazon Appstore in lieu of Google
Play.

~~~
jonknee
The Kindle Fire is not a phone. Not having Google Maps/Gmail/Google Now/Google
Chat/etc isn't that big of a deal on your reader or tablet, but it's a lot
bigger deal on your phone.

~~~
myko
Also current users of Samsung phones would be pretty upset if they bought a
new one and couldn't download the apps they've already purchased via Google
Play.

------
jjsz
I expect Cyanogenmod and it's variants especially Paranoid Android to gain
traction with HTC and Sony phones. Tizen is the WebOS of 2013, nobody wants a
Tizen.

~~~
Apocryphon
Samsung seems to be actually making hardware for Tizen, though, unlike HP.

------
mtgx
I'm sure Samsung wishes that, but you haven't even seen Tizen as a consumer
product and you've already decided a winner? That seems like a big overreach.
We've seen mobile operating systems that actually looked or worked better than
Android or even iOS before, and yet they still failed miserably.

------
mayankj08
One of the major factor that makes ios and Android so popular is no. of apps
in their respective stores. Even if Samsung comes with their own OS building
such a huge repository of apps takes time. So i don't think so that Samsung
would launch it's OS without comparable no. of apps in Tizen too.

------
sverige
I am an early adopter when it makes sense. Smartphones have never made sense
to me as a replacement for my desktop machine. I only recently switched to a
smartphone because my trusty Nokia finally died. It made phone calls very
well, by the way, and worked OK for texting and keeping a calendar, which are
the three things that I mostly use the "smartphone" for.

So, I recognize that I'm not like most here, but maybe that gives me "the
Emperor has no clothes" view of all this. I have to say that I'm not at all
impressed with Android or Google Play. First, the UI isn't all that great. The
gestures are not all intuitive, and sometimes are the opposite. (For example,
why does holding my finger still on a zoomed page mean "zoom back out" when
there's another gesture that I understand that will do the same thing?)

Second, 4G isn't available a lot of places I go, and I live in one of the 20
biggest cities in the U.S. Surfing the web on a Samsung phone feels a lot like
surfing the web using Windows 98 over a 56k phone line 15 years ago.

Third, more than half the time when I download apps from Google Play, the
download fails and I have to retry. Along the same lines, Google wants to
update shit I don't use and never will use (Gmail, Youtube, I don't know what
all - 9 apps recently) - which brings me back to the slowness and
unreliability of downloading generally. And I now have to dive into the
details of how to unlock the thing so I can remove the apps I don't want and
don't use, taking the risk of bricking the handset. I don't want to know this
stuff. I have enough stuff I have to know.

Fourth or fifth or wherever I am, the app store is messy and the apps want
permissions I can see no good reason to give them. (For instance, why would a
calculator app need access to my f'ing phonebook?)

I welcome any and all competition to the way things are now. The smartphone
world right now feels a lot like AOL in the late '90s. "Oh, no one's going to
leave Google or iOS when they have all these cool apps they paid money for!"
That's bull and the handset manufacturers and phone companies and OS / app
store owners know it, which is why they made unlocking phones illegal.

As soon as someone figures out how to make it reliably easy to unlock phones
and put another OS on it that still works with your phone company's system,
the handset becomes a commodity. (Too bad the BSD folks aren't too interested.
The entire phone network was built on UNIX (TM). Should be a relatively simple
thing to make it work.) And as soon as someone makes an app store accessible
to anyone regardless of phone OS, people will go there to get apps for their
OS. The walled garden play has been tried before and inevitably fails in the
end because people want control of their devices.

This is one of the communities that should be making it happen, but what I
hear mostly is "Oh, it can't be done! You don't know how hard it is!" There
are a lot of us waiting for someone to break the oligarchies that have sprung
up to take control of this market. Please do it. You might even get rich in
the process.

~~~
ansible
_Along the same lines, Google wants to update shit I don't use and never will
use (Gmail, Youtube, I don't know what all -9 apps recently)_

Starting with ICS, you can uninstall the updates for those apps, and then
disable them in the Settings -> Applications menu.

That said, Android works a lot better overall if you use Gmail at least.

 _As soon as someone figures out how to make it reliably easy to unlock phones
and put another OS works with your phone company's system, the handset becomes
a commodity_

Oh how I wish this was possible. Unfortunately, at the hardware level, there
is soooooo much support needed for each processor chip. Even among chips that
share the same processor core (such as a ARM Cortex A9), all the peripherals
and especially the power maagement is different. This prevents the building of
a common hardware code base like we have in the PC world.

------
Marazan
Wasn't it last year that Samsung was replacing Android with Bada?

------
Nursie
I'll buy a high-end Samsung Tizen device.

Given my record though, that'll be the kiss of death for the platform.

------
corresation
Samsung's future is to always try to minimize dependencies and to maximize
options. Replace "Samsung" with any company at any time and you have simple
good corporate governance. This is not insightful, and there seems to be a new
harvest of "the Balkanization of Android begins!" articles, despite there
being absolutely nothing new in that respect for years.

For those not aware, Samsung has always pre-loaded their own app store, their
own messaging, their own chatting, etc, to negligible results. Further Samsung
has _always_ "de-emphasised" Android, as like others they want to commoditize
their compliments, and it makes no sense to talk up the features that most of
their competitors have as well.

And for what it's worth, Android itself is the _least_ dependency Samsung has
on Google. The Play store, gmail, maps, Google Now, and so on -- these are all
non-Android specific information services that most people can't go without,
and most users would simply reject any device that doesn't have it.

