Samsung's future is Tizen, not Android

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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.

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

"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."<p>You've got to be kidding.<p>Do you remember the demo? www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJ1y7CpIaVA<p>Smooth. :/<p>To be fair, I'm sure they're working on the UI, but UI is something that's <i>hard</i> to get right. It took android what, 4 years to reach a point where it's actually nice to use.<p>...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)?<p>yeah...

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

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..

I can't imagine a worse android experience than what TouchWiz offers. And if you remove the android ecosystem from that they will have <i>nothing</i> an enthusiast or power user would ever want in a Samsung phone.<p>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.

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.<p>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.

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.<p>Look at <a href="https://www.tizen.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.tizen.org/</a><p>Tizen 2.0 SDK is out? Where's 1.0? Tizen isn't out yet.<p>Why are you talking about SDKs on the hero banner anyway? What's Tizen? Why should I care?<p>Developer docs are out of the '90s: <a href="https://developer.tizen.org/documentation/dev-guide?redirect=https%3A//developer.tizen.org/help/topic/org.tizen.gettingstarted/html/cover_page.htm" rel="nofollow">https://developer.tizen.org/documentation/dev-guide?redirect...</a><p>iFrames?<p>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.<p>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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The title should be rephrased "Samsung wants its future to be Tizen, not Android".<p>I doubt they will succeed, though.

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.<p>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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.<p>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?)<p>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.<p>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.<p>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?)<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.

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

I'll buy a high-end Samsung Tizen device.<p>Given my record though, that'll be the kiss of death for the platform.

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.<p>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 <i>always</i> "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.<p>And for what it's worth, Android itself is the <i>least</i> 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.