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Samsung's future is Tizen, not Android

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Re: Samsung's future is Tizen, not Android

#31

Post by MatthewPhillips »

bsaul wrote: post #10

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 correc…

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.

Re: Samsung's future is Tizen, not Android

#32

Post by RyanZAG »

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #28
RyanZAG wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Replying to my own comment... Regarding Touchwizz and Android app compatibility - without the core Google services (maps, play, etc), many popular Android apps will not run. The differences in the underlying platform is also likely to cause many errors and incompatibilities on non-modified Android apps run on Tizen. This means more app crashes and more uncertainty. In any event, full Android app compatibility and And…

Google added a non-fragmentation clause to their OEM agreement[1] which is meant to prevent anyone from forking it in the way that Amazon has. You can fork it, but you can't make official Android phones anymore if you do. Obviously Samsung wants to continue to sell their Galaxy S phones. Tizen is a hail mary pass. [1] http://www.engadget.com/2011/03/31/google-tightening-control...

Far as I can tell, those clauses are specifically related to the Android trademark / Google Apps / etc. Creating a full fork (of the publicly available source) as allowed by the Apache license with different name and no direct relation to Android should be just as good as creating Tizen.

I guess the sticky point here is the closed-source early access releases that Samsung gets. Google must be threatening access to this if any OEM gets on their bad side. Fairly nasty move if so, and Tizen doesn't protect Samsung here. If Tizen takes off, you can expect Google to drop Samsung's access to early release builds in any event as Google will then try to force customers to use Moto/LG/HTC/etc devices.

So I don't think Tizen helps here at all, as Google can drop Samsung's early access rights for any reason they want. They can just as easily decide that Tizen is fragmenting Android.

Re: Samsung's future is Tizen, not Android

#33

Post by Kiro »

tjoff wrote: post #24

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…

I like TouchWiz so not sure what you're talking about.

Re: Samsung's future is Tizen, not Android

#34

Post by alanctgardner2 »

programminggeek wrote: post #26

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.

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

Re: Samsung's future is Tizen, not Android

#35

Post by 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.

Re: Samsung's future is Tizen, not Android

#37

Post by MatthewPhillips »

RyanZAG wrote: post #32
MatthewPhillips wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google added a non-fragmentation clause to their OEM agreement[1] which is meant to prevent anyone from forking it in the way that Amazon has. You can fork it, but you can't make official Android phones anymore if you do. Obviously Samsung wants to continue to sell their Galaxy S phones. Tizen is a hail mary pass. [1] http://www.engadget.com/2011/03/31/google-tightening-control...

Far as I can tell, those clauses are specifically related to the Android trademark / Google Apps / etc. Creating a full fork (of the publicly available source) as allowed by the Apache license with different name and no direct relation to Android should be just as good as creating Tizen. I guess the sticky point here is the closed-source early access releases that Samsung gets. Google must be threatening access to th…

No, the clause applies to Android forks, not just those using the Android name, Acer was forced to cancel a phone using an Android fork going by another name because of it: http://thenextweb.com/asia/2012/09/13/alibaba-claims-google-...

Re: Samsung's future is Tizen, not Android

#38

Post by corresation »

tjoff wrote: post #24

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…

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.

Re: Samsung's future is Tizen, not Android

#39

Post by 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...

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.

Re: Samsung's future is Tizen, not Android

#40

Post by defrndr »

objclxt wrote: post #25
shadowmint wrote: post #11

"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…

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…

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.
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