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Android Cellphones Operating Systems

Samsung Woos Developers As It Eyes Tizen Expansion Beyond Smartphones 80

Posted by timothy from the me-tizen dept.
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.
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Samsung Woos Developers As It Eyes Tizen Expansion Beyond Smartphones More

Samsung Woos Developers As It Eyes Tizen Expansion Beyond Smartphones

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  • They don't want to be dependant on Google for a large part of their revenue.

  • Steve Jobs playbook (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Own critical pieces of technology

  • Android is where the money is (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Android has the lion's share of the market, followed by iOS. Windows Phone is dead, Blackberry is circling the drain, Sailfish is an an also ran. Tizen doesn't stand a chance. Samsung sell phones because of Android. Full stop. Tizen may sell some phones, but there is no real ecosystem. Google and iOS are the big players. Really, there is room for only two large players. Tizen is not going to make it, like Windows Phone.

    • Tizen has a captive audience on Samsung's embedded systems like TV's etc, so it is most likely not going away any time soon. Too bad it is such a dog's breakfast of half ideas. Committees heaped upon committees, all decisions made by powerpoint (on Windows systems...)

      • Re:Android is where the money is (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Jack Griffin ( 3459907 ) on Sunday August 02, 2015 @12:56AM (#50232449)
        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: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward

        I have a laser printer and smart tv from Samsung. Neither of those have received a single firmware update, despite the numerous software bugs they have. In reality all the smart-tv features are completely useless due to bugs and/or general slowness. Since Samsung does not show any kind of care for their products after money has changed hands, I will not buy a single device from them again.

    • This is US centric thinking. In china you can't get to Google play store, so you get software from your phone manufacturer. It's like every vendor runs their own store already. That's a billion person market where Android vs tizen is irrelevant.

  • Tizen? Don't make me laugh (Score:5, Informative)

    by StevenMaurer ( 115071 ) on Saturday August 01, 2015 @11:46PM (#50232283) Homepage

    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 [thedailywtf.com], 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: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      While we're posting links to thedailywtf, let's not forget this [thedailywtf.com] one.

    • How the fuck... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by AmazingRuss ( 555076 ) on Sunday August 02, 2015 @02:47AM (#50232693)

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

    • Beautiful story, made my morning

  • Is Tizen still a thing?

    • No.

      If we look back into the shrouded mists of time, we see that Moblin begat Meego begat Tizen.

      Moblin was Linux with a cool OpenGL interface from Intel on which Intel spent most of their effort ripping out the parts they didn't need.

      Meego was the effort to put those parts back and make something useful on more than just intel hardware.

      Tizen is the attempt to convince you that this zombie project has life lift in it. It doesn't. It's dead. Stick a fork in it.

  • Android is already open source and Google services are free. Why would any user, developer or vendor want another operating system with tiny market share that doesn't offer any compelling technological breakthroughs? FirefoxOS provides device-agnostic thin client computing. Various custom android ROMs emphasize security or customization. But what does Tizen really offer than is not already available on a platform with bigger mindshare? So far, sounds like wishful thinking on part of Samsung rather than a so

    • While android itself may be open source, the Google APIs are not.
      There are some projects to replace them with open source alternatives, but Google keeps adding to/changing them and developers are addicted to the new and shiny.
      See the issues people with the Kindle Fire are dealing with.

      The other big reason for the change is control. Android might be open source, but it's still Google that decides what direction it goes. Samsung want that kind of control over Tizen, or at least take advantage things being d

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by iamacat ( 583406 )

        Agreed, Tizen gives more control to Samsung compared to Android. But how is that going to make my life better as user or developer? Are Samsung APIs any better/faster/more secure than Google APIs? It would, I guess, make sense to have a framework on top of AOSP that lets users choose among many competing service providers just like they choose search engines. But Tizen is not it.

        As a developer, having choice of graphics libraries would only benefit me if Tizen was a dominant platform already. Otherwise, I g

        • This is gonna be a kind of "I agree" comment but here it goes: It also seems to me that there's little benefit for consumers or developers in Tizen. I have no idea how they're planning to advertise it, it'll be fun to see.
          Anyway, I read on sammobile.com that a phone with Tizen had had a decent amount of sales, in India I think, so maybe it has some legs. Clearly, developing Tizen is a move to escape from the huge power Google has on Samsung. Many people wouldn't buy Samsung smartphones if they didn't run A

    • There are 1 billion people in china who cannot access google at all.

      I honestly didn't realize the situation there was so bad until we had a Chinese customer and they couldn't use our forgot password page because the captcha wouldn't even render.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by iamacat ( 583406 )

        And they have plenty of Android phones with alternative services. Why would they want another one with much fewer apps?

  • However, they kept their past roadmap a guarded secret

  • I think the biggest reason is not that they want to move from Android, it's that Samsung pays Microsoft about $4 for every Android phone they sell.With their profits dropping, if they can change to Tizen and keep the same look and feel of Android with TouchWiz they will save big money. There are many sources when a search is performed. Here's one: http://www.theverge.com/2015/2... [theverge.com]
  • "increasinglu".... i hope you guys/gals get this buyout figured out. You really have something here & I hope it doesn't get lost in translation to a new company.

  • Samsung can try to woo developers all it wants, but anyone who has ever dealt with Samsung knows how truly horrendous Samsung support for their flagship products are. I mean, it's almost 2016, the latest Note 10.1 tablet is still a model that was released in 2013, and a recent version of Android for it is nowhere to be found. User forums are always abound with questions about whether Samsung has abandoned their product.

    Samsung can make all the claims it wants, but until it actually demonstrates that it ha

  • Despite the excellence of their hardware, Samsung software is so bad it actually adds negative value to their products. Their unnecessary modifications to Android increase their support and engineering costs and decrease the performance, security, and reliability of their devices. And their corporate culture is so inimical to software engineering that they will never be able to produce a software stack that's worth anything. No doubt in my mind. Too many Samsung developers have the same stories to just writ

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