Samsung's Bada OS growing faster than Windows Phone | Hacker News Reader

Samsung's Bada OS growing faster than Windows Phone

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56 pointsphreeza39 comments

Microsoft should scrap Windows Phone and buy into a joint venture with Samsung - Bada Bing!

That sounds like a good idea until the collaboration is acrimoniously torn apart in a legal battle over patents, trademarks and revenue sharing.

Then, Apple file a brief that proves conclusively that it was their idea anyway and demands $200 for every new installation of Bada. Microsoft, sensing the winds of change, retreat into enterprise-only mobile space.

Bereft of their large software partner and unwilling to pay licence fees to Apple, Samsung sell off their low-tech phone business to Facebook, who buy it for $1bn for no other reason than the price was decided by an engineer and an intern over lunch. They then shutter the OS, replacing it by FB OS that was in development for 6 weeks on phones across the third world.

The Techcrunch headline? Bada: BOOM!

This comment is both relevant and a great pun. You win the day!

Comparing Bada to WP is apples to oranges. Bada is not a smartphone OS and many (most?) Bada handsets are sold at a fraction of the price of any WP handset. Symbian is a better comparison for Bada and it probably still dwarfs it in terms of market share.

As for App devs, native development for Bada is a massive headache that bears no comparison to WP, iOS or even android. From SDK bugs to Store bugs. And even when using web technologies (phonegap or pure web app), their webkit based browser isn't up to Safari/Chrome standards. Plus the low end devices have (had?) slow processors which make a lot of the fancier CSS stuff unusable.

On top of that, how many people will even know and use the bada app store?

Oh and nowhere in that mini-article is it mentioned that Bada will probably-maybe be replaced by another OS, Tizen.

> Oh and nowhere in that mini-article is it mentioned that Bada will probably-maybe be replaced by another OS, Tizen.

Not much of a problem. Tizen will be able to run the Bada application layer.

I didn't know that - I haven't been keeping up with Tizen. But I did read that tizen would also run android applications.

I don't think the Bada -> Tizen transition is official yet, but Bada had a Linux-based road map, and Tizen would work on the kind of hardware to which feature phones are transitioning.

As for it being an invalid or unfair comparison with Windows Phone, you have to take into account that the feature phone business is overall in steep decline. What might be called a "feature phone" in the future is likely to be indistinguishable from a low end smartphone. The difference will be that the feature phone's ecosystem is more-captive to the carrier's ecosystem, and that will support lower initial costs.

I believe that eventually feature phones will be replaced by smartphones.

Do you believe that Bada will be a smartphone OS comparable to Android/iOS/WP in the sense that people looking to buy a smartphone will buy a Bada-based one instead of one that's WP (or iOS/Android) based? I don't believe that.

If people simply want the phone with the best camera than it wont matter if it's Bada or Android or WP. But if people expect to run apps/games on it than it will matter.

Bada's "growth" is simply due to Samsung replacing their previous feature phone OS with Bada. Even if the overall market is in decline, Bada's share of it will increase as Samsung adopts it in more of their models.

I think there will be a class of phones that do almost all of the things a smartphone like an iOS or Android phone do, but that have an app and content ecosystem where more of the revenue goes to the carrier.

Shouldn't be hard. With a little effort, it could also run WebOS applications. All three have lots of code in common.

Samsung is the biggest cellphone maker in the world and they put Bada on a lot of their phones and 95% of the owners of these phones don't know what Bada is. This makes total sense numberwise, but doesn't say anything about Bada's popularity. It's totally like Symbian was the biggest "smartphone" OS just a couple of years ago, just because Nokia was the biggest cellphone maker. Guess how many Nokia owners knew the word Symbian back then?

I doubt that the majority of mainstream Android phone owners know what kind of OS they have either. Maybe more than Symbian/Bada but still...

Yeah, my daughter (13) was explaining something to her friend like:

D: there's this thing on Android too F: what's Android?? D: your phone!

Still way more of Android users know that they have an Android phone than Symbian/Bada. Actually most likely no less than iPhone users knowing the word iOS (doesn't matter that much in iOS ecosystem though).

Microsoft would probably sell more of them if there were some decent phones on carriers besides AT&T. Last time I got a new phone, I wanted to go Windows Phone 7, but I'm sure as hell not switching to AT&T from Verizon for it.

It might help to some extent, but I think the fact that the iPhone was so successful while it was AT&T exclusive for so long proves that it's probably not the main issue.

> the fact that the iPhone was so successful while it was AT&T exclusive

It also had software that was much more sophisticated and usable than any of its competitors of the time. WP7 doesn't enjoy this advantage.

I also wouldn't mind trying out a Windows Phone if Verizon had a decent one. You would think that Microsoft would have the cash to force the issue a little more.

Hold your breath.

Equally valid headline: "Windows Phone and Android are the only mobile operating systems with year over year growth" http://www.asymco.com/2012/08/15/american-exceptionalism/

The article clearly states Windows Phone's growth was slower than Bada's, so how can you say Android and WP are the "only" mobile operating systems with YoY growth?

Plus, you should never trust Aymco's data. The charts look pretty and as if "they make sense", but the truth is they are always misleading in some way, from what I've noticed, much like Net Marketshare's charts on mobile browsers' "market share", which show iOS at 50% or 60% and Android at 20%, even though there are now about 400 million devices for both Android and iOS, so about equal in market share.

>The article clearly states Windows Phone's growth was slower than Bada's Did you even see the numbers?

Bada grew from 1.9 -> 2.7 percent in 1 year. Microsoft's total share (including the old windows mobile grew from 1.6 -> 2.7 percent in the same time. How's then Bada growing faster? http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/14/gartner-global-mobile-sales....

No one knows what Bada is, it's just because Samsung is huge.

Wonder whether Bada manages to avoid what Japan's carrier-owned MOAP and KCP platforms had become- once dominant in its home country, yet never managing to break outside and rapidly losing out to platforms that did attain global adoption.

In Germany Bada phones are quite popular, you see a lot of people with Wave models.

What's totally bizarre to me is that the Wave 3 is a really nice handset on the outside. It's made of out metal and glass, rather than the somewhat cheap-feeling plastic on the Galaxy series. Why some of the hardware choices on the Wave couldn't come over to Samsung's Android range is beyond me.

I'm guessing it might be an issue of having to compromise to meet a desired price point.

Can't confirm that, I haven't seen one in DE in the last year. All I see are Android, iPhone, Blackberries and old (feature) phones that are 3 years or older.

Here in Düsseldorf I do see quite a few, even among my circle of friends.

But the number of iPhones and Androids outnumbers them, that is clear.

I am also in Duesseldorf and don't know a single person with a Bada phone :)

Maybe we need to visit more parts of the city. :)

Yet they scraped it and moved on to Tizen[1]. While it's good that Tizen is linux based and open source, abandoning a perfectly good os(Bada)just in 2 years might not go well with it's app developers. They(devs) might think twice before developing for tizen now. Although Samsung seems to be planning to make bada open, I doubt it will get the same traction now. [1]https://www.tizen.org

Bada is not a complete OS. It's an application environment that can sit on top of multiple kernels (I am quite sure a friend of mine had one with Linux - or something with version 2.6.xx but Wikipedia says no such phone ever existed). Tizen bundles a Linux kernel and looks more like a full OS.

Bada apps will be able to run on Samsung's version of Tizen, so Samsung is dropping Bada in a fashion similar to how Apple dropped OS9.

Or for that matter Windows Phone 7 and 8.

Oh, good to know. It will be interesting to know how they do so with Bada being rtos.

Yet, despite the fast growth, I'm still having problems finding a Bada phone in the States. None of the major carriers seem to sell them. I've been looking for one for about a year now and it just seems that I would have to buy it directly from Samsung and not get a discount on my new plan discount. If Samsung could start entering the US market, I'm sure they would easily pass Windows Phone in sales.

That's just some misinformation. Bada grew from 1.9 -> 2.7 percent in 1 year. Microsoft's total share (including the old windows mobile grew from 1.6 -> 2.7 percent in the same time. How's then Bada growing faster? http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/14/gartner-global-mobile-sales...

That only works out if you believe that Gartner's ‘research’ is sound and has an error margin of zero.

I encourage you to read Asymco's post on these kinds of guesstimates: http://www.asymco.com/2012/08/13/how-many-smartphones-did-sa...

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