Comment by jpxxx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jpxxx | Hacker News Reader

It doesn't need to be anything new, radical, or anything of the sort. All it aims to be is an Android-alike that Google doesn't control. (ideally one that also enables easy porting of Android code and assets)

With this fixed goal and with Samsung's money, it'll succeed.

Google has two primary points of control over Android: Anti-Fragmentation Agreements (AFAs) and "Google Experience" apps.

While something like Tizen might alleviate an OEM of the former restriction (at great cost), I don't think it helps them with the latter.

True. But trashy in-house Experience Apps are ubiquitous and only going to improve. I think the idea here is that Samsung has an out if they end up needing it.

They'll change, but I wouldn't take it for granted that they'll improve. It's easy to make a new version, but it takes massive effort to make sure that you are converging on something great as you iterate.

If that were the goal why not just fork Android like Amazon did? You get a functional OS with a lot less work.

I really can't see much point in Tizen except maybe as a bargaining chip used to keep Google honest with Android.

You do know Samsung is already doing that, and is very successful at it ? They're the #1 Android maker. So they must have their reasons for wanting to escape Google's control.

What? They lay their own TouchWiz UI over Android but I'd hardly call it a fork. Amazon's version is a fork. Unless you have secret information to share.

It's really not a fork in the way forks go. They have to stay compatible to a point with the master AOSP branch as per agreements with Google. Amazon has no such obligations.

It might succeed in distribution because they have market share in a portion of the market largely unconcerned about user experience.

Has any software produced by Samsung ever made you say "I wish I could use more of this"? Touchwiz?

You speak the truth! Even when they're copying experiences, there's always a rough edge hanging out that makes you wince.

Samsung tried that with Bada, too. It didn't work. I think people are really underestimating the power of an ecosystem. Look at WP8 how much it's struggling in low single digits even after billions invested in deals and promotions, and money paid to developers to make apps.

Samsung has nothing. It doesn't even have the content Amazon has, which only got popular with Kindle Fire because people were looking for a "hero" against the iPad, and their very affordable $200 "Android-based" tablet seemed to be that one.

Or that Samsung Kies crapware.

>>>Has any software produced by Samsung ever made you say "I wish I could use more of this"? Touchwiz?

From what I have seen from users on YouTube, the multi-window feature Sammy brought to Android looks good. And actually does screen splitting better than Windows 8 (no fixed width presets).

They tried that already with Bada and it didn't succeed. What will make this different?

Bada's outselling and outgrowing Windows Mobile. It's doing fine.

How many people are choosing to buy a phone because it has Bada?

A majority of people are purchasing the phone they can afford first. Status purchases are for a more select population.

And the phone you can afford is more likely to have Bada.

Why is Bada (developed in-house, costing Samsung money) cheaper to deploy than Android (developed by others, free to use)? Why would a Bada phone be cheaper?

Ufff, Android is not free! The license to use the name, Google maps, market, etc. is around $15.

Citation please? Is that a recent change? Otherwise a $15 fee seems at least an order of magnitude off.

Android hit 200 million activations in November 2011. It hit over 500 million in September 2012.

Assuming the $15 fee was in effect when Android hit 200 million, then Google got roughly $4.5 billion in licensing fees in less than a year. Even Google (earning roughly $2.8 billion last quarter) would probably have trouble hiding that much pocket change in an earnings statement.

A year or so ago I was contracting with a military supplier. The company makes rugged Windows CE handhelds and was looking at jumping to Android. $15 per device was the quote they got from Google.

Now that you mention the number of activations, it's obvious Samsung is not paying that price.

For for low-volume products like that, I'd expect a high per-unit cost. The support overhead will vastly outweigh the money Google might make in purchases via the Play store.

That tracks with something else I heard about recently via Twitter: Indian Android OEMs releasing devices without Google Play because they had problems with Google's terms/fees. That was confusing because the only thing I'd seen about Android's economics ( http://www.asymco.com/2012/05/13/android-economics-an-introd... ) said that the money flowed in the other direction: Google paying OEMs for search traffic, etc.

However, if Google is discriminating between OEMs then that makes more sense. The typical terms (that, say, Samsung or HTC gets) might be quite generous, but the Indian OEMs don't get the same deal. I find it a bit surprising that Google couldn't come up with better terms for the huge but poor Indian market, but maybe there were non-export clauses or something similar that got in the way.

> The license to use the name, Google maps, market, etc. is around $15. Source?

Mainly lower hardware requirements.

How many people are choosing to buy a phone because it has Android? Gingerbread accounts for 48% of Android devices because many Android users just want a cheap or "free with contract" phone.

Nah, Gingerbread is on 48% of devices because of the broken model where the carrier and phone maker get to decide if the phone gets Android OS updates or not and they have no direct incentive to provide updates (because unlike Apple they aren't making money on the app side to justify the OS update costs), in fact they have incentive not to provide updates in order to persuade users to upgrade to new devices as soon as their contract is up.

This combined with the fact that ICS was only released a little more than a year ago (half the term of most people's cell phone contracts) and Honeycomb was never officially put on to phones.

While some of those Gingerbread phones were in fact just "cheap phones" a lot of them were also high end (and everything in between) for the time they were sold.

In the third world, price is a bigger concern than ecosystem. People will buy the cheapest phone that offers some smartphone features. Right now, this product selection is limited to Bada and the lowest-end Android phones. Nobody else caters to this market.

Bada outsold Windows Phone in one quarter in 2011.

Samsung didn't release a single new Bada Phone in 2012.

Windows Phone 7 had a horrible start in it's first calendar year for a plethora of reasons (at one point Windows Mobile 6.5 was still selling almost as much), but after Nokia started their development in earnest, sales have taken off (well, "taken off" relative to previous years)

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