Samsung's future is Tizen, not Android
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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.
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.
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.
Yes, Windows Phone rocks, but they don't have the apps iOS and Android have. And while I can certainly browse sites directly (preference anyway), web developers forget about it during testing. Not that I blame them, since being one myself I know it's still a niche group.
If their OS can run Android apps ... they're already ahead of MS.
Which, to me, makes Tizen a bit of a mystery. If Android has the momentum Tizen will fail, but if Samsung has it Tizen might just have a chance.
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 Android apps as first class apps means that Tizen basically is Android in any case - it will have to have Dalvik, Linux ARM compatibility, identical OpenGL interfaces, identical Linux interfaces, etc. Seeing as Android is Apache licensed anyway, I'm having difficulty in seeing the point? Why not just take Android, create a fork, and rename it to Tizen? I don't see any benefits in re-inventing a platform that will just mimic Android (and have all the same limitations to keep compatibility).
Legal issues - I can't see any legal difference in forking Apache licensed code and renaming vs starting from scratch.
Usability - both Samsung Android devices and Tizen devices will have the same Touchwizz UI. Far as I can tell, Samsung is actually aiming for identical usability here.
Compatibility - all of the Google Maps based Apps won't work. Users won't get the great gmail/gtalk/google now integration that they can on Android. No free best-of-breed navigation. No Google Play - users will have to rely on devs uploading their app to Samsung store along with Google Play. Seems like a big point against Tizen here.
Control (for Samsung) - Samsung can already add/remove whatever they want to Android. I'm guessing Google puts certain demands on Samsung to use the Android name and Google apps, but Samsung can just use a different name and no Google apps. In Tizen they're going to have to do this anyway.
The more I look into this, the stranger it becomes. I can't work out what Samsung is trying to accomplish here. This smells like a project they inherited with Intel with the likely purpose being rivalry with Nokia and perhaps internal politics. Maybe some misunderstanding of how much freedom they actually have with Apache licensed Android?
[1]http://www.engadget.com/2011/03/31/google-tightening-control...
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.
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/09/google-blocked-acers-...
The HN gods banned me for saying bad things about Google, but I have one word for you: antitrust.
And even if it does. Samsung is the one vendor that actually sells Android phones - those millions of phones and I am sure Google gets a cut from it, not to mention ads and other ways of monetization. So, it is unlikely Google is denying them early code access. Other OEMs have failed on one more front - providing upgrades and this is where Samsung beats them all (except Nexus line; last 2 Nexus were from Samsung BTW). HTC makes good phones(better than Samsung IMHO, at least some models) but their users are doomed on upgrades. LG is not even worth mentioning. We have their phones in test lab and almost they all suck. We've yet to see where Moto goes and what it does. I guess Google will try to pull an Apple with Moto(though it's just a guess, I've no solid backing for this argument). Sony just keeps trying to make their devices all the pretties and they end up screwing the overall design and their s/w support is even worse than LG.
Tizen is not fragmenting Android. I also had doubts about it and talked to the guys working in that team and they explained it doesn't. They also said that Tizen Android app experience is nowhere going to be near the native Android experience.
Google has threatened that Samsung lose support if they fork Android. They might or might not actually do it - Samsung is a major Android player. The threat is still enough that Samsung have chosen not to try forking Android.
However, Samsung still wants more control. The solution is to use Tizen with Android compatibility to try and wrest that control from Google, but while still acting within the boundaries Google have given them. If Tizen doesn't take off then Samsung can just fall back on Google Android. If Tizen does take off, then they now have enough weight to push Google around as they wish.
Google isn't worried about Tizen as they believe that Samsung will not be able to out code them, and that Android apps running on Tizen will not be as good as Android apps running on Android. While I'm sure that Google would prefer if Samsung wasn't trying out Tizen, they believe they have a strong enough bet that Tizen will fail and Samsung will come crawling back anyway.
So the whole situation now makes a lot of sense from both Google and Samsung's side. From this we can probably take away that Tizen will get the best hardware first to give it more chance of taking off. Also, Google is likely to try and add new services in future Android versions that will make it more difficult to run Android apps on other platforms. Interesting and falsifiable, in a year's time we can see if these predictions are true!
Anybody think I've got way on/off track here?
I can't think of anything great or innovative Samsung can after forking Android. It will let it die a sad and quick death by turning into an extended TouchWiz all over. I think Samsung knows that it's better to let Google do the dirty job.
As per Tizen, not sure about its potential. I think other OEMs, if tried together would a lot better, rather than just Samsung(or practically the only one and leading the push) would try for it, work fir it would be better. Samsung just going to make this mobile OS a bulky ugly mammoth. It looks like Bada I think. Doesn't feel elegant but what I used was not a final version. It was boot-up phase and haven't checked after that.
But this is not the case. It's Samsung and Intel and the rest - means just two of them. Nokia had a good opportunity. But then it's hardly in a situation to risk sth other than MS.
Anybody think I've got way on/off track here?
Naah, you are pretty fine. All one can do right now is speculate.
Thanks for reminding though. Maybe I should have explicitly excluded the current from from last two.
Looking at the industry history it seems more a problem of mindset, that implies a failure understanding a different industry (e.g: hardware != software, ISP != Web). For example, before the new Windows Phone 8 it was incredible that Microsoft insisted with an awkward UI that came from the Palm era. There are a lot of other examples like Nokia/Ovi, Telefonica/Lycos.
I don't have any empirical data to back this up, but in my personal opinion a large reason why Windows Phone just isn't doing so well is because of brand association with 'Windows' and 'Microsoft'.
Microsoft's general appeal to the public is not one of hip and chic and new, which is what Windows Phone marketing has generally been about. Microsoft is associated with corporation and money and monopoly. The appeal of Windows OS to users is that people just use it and it works and sometimes it does things they don't understand and they get viruses and they get angry at it and they have to use Excel and Word. Even if Windows as a product is stellar the old moniker still lurks and it's very difficult to move away from that. People buy Windows because it's Windows. Good or bad. Doesn't matter. And Microsoft clearly has the OS marketshare muscle to force people onto Windows 8 despite it not being very favorable to many at all. Microsoft is just seen as an unappealing 'businessy' corporation for the general public. It doesn't at all attract the young or relatively middle aged chic users that it wants so hard. Windows is just seen as a business brand in general.
Apple already has a well known established brand and image, and Samsung is relatively faceless to the western market (and quite respected in the east) so much so that it can shape its brand image still (Going for the Apple look). Microsoft is simply just too well known to market Windows Phone as Windows Phone.
I honestly believe that if they just set up a different Mobile branch with a new name, rename Windows Phone to something else, and removed some of the "Windowsy" stickers on the Phone's OS, it would sell very very well. As an operating system the core apps work very well together and it's honestly better than Blackberry's and stands as a fair contender with Android in terms of polish. The only real problem is that it's just called Windows Phone.
That, and Microsoft just loves to drop support for older phones (2+ years old). That's a big no-no. Fucking over your already small userbase because you're churning out bigger and more powerful phones to go after the cash prize of young consumers does not bode well. It shows your greedy cunty side and will obviously detract already existing customers... which makes developers not so willing to make apps on your platform, however open and easy and inviting it may be. You are not Android. You do not offer the upgradability option like Android.
But unfortunately Microsoft's goal is to unify all of their products under a few 'key' Windows things. Skype is increasingly becoming more Microsofty and hotmail was turned into outlook. Neither of those things as brands are exactly super appealing. Microsoft is trying to centralize everything a la Google with it's wide plethora of apps and services while simultaneously creating a walled garden of windows only products like Apple.
When I think of outlook I think of being at work and dealing with business emails. I hate that. I don't want to tell you what I think about when I think of Internet Explorer. Associating that with Windows Phone doesn't make me happy. I don't want to take my internet explorer experience with me on the go.
When I think of Android I think of an open platform and flexible. Google's default apps are very open and clean and simple. Chrome mobile is just primary colors and white and sharp with some text. It doesn't fuck around but it doesn't look businessy either. Same goes for the gmail app. The plethora of adequate white space between apps and their overall simple and clean design shapes Google's image as an open and simple company. In general, that's always been how Google has marketed itself and it's products. Windows is trying to copy that same design style to some degree in Windows Phone, but it just doesn't work. That's not the company's history.
Now, going back on topic. Samsung is going to spend a few years actually just making Tizen work as an OS and polishing it, unless they somehow hijack a lot of grunt developers overnight or something. iOS has gone through a lot of polish and testing and Android has taken years to work as well as it is currently today. Yes yes, TouchWiz is Android to many Samsung users. But under the hood Android does quite a bit more than what TouchWiz lets you believe. And there's lots of things that you only learn about once you let something loose in the wild.
Sleep deprived walltexts. I am sorry HN.
Android does not have support on a lot of phones beyond the original version which comes with the phone. The only problem for MS is the fact they spell out the fact that old phones can't be upgraded due to a kernel change which end consumers don't understand. Upgrade options are available on Android only because of the hacker community.
The rest of your post is just your opinion on Android v/s WP8. So, no comments.
This is a good point, but I think it'd be closer to the mark to say that Microsoft is associated with work.
People are often forced to use Microsoft products when they are at work. They frequently have little say in how these products are selected or configured. They're told that The Company has made those decisions for them, so they should just shut up and learn to love them, all hail The Company.
This is not an association that will make people leap joyfully to buy the same products when they are deciding what to spend their personal money on.
This is part of why I have been baffled at MS's insistence on branding Windows 8 and Windows Phone, both of which they desperately want individual consumers to buy into, as "Windows" products. Windows is work. Products to be sold to individuals need to be positioned more like play to be appealing.
Microsoft was smart not to call XBOX "Windows Console" or such, but probably silly to call their mobile OS "Windows Phone".
I'd say making a desirable OS is much less difficult than trying to displace two operating systems which, combined, take up more than 95% of the current OS mobile mind share.
Samsung and Intel need to learn how to cooperate on Tizen. There is no agreed Tizen road map. No unified governance.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 actually nice to use.
...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)?
yeah...
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 genuinely believe it was running Android. Samsung had ported TouchWiz over to it, and whilst there were some clearly noticeable differences in terms of performance most people didn't care enough to pick this up. I think you give people too much credit.
All I know is that back then Samsung put a lot of effort in making Bada look, feel, and behave like TouchWiz on Android. I haven't looked at Tizen recently, but I don't see why they wouldn't do the same here.
Android is apps that share UI, using intent filters that launch Activity objects. Android is a Java VM, including a unique bytecode, and jit and gc, and that's good at multiprocessing, and that's appropriate for battery powered devices.
A lookalike launcher that launches apps written in C++ that can't do what Android apps do is not going to make any headway in the market. In fact it is kind of silly to emulate Android's launcher style. There is nothing, apart from familiarity, that makes it especially good.
Android's app runtime technology has become the de facto client Java technology. Anything that is going to credibly compete has to have something at least as compelling going for it.
I'm a very happy owner of a Galaxy Note II, but nearly everything Samsung did on the software side is value subtracting.
(Nearly, but not all: I do like the way I can capture a screenshot by moving my palm across the screen as if I'm a photocopier.)
> Add all of this together and it becomes clear what Samsung is going for. The company wants to decrease its dependence on Google, and Tizen is the way they're going to do that.
He is conflating independence from Android as independence from Google. How? What will it use for Maps? Search? Email? Wifi-assisted location data? Moving off Android is about as Google-independent as moving off Chrome.
Microsoft are playing the OS switching game for a few years now and this is working great for them.
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.
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.
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.
I have a friend that always said that "Samsung can't do software" and I thought that was a bit hyperbolic. Samsung is a huge company and just because one parts screws up doesn't mean, well, anything really.
But I guess I just had barely used any samsung devices that required software. I can honestly not mention a single piece of samsung software or device that wasn't seriously hindered by the software. From TVs that show hideous grey bars (when the aspect ratio doesn't match) that will blind you in dark scenes (just because the TV frame is grey (note that you can't even change this in the menus)) instead of black bars like all other TVs, to well, TouchWiz...
Take the sound notification you got in samsung phones (was this around the time of galaxy SII? (and not the 90's that you'd expect)) where the phone would make a sound notification when the battery was charged to 100%. With no way to turn it off. I dare say the most common use case when charging a phone is during the night, a lot of people have their phone alongside their bed and this meant that they would be waken a few hours later.
All samsung devices with software in it has at least a few of these annoyances that makes it obvious - no one, has ever, used this thing outside of a lab.
But that's just small details.
TouchWiz is horribly slow. No, it really is catastrophically bad. I tested the Galaxy tab 10.1 in a few stores, in everyone the interface was seriously slower than any of the competitors (with the same hardware). But I figured that this was because of people installing and abusing demo devices. Then I was to help a friend with their brand new tab 10.1, I even witnessed the unpacking and out of the box and it was just as horrid as in all the stores. The brand new top of the line $500 tablet behaved as a bloated, cheap, first generation device. And it hasn't gotten better with time.
Samsung completely ruined the Galaxy S. Compare it to the Nexus S, pretty much the same hardware and the Galaxy S was by comparison barely usable unless you installed a custom rom on it. At which point it suddenly became a great phone.
The touchwiz calendar and messaging applications (in galaxy SIII) looks like they have been designed by a 10-year old starting to learn photoshop (seriously, I just can't believe my eyes everytime i use a Samsung android phone). The UI isn't even remotely consistent with... anything.
Everything they tweaked and touched has been for the worse. Yes they have their own features, mostly features that are fun the first five minutes (if you are a ten year old) but at best doesn't annoy you after the first week.
You're kind of veering to the point of insulting people who might actually see credibility in TouchWiz (the whole "if you're ten years old" thing), which, I guess...whatever. But as someone who has quite appreciated Samsung devices I just don't have the complaints.
"You're kind of veering to the point of insulting people"
Not my intention, but I guess it's my way of responding to the gimmicky features Samsung pushes - instead of focusing on usability. Something that I think the galaxy S4 promo videos demonstrate quite clearly. It's great that they try but in the end it ruins the experience (it shouldn't need to, but it does in my opinion).
If Galaxy S4 was a stock android device I'd buy it. With TouchWiz... I just can't...
I've a Note and never really noticed what it is or does. I replaced the launcher with Apex, just because and... I'm just not sure what touchwiz is at this point or how it might be making my experience worse?
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.
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.
Google is likely trying to move back to a position of neutrality. It will put apps for its services on any phone / platform that 'matters'.
(Incidently I got a S3 before this weekend as a corporate phone. I didn't even once boot it before flashing ClockworkMod / CyanogenMod)
I doubt they will succeed, though.
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 think mainly Samsung will wait a see how Windows Phone goes, to see if they change OS. Maybe even launch a Tizen or whatever OS phone to test the water before jumping the Android ship...
It's just like a real life version of Game Of Thrones... Game of Smartphones (maybe not...)
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?)
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.
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.
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?)
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.
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.
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.
Starting with ICS, you can uninstall the updates for those apps, and then disable them in the Settings -> Applications menu.
That said, Android works a lot better overall if you use Gmail at least.
As soon as someone figures out how to make it reliably easy to unlock phones and put another OS works with your phone company's system, the handset becomes a commodity
Oh how I wish this was possible. Unfortunately, at the hardware level, there is soooooo much support needed for each processor chip. Even among chips that share the same processor core (such as a ARM Cortex A9), all the peripherals and especially the power maagement is different. This prevents the building of a common hardware code base like we have in the PC world.
Given my record though, that'll be the kiss of death for the platform.
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.