Yesterday, during the most insane launch event in the history of technology, Samsung unveiled its next big flagship, the Galaxy S4. I really couldn’t care less about this new phone – another plastic phone that looks exactly like its predecessor – but the flurry of interviews with Samsung executives that followed is far more interesting. With them, Samsung has repositioned Tizen – and if you connect the dots, something interesting is starting to appear.
The Galaxy S4 event last night set a new standard for total pointlessness, and was so over the top and ridiculous I really don’t want to waste too many words on it. One thing stood out though – even if, by now, it should no longer do so: very few, if any, mentions of Android or Google. Here we have what will inevitably become one of the world’s most popular smartphones, yet there’s no mention of the operating system it runs, or the company behind said operating system.
Then there’s Samsung’s attitude towards Windows 8, Windows RT, and Windows Phone 8. Mildly put, the company doesn’t really see much value in any of them. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Samsung’s J.K. Shin said that “smartphones and tablets based on Microsoft’s Windows operating system aren’t selling very well. There is a preference in the market for Android. In Europe, we’re also seeing lacklustre demand for Windows-based products.”
So, the company is de-emphasising Android and Google, while at the same time talking down anything related to Windows. There’s one final piece of the puzzle – and that’s Tizen. In an interview with Bloomberg, Lee Young Hee, executive vice president of Samsung’s mobile division, revealed that not only will Samsung release phones running Tizen later this year, they will be high-end.
“The Tizen phone will be out in August or September, and this will be in the high-end category,” he told Bloomberg, “The device will be the best product equipped with the best specifications.”
This is very much unlike what everyone assumed up until now. Up until now, everybody had assumed that Tizen would focus on the lower and middle end, with Android focussing on higher-end phones (and also low-end). This new statement by Samsung seems to contradict just that; Tizen will be on high-end devices.
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. 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. OpenMobile’s Application Compatibility Layer takes care of the application situation, and will allow Android applications to run on Tizen unmodified.
In other words, since most Samsung users are familiar with TouchWiz and Android applications, Tizen should not provide them with any difficulties – yet, at the same time, it will give Samsung control over its own platform, independent from Google. It won’t have to conform to Google’s wishes, it won’t have to deal with sudden code drops from the Android team – it can do what it wants.
Of course, this won’t happen overnight; it’ll be a gradual process that may take several years. I also highly doubt Samsung will drop Android altogether – most likely, Samsung’s big sellers, top-of-the-line devices will run Tizen, while others will run Android.
All this can’t be a coincidence. Interesting times ahead.
I didn’t think they could do it, but they really have built an apple-like following. Honestly I’ve determined that it comes down to marketing. Remember when Android really took off? It was when Verizon started running the “droid does” commercials ripping on the iPhone. Motorola did well then and Samsung really took off when their anti-iPhone ads came out. People respond better to negative ads than positive ones, just look at political ads. Interesting that we are starting to see anti-Samsung ads popping up.
It looks like the situation in the late 80-ies when MS grew in partnership with IBM and they increasingly realised their interests are in going alone with their Windows instead of together with IBM and OS/2.
I’m not really sure that comparison works well because in this instance IBM should be Samsung (hardware) and Microsoft should be Google (software that’s designed to run on a multitude of hardware).
Let’s also not forget that Samsung were a large company even before their recent rise of popularity in the smart phone market.
What will be interesting is if Samsung switching away from Android has any effect on their Galaxy Sn sales. Or if history does indeed repeat itself and users switch platforms against to a (potentially) cheaper handset that does run “the ubiquitous” mobile OS; Android. I guess that depends on just how well Tizen runs Android applications and how smooth the transition will be.
That would be kinda stupid (like Google stupid). I mean, all of a sudden, no apps work? Smooth …
You caught the part in the article where they mentioned that Tizen runs Android apps, right? It wasn’t in the first paragraph, it was in the read more section.
Yeah it “runs android apps” But that’s different from shipping with google play.
The same apps that I hear about from friends that haven’t converted to a tizen won’t show up in whatever app store.
Some people will have problems with that. Sales guys at the cell stores will get confused, and eventually stop trying to sell them ( like they did with windows 7 phones).
Despite those problems, I’m pretty sure the event yesterday proved to me that samsung is stupid enough to do it. That was a lot of marketing hype for such little substance. And to think that they’ll probably repeat it for tizen! crazy.
App store as delivered on Android is an app. That app could be easily extended or be replaced to fetch apps from whatever store including supporting more then one store.
The Play store isn’t open source – in fact I don’t think it’s even free either. There’s a few Android apps provided by Google that I believe come with licences (Youtube, Play store, etc).
So there might be a case where Google turns around and tells Samsung that they either ship Android or have to source apps from a 3rd party repository. Leaving users in a situation where they have to manually install the Play store if they want access to it (like Kindle and some unbranded / cheap Chinese tablet owners have to).
Edited 2013-03-16 17:40 UTC
No it doesn’t. It’s OpenMobile’s ACL commercial piece software(that was never demonstrated to run any app compatible with even 4.0 and never at acceptable speeds) that should run on Tizen, among other platforms.
To be honest, Dalvik is opensource. And if a few enthusiasts can get most apps to run on even x86 i bet Samsung could solve that “hurdle” as well…
Only pure Java ones, what about the applications making use of NDK?
Will they do binary translations?
Applications making use of the NDK generally do so in order to make them more easily portable. So they won’t run on Tizen out of the box but they should be pretty easy to port regardless.
Who will be porting them given the braindead C++ environment in Tizen, inherited from Bada?
Edited 2013-03-16 13:24 UTC
Maybe 90% of all apps that use the NDK are games. And based on my information I am 95% sure that these won’t be too hard to port. OpenGL ES 1.1 and 2.0 is in there, and apparently even Qt and GTK apps will still run, so it seems that standard GCC and other standard Linux bits are all included. On top of that Samsung aren’t stupid and I highly doubt they would shoot themselves in the foot by making it harder to port games than it needs to be.
As for hybrid (non-game) apps, maybe it’s a different story, but seriously, I doubt the lack of these few apps will mean the downfall of the entire OS…
Thanks for calling attention to that, but I will believe it when I see it.
.
Edited 2013-03-15 18:45 UTC
Even if Samsung achieves compatibility with most Android apps, they still need to convince app developers to publish stuff in their store in addition to Google Play. Since nowadays everything is about app stores you can’t simply download an app from the publisher’s website and copy to a device, and obtaining Google Play access on a device not blessed by Google is out of the question.
And if anyone used a cheap Chinese Android device, Android is much less usable without Google’s online services.
Why Samsung should be developing a new OS instead of simply replacing Google services with their own in stock AOSP Android?
If they don’t like releasing device updates to the latest Android version or following Google’s guidelines, just wait until they try
– developing their own map solution
– convincing major email providers to open proper access
– negotiating with hundreds of major app developers to publish their Android apps in Samsung’s store
– organizing payments for their app store in the countries where the phones are sold
Edited 2013-03-15 19:10 UTC
Not having used Google Play or the alternatives, I can only go by reports.
Which seem to indicate that life without Google Play is definitely possible, the example being China, where Android usage vastly outstrips iOS, WP, BB etc but Google Play use is minimal. Already 140 million Android users there, with probable growth in the next few years of at least dozens of millions per year.
Chinese users seem to prefer competition rather than being locked into one walled garden of an official app store, be it Google Play, iTunes etc
Some articles from Tech in Asia on this:
“Dear Apple, Amazon, Google: Here’s Why Chinese Consumers Hate Your Ecosystems”
http://www.techinasia.com/apple-google-why-chinese-consumers-hate-t…
“10 Alternative Android App Stores From China”
http://www.techinasia.com/10-android-app-stores-china/
Didn’t Baidu (owned by Chinese gov?) fork Android awhile back?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baidu_Yi
I assumed (never been to China) that Baidu would be the king of the Android clones over there since they have a huge amount of influence.
afaik Baidu’s not owned by the party/govt (altho it may pwned by the party/govt
Their OS is apparently just a skin on Android, and not a popular one at that. Alibaba’s isn’t taking off either apparently.
One local outfit that is doing well with their own UI on top of Android is Xiaomi, whose phones sell like hot cakes… when they’re available.
Basically there are no real local Chinese alternatives to Android yet, so much so that the Party/Govt is complaining about over-dependence on it: http://www.techinasia.com/china-miit-warns-dependent-on-android-goo…
And this is a govt with form on the issue, having pushed/forced made-in-China standards in mobile tech, video discs etc
– http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TD-SCDMA
– http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_Versatile_Disc
– http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Blue_High-definition_Disc
I’m not familiar with the Chinese market but one would assume that heavy competition is expected because:
1) There’s no official Google Play operating in China: https://support.google.com/googleplay/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=143… (possibly because Google stopped operating in China).
2) No store can be named “official” and be popular simply because they’re “default”. So they have to compete in order to gain users.
I’m saying this because I once tried to switch to Windows Phone from Android and found a lot of apps I took for granted was missing, and most of it was Google services like Goggles, Maps, bookmark sync, Latitude, Talk and the Gmail client.
And are you saying that the fact that Google Play(and other Google services) barely works in China has no bearing on that? Google does not sell apps in China though Google play. Google search is heavily restricted. GMail connections are monitored.Barely usable is a compliment, but Google is hardly to blame…
No, I’m not. But it seems the lack of people letting themselves be locked into a single “official” app store applies equally to iOS, not just Android.
But again, just going by what I’ve read. no personal experience. I need to ask some of my Chinese students about this.
As I said – barely usable is a compliment for Google.
Chinese can’t use Google’s services to their full extent practically, even if they want to. As a result the Chinese counterparts(while being inferior in reality) are much more functional than anything Google.
It has little to do with preference for no lock-in, it’s more about preference for functional.
Google Search -> Baidu. Baidu is the number 1 search-engine in China, not Google.
GMail -> Yahoo/etc. GMail is not much used in China anyways.
Google Play -> eg Baidu app store and others: http://www.gizchina.com/2012/08/14/20-ways-to-get-free-android-apps…
Android is huge in India. But nobody would buy a mobile without Play Store.Cheap Chinese made mobiles/tablets all come with play store.
If any company its positioned to do that its indeed Samsung. They have very cosy relationships with carriers (evidenced by relative success of bada), the utter numeric domination, so its actually more probable that SW houses would be tempted to go easy compatibility route and only support their devices skipping play market altogether. If that covered close to 50% it could actually be viable economically.
Common sense move. Samsung is huge, they seem to be building everything and most of the stuff they build also happens to work very well for some reason (in my experience). I’m sure they’ll do a great job with Tizen.
I’m not so sure. Their Smart TV software is a mess and there’s quite a difference between making a skin for Android and having the software engineering chops to build a whole OS stack from scratch (although in truth there are many years of Maemo/MeeGo engineering behind the facade of Tizen). Samsung’s S-Pen custom apps have also gotten consistently middle-of-the-road reviews. And I can’t shake the feeling that Tizen is still first and foremost an experiment; they’re not betting the company on it.
Once Tizen’s actually released we’ll be able to tell for real what software engineering and interaction design skills they are able to bring to the table; till then it’s all speculation.
Edited 2013-03-16 11:26 UTC
I’m interested to see what services they’ll go for on Tizen.
Another Unix wars ?
That is already happening in the Linux distributions, this is why commercial vendors tend to focus on single distributions.
Looking at the SDK documentation and information from a previous discussion here, Tizen is now making use of the former Bada SDK for native programming.
Bada reminds me of Symbian, using a brain dead version of a C++ dialect that brings me bad memories from Symbian C++.
Additionally it makes use of Hungary notation and even Microsoft nowadays advises against it on their best practices documents.
So I doubt any developers will jump into the platform.
This is such a huge shame. Samsung does such a bad job at software.
I recently replaced android on my Note II with Cyanogen 10 and it suddenly became and awesome and wonderful experience.
This does not bode well.
So what if Samsung goes all Tizen? Assuming Dalvik compatibility, Android apps will still work. It’s the same as having two Linux based operating systems, but with different Desktop Environments. Everything still works, so no problem.
Since we’re removing Google services out of the equation, I don’t get this fear about Android and Google, as if Google could suddenly control everything you do with the platform. Android is still Free Software, you can do whatever you want with it, except calling your Android, because of trademark issues. Heck, Samsung could base their next phone off CyanogenMod and it would feel just the same.
Except the applications compiled with the NDK.
– Same CPU architecture will be required
– The same dynamic libraries need to be available
– Android does not mimic a Linux distribution and some things just are in different places or done in a different way
NDK-apps or those Dalvik-apps using JNI to access bundled native libraries. There are lots of them.
Theoretical they could also ship a ABI compatible NDK.
An Android environment could easily by emulated with chroot.
The ARM CPU as well?
Qemu does support emulation of ARM.
So you plan to have Qemu running on a phone?!
Well Thom, I gotta admit you surprised me with this article. I was expecting another baseless article on how Samsung is so scared of Google and wants to be more independent, where being scared is the only argument. But these comments from Samsung officials are pretty interesting.
Still, I don’t believe Samsung will push Tizen as hard as some may think. I still see it more like a backup strategy move. I mean, just look at the success Samsung has had with Android over the years. It’s phenomenal by any measure! I think they will be pragmatic about it, going forward. As long as Google doesn’t p*ss them off, they will happily use Android and sell like crazy. In Tizen itself I still don’t see how this offers anything unique from Android other than having some tools for Linux Geeks that Android lacks.
But interesting times, indeed!
> how this offers anything unique from Android
That’s the point. There is or will be no huge difference. Add Touchwiz on top of Tizen and make Android apps run there and you have an Android. Users my not able to tell a difference.
And that is the goal. Samsung took Android and added own gimmicks, inventing on top. They can do the same with Tizen. No difference for the user but with Tizen Samsung has full control of there stack unlike with Android where Google has that control.
Its never good to depend on the good will of some other company. Granted that Samsung’s Android dependency is way different then e.g. Nokia’s WP dependency cause Samsung has the Android code and licensing allows them to turn that everytime into an own product, to drive forward, to extend from the Kernel to the UI. But its still a competative advantage Google has. They could stop opensourcing newer versions or just publish them month after Moto uses it already.
Watch out what Samsung does here. Its a winning strategy. You need inhouse control of your stack to keep in the game else you end like Nokia.
Edited 2013-03-16 11:58 UTC
I still don’t see how this move makes sense. Even if Google took that course, Samsung would just have to maintain an Android fork with no help from Google. Is that really worse than developing something else from scratch?
OTOH, this would make sense if Samsung is planning to do something which is easier in Tizen than in Android for technical reasons rather than licensing ones.
Priviledging Motorolla is not enough to fend off challenges for Google.
They do need to increase the value of the ‘real Android ecosystem’,
to prevent all it’s best parts, including application library, from being siphoned off.
If they can find other vendors who are willing to play along with Android,
they can pursue a ‘Real Android’ ecosystem which the best development resources will go into,
and which has separate licences that exclude companies like Samsung who just want to use overly permissive licences like base Android to feed into their own proprietary projects.
Funny that you say that, because Nokia DID have their own inhouse control, but they pissed it away…
The most important fans they had multiple times yet by doing promisses to the developer community, especially the cyanogen mod team (teamhacksung) that brought the best aftermarket firmware to their devices, that they did not hold. They think it is ok to not provide source code or usable binary blobs for proprietary drivers, but this community is who made Samsung a majour player in the android market. Now the geeks are switching over to Sony, which prove they have learned how to work “with” and not against the community and the average user will follow, not today or tomorrow, but in a few years Samsung will get what they deserve and Sony will as well. For me the S3, which is my third Samsung android phone, will be definitely the last one and i will follow the Dec community to Sony with my very next device…
The sonys are also a lot more sexy looking. And Samsung does not share source back. Most of what makes the S4, well, a S4, is software this time. All of it is 100% proprietary samsung stuff. So yeah.
What about Core Google Apps, most importantly including Google Maps?
I wouldn’t expect that Google would just jump up to help provide Samsung with Tizen Map client.
(which isn’t a technical issue with the App Compatability Layer, but a licence issue)
I guess users could side-load ‘unlicenced’ copies of Android Google Maps, but is that a real solution?
We have already seen Apple stumble here. Apparently in-browser GMaps isn’t good enough.
Does Samsung have another map provider in the works?
Google really needs to step up their game.
Primarily in terms of increasing the value of the Android ecosystem.
There can be technical approaches which can’t be ripped off with App Compatability Layers,
and there can be hard-ass lawyer approaches, like introducing terms to Google Play app vendors like Goole Play exclusivity, and at minimum disallowing them from also using stores which aren’t real Android stores.
I really do think Sailfish and Firefox OS have a good chance of taking advantage of similar opportunities, with Android App compatability but a compelling native experience as well. These also face the same issue re: Maps though.
Google is essentially a web apps company;
Tizen is essentially a web apps platform.
Google is platform agnostic.
Edited 2013-03-17 17:42 UTC
They are not so agnostic when they ask people using stuff like cyanogen of whatever not to use the official google apps for gmail, etc.
A high end Tizen phone by August/September. That is around the time they’d release Note III. Could it be the 1st Tizen based smartphone? It’s what you have on the userland that really matters to me. I am getting a Note III, with or without Android if it comes to that. Somehow it’s not about Android anymore but it’s all Samsung.
Edited 2013-03-17 20:06 UTC
“Google’s future is Tizen, not Android” could be an OS News article in a few years
Google has a browser, OSs and even a phone company but that’s not their core biz.
Edit: a phone manufacturer (Motorola) not a phone company of course 🙂
Why not Jolla/good-old-maemo instead of Tizen? Tizen is all about the HTML5-based apps. If _that_ is not relevant somehow, then why Tizen specifically?
Being able to use Android apps would be paramount. As it if for Jolla to have a real shot. That should be in thec enter of the debate.
But then we have to ask, what is it really different in a OS for any developer or user if it can run another platform’s apps?…
Touchwiz is the worst of the Android overlays. People use it because they cannot get rid of it without rooting and custom ROMs.
Samsung should ask Blackberry how well running Android apps on another OS is going…
Since Tizen is Linux based, it should be relatively easy to have a single kernel and set of drivers while offering both the tizen and android userland.
Perhaps they will make it possible to buy a single handset and choose the os, or even dual boot?