Tizen is a mobile operating system from Samsung which they believe will be the replacement to the android operating system that they are using right now. Samsung is doing this to reduce their dependence on Google and to differentiate themselves from other OEMs.
Differentiating themselves from other OEMs is very important in the android field because of every single manufacturer is using the same vanilla android then the only thing that can compel people to buy a device from Samsung will be just their hardware and we all know that Samsung doesn’t make the best hardware. This is the reason why every company producing an android phone had some form of custom version of Android installed in their devices even though it irritates android lovers like me to the core. In addition to this Samsung had to work under a lot of restrictions since google has control over android and they want the users to have a more unified experience across devices. Also I believe that Samsung had to pay some licensing free to google.
So to solve these issues Samsung came up with the idea of developing their own os. With tizen they can design the system the way they want and include all their stupid features that nobody usually uses and at the sane time they can optimize the os for their hardware so that it will run smoother in low-end devices and will perform better in high-end devices as well. Also it solves the issue of Android fragmentation which means Samsung can push updates to the consumers much faster.
So all these seems good for Samsung but the real question is “will Samsung be able to bring developers on board so that consumers will have all their applications available to them”. And unless that happens nobody will be willing to buy tizen phones no matter how better it performs compared to android. Well in my opinion i don’t think this is going to happen, at-least not in the near future. IOS and android are the 2 major operating systems that dominate the market right now and because of that developers prefer developing apps only for these 2 platforms. Even windows which you can say is kind of popular faces the issue of lack of applications. Sometime these platforms may have applications but they may not get update very often and they certainly wont be as good as the IOS or android apps. So now samsung is trying to bring a new os into this already saturated market. And i strongly believe that there is no place for a fourth OS in this area. Samsung maybe able to get major apps like Facebook, whatsapp etc on their platform but i don’t think they will be able to get a variety of other applications which comes from other small developers just because they really can’t afford to support a 4th platform just for a small percentage of people.
And without the presence of good application an OS cannot be successful in the current scenario. Maybe Samsung will be able to satisfy the consumers of low-end devices by provide them with a
small set of core application but i don’t think the people who are looking for high-end flagship devices will ever be satisfied with such a platform. Also right now Samsung is using tizen only in their low-end devices and usually only a small portion of the total revenue of the developers come from these low-end devices and hence these developers don’t have a good reason to support tizen at least as of now. Samsung can start supporting these developers by giving them some incentives at least in the initial phase of tizen development but im not sure how helpful that strategy is going to be.
I think even Samsung has realised this issue with tizen and that is why they still depend on android for most of their devices. Samsung may still try to bring out new devices which run tizen but I strongly believe that these devices are either going to be restricted to low-end market or gradually Samsung is going to drop the idea of tizen.
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