Fans of mobile operating systems not called “Android” or ‘iOS” might be sad to hear what Huawei’s head honcho just told the Wall Street Journal. In an interview, Richard Yu spoke about the company’s plans regarding Tizen, Windows Phone and a long-rumored homegrown OS, and basically said they were all doomed.
He’s not wrong.
Samsung is still a competitor, as simply as that!
Tizen makes sense only for Samsung and only if the company would like to follow a more tight software-hardware integration… let’s say ~A la Apple
But Samsung is very bad on the software, so Tizen is pretty much useless for them too.
With the slow way of Samsung developing it – yes. Samsung have a lot more resources than Jolla, yet they achieved way less so far with creating actual Tizen products.
Edited 2014-08-25 20:49 UTC
What always appalled me is how a massive behemoth like Samsung, who do owns the expertize to design and produce some of the most advanced technology currently know, can be so awfully bad with software.
I can’t say they are always bad. For example F2FS looks promising, and if anyone can pull through an ubiquitous FAT32 replacement, Samsung is good for the role. But so far they aren’t rushing it into the production ready state.
May be it’s a bad example – developing stable filesystem is a humongous task.
Edited 2014-08-26 01:10 UTC
I am pretty certain that’s what was said about both Android and iOS when they were new when Symbian was the biggest player in town.
Touch~A(c).
I think both iOS and Android were able to acquire the success they did because they provided something different that people wanted. I suppose Windows Phone, Blackberry OS, Tizen, SailfishOS, and others have a chance if they can do the same.
the only people that thought that were symbian fanboys.
The difference between Tizen now and iOS/Android when they started was that a company was actually invested in iOS/Android and they pushed it hard. I don’t see anyone pushing hard on Tizen including its creators.
Nope, those who knew could see the writing on the wall for Symbian.
The problem for any other mobile operating system is that iOS and Android have heavily established application stores with lots of apps written for them, something that Symbian never had and that Nokia never saw the need for with all its inertia despite many seeing the writing on the wall. Some people laughed at me on here a few years ago when I said that either Nokia developed Symbian in that direction or both would die.
Even with Android, in the face of iOS it took it some time to get its application store up to any kind of critical mass. Now that Android is just about there there simply isn’t room for any other OS nor is there any need. If you don’t have an iPhone you can install Android everywhere else pretty freely in a way you could never do with Symbian.
Well there’s always Symbian source dump available on Sourceforge…
http://sourceforge.net/projects/symbiandump/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/symbian/
Even an open Symbian phone!
http://sourceforge.net/projects/wildducks/
whenever Tizen sales did not quite make it, it will be abandoned just like Bada, no question asked
its Samsung afterall and consumers will doubt this OS’s worthiness due to Samsung previous failure and irresponsibility
Unless ofcourse if Microsoft purchased Tizen over and integrate them into the new Nokia device, well thats an entirely different story.
That is a cold day in Hell. Tizen is a Linux based phone OS and MS is still betting the farm on Windows.
Also, if Microsoft backed Tizen, it would cement Linux with systemd and Wayland into place. That way MS would create a formidable competitor to Windows by themselves.
The are already formidable and don’t need MS cementing (see https://youtube.com/watch?v=jOh6Nh8w6f8 at 0:30
).
Edited 2014-08-26 20:21 UTC
How do you mean Tizen sales ?
The problem was, there wasn’t any phones offered for sale.
No one knows what the marketshare of any mobile OS will be in five years. I wouldn’t even be surprised if WP is bigger than iOS.
Hi, Unclefester:
That’s very difficult, although Tomi Ahonen, a former Nokia executive, has forecasted a lot of events related to mobile phones, and has published another report:
http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2014/07/rest-of-decade…
No one is going to allow Google to get 90% of the mobile market. So Tizen (or some other mobile OS) will be heavily backed by Samsung.
Edited 2014-08-26 11:07 UTC
Samsung backs Tizen so heavily that they recently cancelled the launch of the Samsung Z which was to be the first Tizen phone. The news came around only days before the launch was supposed to happen.
Not even Intel backs Tizen except by token gestures any longer, and are vastly more invested in Android today.
Doesn’t Google already has pretty close to 90%, and rising?
No, Android has 84.7% in Q2 2014 according to IDC.
Apple has 11.7% (down from 13.0% in Q2 2013)
WP has 2.5% (down from 3.4% in Q2 2013)
In order to reach 90% Android, the combined share of Apple+WP needs to go below 10% which is unlikely to happen this year. Next year I think it is possible if Android remains the only OS which grows unit sales.
Yeah, that’s what I would call pretty close
…and seems almost inevitable to reach that 90%.
It’s inevitable. If Samsung drops Android its own OS will fail and another manufacturer will be clear to install Android and sweep into the vacuum.
Because it will be squashed by the Ubuntu Phone?
Samsung does not have a chance! Have you seen their other SW ventures? GMAB! DOA!
Tizen can have a chance in the feature phone segment like the S40. Then if they gain a significant size they can enter the smartphone race.
It will be pretty much all smartphones soon… (besides, one could argue that Tizen is not a good feature phone OS and/or that switching focus like that isn’t very feasible)