Tizen mobile OS releases v2.0 code The men and women behind the open source Tizen mobile OS platform have stated an early claim to win developer hearts and minds ahead of Mobile World Congress next week with the official release of Tizen 2.0 source code and SDK. After a particularly slow start since its launch in by the Linux Foundation in September 2011, the …
Plus developer interest. I don't believe many developers (one-man teams, small teams and medium sized teams) have enough momentum, sales or desire to start developing for a new platform.
From experience, working for various dev teams over the past 2 years, Tizen is barely mentioned, if at all. I think Tizen, Firefox, Ubuntu and Sailfish (I doubt the latter will really go to market) will just eat each others sales in the bottom 5% of the market not owned by iOS, Android, BB, WP8.
Surely the reason these things are barely mentioned is because there are no devices? They may as well be vapourware until something appears, so who's going to bother developing apps for them?
That doesn't mean much in terms of potential. Also it may be better to eat each other's sales in the bottom five percent than bother with WP8 which makes up far less...
Except Tizen is supported by Samsung, the number one smartphone and phone company. Of course that doesn't guarantee sales (they sell WP too, after all), but it does mean its worth keeping an eye on.
For developers, Tizen and Firefox OS both use HTML5, so should be compatible with each other (as well as ChromeOS, and running on many other platforms too through a browser). Ubuntu (and I think Sailfish) is compatible with GNU/Linux.
And since when did geeks care about market share? I remember people leaping onto Android because it was cool, even when its market share was tiny.
If I planned on writing an app for an HTML5-only platform, it would be Firefox OS, not Tizen. The latter is bound to use proprietary extensions in an effort to lock you into their ecosystem.
If I planned on writing native apps, it would be in Qt for iOS/Android/BB10/Ubuntu/Sailfish, a single framework that targets all of these platforms, but a framework shunned by Tizen (and also Windows Phone). Guess who loses, eh?
Tizen is simply dead in the water. Samsung and Intel have for a while now been ignoring what Tizen community they remained after MeeGo, and I doubt anyone outside of Samsung and Intel now gives a shit about Tizen. In fact, I'd be very surprised if Intel gives much of a shit about Tizen any more.
As a platform, Tizen is a horrible mish-mash of compromises, EFL replacing Qt to keep Samsung happy was a bad decision two years ago and it's looking even worse now.
"If I planned on writing an app for an HTML5-only platform, it would be Firefox OS, not Tizen. The latter is bound to use proprietary extensions in an effort to lock you into their ecosystem."
Well... I wouldn't with the current hardware running FFOS: it's painfully underpowered and makes a hell in terms of usability of anything more complex than an RSS reader. :(
If you are concerned by lock-ins you should steer away from the FFOS: it's pushed directly by operators (Telefonica, Telenor) who seem quite keen on trying to revive the WAC concept.
At least Tizen is supported by Samsung and they run it on quite powerful hardware (at least looking at the developers devices that have S3's hardware to run on).
Tizen is built on top of a very clean version of linux: porting is really easy and there aren't really proprietary APis at that level.
From direct experience it has been relatively easy to port (native) our application to Tizen, get hardware acceleration working, and all without using any proprietary Tizen APIs.
If you are concerned by lock-ins you should steer away from the FFOS: it's pushed directly by operators (Telefonica, Telenor) who seem quite keen on trying to revive the WAC concept.
WAC is fully revived and living it large in Tizen. The entire Tizen HTML5 proposition is based on WAC. Now do you realise why I'd want to avoid Tizen?
"The latter is bound to use proprietary extensions in an effort to lock you into their ecosystem."
The whole goal of Tizen I thought was to not lock people into ecosystems, and to be compatible with FirefoxOS and web browsers. I'm not sure if this is just an assumption you're making, or if you know something more about the politics involved?
I agree it's a shame to not support other languages, as it is nice to have other options to make cross-platform applications (I use Qt too) - same issue with ChromeOS.
Samsung have become the heavyweight of the mobile market and as such can sway the balance.
If they backed a system with good hardware, cheaper phones, no spy ware or lock in, an App market that had few but serious apps then personally I would be happy to shift.
I only use a few common apps, standard telephony functions and Gps. I imagine that I am quite a typical user. My needs do not require a particular OS but they do require a stable OS.
If they would also include a 'garauntee' for updates then they might stand a chance of making some market penetration.
But like everything today this could end up being just another pipe dream.
I would like to see them suceed just for the sake of reducing the Google monopoly.
But to beat Android, the phones would need some selling point, such as better battery life (replacement for those happy Symbian users?). At least, Samsung might get to see all the little tricks that all those Meemo/Meego/... contributors were thinking up, so maybe that's a motivator too.
Hope it kicks off in at least a minor way, more operating systems in the mobile space are a positive thing.
What would be really great would be if Samsung provided a semi-official way to hack it on to their Galaxy handsets. Can't really see that happening though.
Tux because it's time 'proper' linux made a comeback into the mobile space.
I guess by "proper" Linux you mean GNU/Linux(?) similar to what Maemo/Meego were. But is Tizen that? Given there only seems to be support for HTML5, it's unclear if this is Linux anymore than Android or ChromeOS (i.e., only using the kernel)? Similarly with FirefoxOS. Though of course Ubuntu, and I think Sailfish, are GNU/Linux OSs.
My guess is that they are planning on using Tizen to compete with Nokia's Asha phones that are doing well in developing countries and actually what is making Nokia its bread and butter atm.
If Tizen does do well and become a real player in this sector it will be a bit of a kick in the teeth for Nokia considering that Tizen was developed from Meamo that Nokia dropped in favour of Windows phone
"My guess is that they are planning on using Tizen to compete with Nokia's Asha phones that are doing well in developing countries and actually what is making Nokia its bread and butter atm."
It looks like that in 2013 Samsung will use the REX line of phones to compete against Asha.
Tizen is much more in the Android category so far.
I really hope FireFox OS turns out well and influences all these other platforms. Surely developers are going to get in a right mess developing for iOS, Android, WP8, Blackberry, Bada, Tizen, Ubuntu, Sailfish, etc all at the same time. I know some tools exist to make apps across some of these operating systems in one go but that hardly covers everything. If Mozilla can prove their HTML5 apps idea really works and their APIs become some sort of standard then we might see the end of the app store bollocks and the beginning of something a little bit more open.
Tizen is as bad if not worse than Android - no open discussion, no community involvement, just the usual monolithic code dumps. The lack of engagement with the community was the same when Intel were running MeeGo, so I'd blame Intel for this, but most of the code is coming from Samsung and they have no interest either in a community of developers submitting patches.
MeeGo has flourished without Intel (and Nokia). Tizen will be smothered by Intel and Samsung.
Is open hardware ... so that people can install the OS of their choice.
I don't want to buy a Tizen handset only to find out that I'll have to ditch it and buy something else because it's apps are just not up to scratch.
Smartphones are getting to the stage where they're packing enough punch to be classified as small computers ... the additional elements that they have are not unique and must follow standards ... so why can't the Smart part of the phone be capable of having any OS installed??
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