According to a report by Korean Times, an anonymous Samsung executive said that the company is considering to move to Samsung’s own Tizen OS for all of its devices.
The executive said that they are using India as testing grounds for the popularity of its OS.
Samsung is releasing cheaper smartphones in India which are powered by Tizen OS rather than Android. The cheaper line of smartphones is doing rather well. Customers are satisfied with Tizen and have happily adopted the new OS.
The un-named executive commented,
Samsung’s Z-branded Tizen-powered phones are popular with Indian consumers, during the first quarter of this year. Samsung sold about 64 million phones there. This means that Tizen is proving its competitiveness.
Samsung is eager to roll out Tizen for its other devices, due to the encouraging results in the Indian market.
Tizen has no presence in developed countries aside from the company’s range of Samsung Gear smartwatches.
If Tizen is adopted in all of Samsung’s devices, it would become a direct competitor to Android because of the sheer volume of phone shipped by the company. Samsung will also be heavily promoting Tizen to the app developers with hopes to increase the number of apps for the OS.
Another reason for the eagerness of the company to move to Tizen is to decrease their reliance on Android.
Even though Android is open source, it is still a cause for concern for Samsung due to it being focused on the mobile side of the devices, not to mention Google’s control over the platform.
Samsung isn’t the first company which has tried to break into mobile OS business, others like Windows 10 for mobile, ubuntu and Sailfish OS are also struggling in a market dominated by Android and iOS.
This move by Samsung could have negative results for the company, because despite seeing success in India with cheaper phones, Tizen does not have enough apps to fulfill the requirements of the average user nor the traction iOS and Android enjoy.
The app gap is part of the reason why Windows and others did not make it as far as Android or iOS. Samsung seems aware of this though. Tizen has been in development longer than any other mobile OS and the slow and steady rollout alongside success in India might just mean the company has cracked the code for a truly viable mobile OS.
