Samsung Software talent reportedly being shifted from Android to Tizen

http://www.sammobile.com/2014/09/02/software-talent-reportedly-being-shifted-from-android-to-tizen/

Samsung Electronics has begun moving software resources that were previously working with Android OS for Galaxy devices over to Tizen. Apparently the move is quite a big one and may even have resulted in more than 1000 people begin moved over from Android to Tizen. Samsung reportedly has a 5,000 strong team of developers that’s tasked with further developing and improving its operating system.

inb4 layoffs

Zorachus said:

http://www.sammobile.com/2014/09/02/software-talent-reportedly-being-shifted-from-android-to-tizen/

Samsung Electronics has begun moving software resources that were previously working with Android OS for Galaxy devices over to Tizen. Apparently the move is quite a big one and may even have resulted in more than 1000 people begin moved over from Android to Tizen. Samsung reportedly has a 5,000 strong team of developers that’s tasked with further developing and improving its operating system.

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Not surprising, really. Samsung realizes that it's too dependent on Google for its success, and that its current Tizen efforts are pretty weak (see: the Z phone being effectively shelved before it shipped). I just wonder how much of this is for phones versus other devices. A head-on assault against Android phones/tablets is likely to fail ("here's a Galaxy phone, just without all the apps you like!"), but it may be good news if it gives you more of a reason to consider a Gear watch.

probably not for phone os purpose
more effort into watch/vr headset etc? they can put this on tv and so on

Samsung's software expertise is good enough for Apple to borrow from like split screen multitasking, bump to share, app switching menu, quick setting menu, etc. so I don't see what's wrong with offering another choice besides Android and Windows Phone.

Hasn't samsung been one of the bigger companies backing it for a while(along with intel)? I thought they were one of the first to release something running it although I thought it was a camera.

This is the part where Galaxy starts losing market share to someone like LG, Huawei, Lenovo, etc.....

Samsung is sort of like HP quite frankly I don't consider their software developers that skilled. They add features and hardware that are nice, but certainly not super efficient or polished. It works. Of course the rest of the industry isn't even capable of adding such features at all lol.

It's going to be interesting to see how the market reacts to the same device designs using a different os. Software is not their strong suit, but they do have some neat ideas from time to time.

I doubt they want to continue developing touchwiz, they will probably go for a more vanilla experience or we will get much the same from here on out which I would totally expect.

Trimlock said:

I doubt they want to continue developing touchwiz, they will probably go for a more vanilla experience or we will get much the same from here on out which I would totally expect.

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bingo.

I think this is the correct analysis.

Samsung is stripping down touchwiz because they cannot win the blogosphere's grace of manufacturer theming. So instead of investing valuable resources to continue to develop software that inevitably gets railed on by the media and competition, Samsung might just be thinking "Fuck it" and just stripping it down and only loading up essential bloatware apps.

I think it makes sense because of Samsung's enormous android device library. They have a small army's worth of engineers just to streamline firmware updates for all the devices. That's a game that they can't win given how many different devices Samsung wants to push out any given year.

What's probably happened is that there is some finality wrt to touchwiz. I think they are going to Tizen for wearables because it's a niche within a niche; and the industry as a whole (wrt to wearables) is young enough that a certain design/implementation ethos can dominate the market in the near future.

Hmm... I wonder if they plan to make their own java virtual machine so that Tizen can run Android apps.

Samsung has been duplicating Google's apps for some time. Now they will have Here maps too. Hmmmmmmmm.......

Dream on about Samsung offering vanilla experience as default in three flagships...

I only hope they debloat that shit and/or program it more efficiently.

There is only one thing that draws me to samsung. It's amoled displays. Once that piece of taken away, I won't be tethered to them. The problem is that I suspect samsung will have a tech lead in oled on the mobile side for years to come.

Yep that is the advantage of actually making a product rather than just out sourcing everything.

That said even though there is no major reason for it. No one else offers an active digitizer like galaxy note. Few offer removable batteries, expandable storage, or various other features. Most of them have had years to counter and have failed to do so.

rudy said:

This is the part where Galaxy starts losing market share to someone like LG, Huawei, Lenovo, etc.....

Samsung is sort of like HP quite frankly I don't consider their software developers that skilled. They add features and hardware that are nice, but certainly not super efficient or polished. It works. Of course the rest of the industry isn't even capable of adding such features at all lol.

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This is what bothers me. I would like to see Google and Apple offer real multi-tasking features for their OS's. Today's smartphones are a lot more capable than Android and iOS allow it to be and it seems like they're holding back the hardware too much. Samsung is doing a good enough job to make sure those features work properly, but their software still feels so clunky. This is mainly because the features are built on top of already inefficient Android. Will Tizen make things a lot smoother and better? Only time will tell. We'll see.

Either way, they need to focus on pulling in mobile developers to make apps for Tizen. Otherwise, Samsung's Galaxy Tizen phones will be the next Windows phones.