Hacker News Reader

Comment by Zigurd | Hacker News Reader

The chances of Samsung either making an alternative ecosystem for Android, like Amazon did, or a replacement OS that actually replaces more than 1% of their Android unit volume within three years are about nil.

Samsung takes all the profits because they have both vertical integration and scale. That's the same thing they did to the PC business, except Intel keeps the CPU profit.

I don't know what Google can do about that, or, for that matter, why they should do anything about it at all. Where is the rush of OEMs to Windows Phone? Nobody is offering a better technology at a better price than Google.

I hope there are more viable mobile OSs to help prevent stagnation. But I don't see any of the current crop of contenders knocking anyone out.

View on HN

Wouldn't it make sense for a vertically integrated company to control its OS though ? Like Apple... We know Samsung is at least looking at this option with Tizen, previously with Bada. Why do you think they can't achieve this where they already have 95% of the Android market ? I'm not sure they can either, but I wouldn't be so confident about this statement.

Samsung makes really great hardware (speaking in terms of the computing functionality of the machine, not industrial design where I think they are merely average at best), but I've never used Samsung software that didn't make me want to smash something. It is always possible they might someday turn that around, but as of right now their best bet is to stick with the Android ecosystem and let Google do most of the software work.

It was the same feeling with Android until not so long ago. If Google can work to incrementally improve the user experience, I'm sure Samsung could. If they have the incentive. But maybe they are fine with the current state of affairs.

> The chances of Samsung either making an alternative ecosystem for Android, like Amazon did, or a replacement OS that actually replaces more than 1% of their Android unit volume within three years are about nil.

I wouldn't be so quick to jump to conclusions as Samsung already have a replacement OS called 'Tizen'. It's already themed like TouchWiz (Samsung's bastardization of Android) and it already supports Android apps. What's more, Tizen handsets are set to hit the shelves this year[1].

[1] http://www.osnews.com/story/26865/Samsung_s_future_is_Tizen_...

I'm sure they'd like to do this, and it'd be interesting to see. I still think they'd hit an ecosystem problem even if they can run Android apps though, namely that Google won't give them their apps in Tizen's store. They'd be able to sideload them presumably, and there's plenty of Google Apps packages around the internet, but most consumers wouldn't. Google are killing it software wise on Android and iOS, and it's increasingly looking like an OS without first class Google, not Android, support, is going to suffer.

I doubt Samsung could side-load Google apps from a legal perspective. From what I understand, YouTube et al isn't free. You have to be a member of Google's Android license or something; and that's on the condition that the OEMs conform to various compatibility and UI standards within Android. Sorry for the lack of precision there, I forget the exact details of te agreements OEMs have with Android. But the crux of the matter is if Samsung switch to Tizen, Google could easily block their access to Google's Android apps.

As to whether consumers would ever make the switch to Tizen: I'd imagine some might without realising it - not everyone is tech-savvy about these things. But I wouldn't like to comment on the masses. I've tried to predict popular trends before and have been wrong and given how fickle the smartphone market is, I really wouldn't like to make any future predictions just yet.

My point was just that Samsung are, at best, attempting to supplement their Android market, or at worst, trying to replace Android entirely. And that they've already reached the point where they're ready to put their competing OS to market.

Sorry, I should have been more clear. I meant solely from a technical perspective, my anecdote being that I use Android on my HP Touchpad and had no problem finding Google Apps to install, and they work great. Legally though, I think you're right that Samsung couldn't provide them, so they wouldn't be available to the average consumer.

I do agree with you though that we can't really predict future trends, and I guess Samsung are really uniquely positioned as producers of mass market big selling Android products to know what works in Android and what doesn't.

I am reasonably familiar with Tizen. Tizen and Firefox OS are Linux-based Web OSs. That is, they expect to run all their apps in the browser as an app runtime.

Tizen development is split between Samsung and Intel, and I have observed instances where they do not communicate well. I think that puts Tizen at a disadvantage relative to Firefox OS. I am also skeptical that Web apps on mobile devices will become as refined and as power and CPU efficient as native apps.

Regardless of your skepticism, Tizen is being pushed by Samsung as a potential successor to Android and is being shipped well within the 3 years you estimated on.

However if we're talking about our personal thoughts, then I'm not convinced by Tizen either. Not because of the web-apps aspect (remember, Palm's / HP's WebOS is also powered by similar technologies (C++ for performance demanding apps and HTML/Javascript rapid development) and that seemed to work well (or at least, I never had a problem with it). Plus a lot of the time, mobile apps are essentially just frontends to websites anyway (albeit with a few features bolted on to get them past Apple's vetting procedure). And let's not forget that Tizen does support Dalvik as well.

The reason I'm not convinced by Tizen is because people don't really care what Tizen is. They just want their old phone but with better hardware. So Samsung would have be careful not to make such a big deal about Tizen being different to Android and then Samsung would need to make their Android support near to perfect otherwise there could be an uproar from disgruntled consumers claiming they were mislead into buying an incompatible handset. I couldn't see how else Samsung could use their Android market share to leverage a new OS.

But as I said before, I've been wrong in the past when trying to predict how consumers shop. So I'm no doubt wrong again here.

I happen to know a thing or two about the Android compatibility technologies available for Tizen. At least one of them is a port of the Dalvik bits from AOSP, so, inherently, compatibility is really very good. On top of that, one can even blend the Tizen "Home" and task switching with the Android back-stack and task management. That's tricky because "task" in Android doesn't necessarily map to one process. It's an interesting engineering problem and I hope, for entirely selfish reasons, Samsung makes a good choice there.

However, that doesn't make the resulting product a threat to Android. It would start on one or two handsets. It would lack Google's ecosystem, and building the right alliances in the right regions is a heck of a product marketing problem. It would have to be refined over multiple product generations.

Right now, RIM's whole business rests on 1% market share. That's a tall mountain to climb starting from zero.

So, what I'm saying is, even under optimal circumstances regarding Tizen, Google is rational to think they don't have to consider Samsung a threat this year, or for a few years.

Tizen has Android's ecosystem, which is nearly as good as having Google's ecosystem (let's be honest, it didn't really hurt Amazon much did it?)

> So, what I'm saying is, even under optimal circumstances regarding Tizen, Google is rational to think they don't have to consider Samsung a threat this year, or for a few years.

Not really. It will already be too late in a few years when Tizen has proven itself (assuming that it does). As the saying goes, "there's no point closing the stable door after the horse has bolted." And lets also remember that a threat doesn't mean actual damage - threats are warnings about the potential to do danger (and sometimes those warnings amount to little more than bluffs). So Tizen is already a threat, the question is whether Samsung manage to substantiate on that threat and carve a slice from Android's market share. And if Google want to ensure that doesn't happen then they need to already be acting rather than waiting until something does and then trying to react (just look at how well that strategy has worked out for Palm, Nokia, RIM/Blackberry and Microsoft).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com