Creating your own OS is a very difficult story, but not so much creating your own OS, which is relatively simple. It’s the other part of the story. The software you want to run on it.
A simple example CandyCrush does not run on Tinzen, and probably never will. Neither do Microsoft Office tools, nor do many other software that many people want to use on their phones. Porting the Chrome browser is not that difficult, probably because the underlying hardware architecture is the same as Android and Apple, but to keep up with it and solve any problems…
That all has to do with the chicken and the egg story, a new OS has no 3rd party software and without the software no user numbers that can persuade the 3rd party developers to port their software to the new OS. And so Samsung will have to spend an extreme amount of money to either do the ports themselves where possible or pay the developers to do the port for them.
When Apple released their OS it was the first modern smartphone with a touch screen that was capacitive and not resistive, which meant you didn’t need a stylus. The OS was also much faster than what we were used to, there was much more screen than we were used to and there was visual voicemail so that for the first time you could choose which voicemail messages you wanted to listen to first. The contacts were finally more than just a name and also had a picture or photo and so on, you could even access the internet with them.
There were no 3rd party apps yet, but they were soon allowed (when the install base was already relatively large, especially for a new phone from a company that had just produced its first phone). So it didn’t take much to convince developers to create apps for the biggest hit in the mobile phone market since it came into existence.
When the next IT giant entered the battlefield and Google bought Android and subsequently offered it, it was possible for many relatively small and aspiring phone makers to finally make a smartphone without the excessive licensing costs of Microsoft’s Windows CE, an OS that also performed poorly. market because it was simply far too heavy for the telephones of the time. So soon there were a lot of Android options, many of which were relatively cheap compared to Apple’s iPhone while still offering comparable options. So even then the app builders were willing to make a port for that large install base because a port works on all Android devices and so it is cost-effective to serve a huge market with a port.
If Samsung now makes its own OS that is not compatible with Android and most likely not with iOS either. Then the install base is simply not large enough to persuade the app bowers. Unless Samsung manages to introduce a killer feature with the new phone and the new OS, it will simply become nothing more than a Samsung phone without 3rd party apps. Even with a killer feature, it is a nice but rather useless phone because the feature can be great, but without apps on the phone it is quite useless nowadays.
So yes, Samsung could have entered the mobile market years ago and competed with Google and Apple. But looking at Microsoft, which has tried this (sometimes very late), even that is no guarantee of success. Microsoft literally threw billions at it and got nothing from it. While the phones really weren’t bad, and the OS was even quite good. The problem was that many apps were not available or only became available much later, which meant that as a user you simply could not do many things with your phone or only did so much later. All the people I’ve seen with a Windows phone eventually switched to an Android or iOS phone simply because the lack of apps was an insurmountable problem even though they were very happy with the OS itself.
Tags: Samsungs research department develop OLED panels Apple Tablets telephones News
