Wen 丨 Feng see
Over the past year, there have been many new changes in the smartphone market. Hardware side of the major mobile phone manufacturers are competing for Huawei vacated mobile phone market, some manufacturers launched their first folding screen products, explore the development of future mobile phones, software side Huawei to accelerate the Hongmeng system update rhythm and product coverage, as of the end of this year, equipped with Hongmeng system of Huawei equipment has exceeded 220 million.
Recently, according to the Report of Foreign Media quoted by the World Wide Web, Samsung has closed the Tizen mobile app store and is no longer open to existing users and new users. In fact, as early as the middle of last year, Samsung closed the tizen registration channel (mobile terminal), only old users can continue to use, but the new application download is limited, only get the previously downloaded application.
With the passage of time, Tizen was once Samsung's hope of challenging iOS and Android, and now its recent development in the smartphone market is inevitably regrettable. So how did Tizen go to failure? Are there any opportunities for future development in other areas?
The birth of Tizen was associated with Samsung's insecurity
The background of the era of Tizen's birth is the market integration stage of mobile intelligent operating systems. In the face of the increasingly strong market performance of Android and iOS, many manufacturers are looking for market breakthroughs in the form of a joint form, and Tizen is an integrated body of MeeGo and LiMo systems.
The first is the MeeGo system that is more familiar to old Nokia fans, which is mainly equipped with nokia N9. MeeGo was formerly known as Nokia's Maemo and Intel's Moblin, after which Intel partnered with Nokia and launched the MeeGo platform in 2010 under the leadership of the Linux Foundation.
This is followed by LiMo, a mobile operating system developed under the auspices of the LiMo Foundation, of which Samsung is one of the founding and core members. The birth of Tizen is also related to Nokia, in the face of the impact of iOS Android, the panicked Nokia switched to Microsoft's Windows Phone platform, making Intel and Samsung finally come together.
Tizen has been inseparable from the support of Samsung from its birth to its development, so it is easy to leave users with the inherent impression that Tizen belongs to Samsung. Samsung chose Tizen out of consideration for the security of the industrial chain, to avoid its own hardware ecology relying too much on Google. To drive Tizen's growth, Samsung even integrated its own Bada system into Tizen in 2012 and promoted the Tizen ecosystem within multiple product lines beyond smartphones.
But the embarrassing thing is that even with Samsung's support, it has not been able to drive Tizen's development in the mobile phone. According to Strategy Analytics, the total sales of Samsung mobile phones reached 320 million units in 2015, of which only 1% of Samsung mobile phones using the Tizen system were sold, and the annual sales volume was about 3 million. Tizen's failure on the mobile side is also related to Samsung's product layout, the emergence of Tizen has made Samsung feel safe, but due to its relationship with Google, Samsung has not applied Tizen to more mainstream models.
On the one hand, the main model equipped with Tizen is the Samsung Z series that is positioned to be biased towards the low-end, taking the first generation Z1 in 2015 as an example, only equipped with 1.2 dual-core processors, 300,000 front-facing and 3 million rear-facing lenses, the product competitiveness is lower than that of the same period android One series models, and the poor product configuration hinders the popularity of Tizen mobile phones.
On the other hand, Samsung's "contempt" for Tizen mobile phones is seen by developers and users, reducing the enthusiasm of software developers for application adaptation. After the release of the Z1, Samsung said that the Tizen app store can download 1,000 apps, but this number is not only much lower than Android and iOS, but even the number of Windows Phone software can be compared to Tizen (in 2013, the number of WP app store software exceeded 200,000).
After 2017, Tizen gradually faded out of the smartphone market, and the Samsung Z4 did not launch new models after that. The closure of the Tizen mobile phone app store shows that the development of Tizen in the mobile phone market has officially come to an end, and from the recent revelations, Samsung, as a close partner of Google, is striving to debut Google's new system Fuchsia. Samsung, which has fully embraced Google's software ecosystem, has made Tizen's future in other areas even more uncertain.
Will Tizen disappear?
Smart wearables are another important area of development for Tizen, but on the 2021 Samsung Galaxy Watch 4, Samsung abandoned Tizen for Google's Wear OS. Although there have been many negative news about Tizen in the past year, from the perspective of the establishment and research of the entire industry ecology, Tizen will not disappear due to the failure of mobile phones and smart wearable devices, but will continue to play the role of Samsung's "security card".
As mentioned earlier, Samsung promotes Tizen in several of its product lines, including mobile phones, tablets, smart wearables, smart TVs and refrigerators. Compared with mobile phones and smart wearable devices, Tizen performs better in the field of smart TVs. China Computer News (Issue 11, 2019) once quoted StrategyAnalytics as saying that in the global smart TV market in 2018, "more than one in five smart TVs sold use Tizen." ”
In 2020, data from StrategyAnalytics also shows that under the wave of smart TV popularization, Tizen still ranks first in the world with a market share of 12.7%. The reason is, first, Samsung TV belongs to the top brand in the industry, TV sales have won the world's first place for many years, and Samsung has used the Tizen system on a large scale in the TV field, which has enhanced Tizen's sense of market presence and industry influence.
Second, and most importantly, the smart TV space doesn't need much content apps. Affected by content copyright, several mainstream video platforms can basically meet the daily viewing needs of the vast majority of users, such as domestic Kiwi TV, Aurora TV and Cool Meow Film, foreign Netflix, YouTube and Disney+, etc. Samsung is facing less software adaptation pressure, just need to pry cooperation with mainstream video platforms.
On the other hand, whether a system will really disappear depends not only on how much hardware there is on the market, but also on whether the relevant support platforms and research are still continuing. The author's query found that at the end of 2021 last year, the Tizen application developer official website just launched a new IDE program (for software development), and the Samsung Research Institute also has research topics on Tizen and AI. In addition to mobile phones, those who are still using the Tizen system do not need to worry about the maintenance of the system.
Regarding the future of Tizen, the author believes that Tizen will develop into the IoT field in the future and become an important banner for the combination of Samsung's software and hardware. From the perspective of Samsung's historical development, "joint" and "self-developed" are the keywords of Samsung's development, hummingbird processor, Bada system, mongoose architecture and the next generation of new GPUs cooperated with AMD, etc., Samsung has always had a tradition of self-research, which is inseparable from its unique development process.
Relying on the support of the government and the courage to dare to break through, Samsung launched a price war against the Japanese semiconductor industry in the field of DRAM, and quickly competed for the market in a cost-effective way. So now Samsung in many areas to attack, trying to become the leader of different industries, master enough self-developed technology and patents, to prevent themselves from one day being defeated by other manufacturers in a cost-effective way, in the end, Samsung's self-research tradition comes from its own insecurity.
Epilogue: The conference that changed the mobile phone industry
In 2007, at the Macworld conference held at the Marscony Convention Center in San Francisco, Jobs, dressed in a black turtleneck, jeans and sneakers, took the stage to release the epoch-making first-generation iPhone, which shocked users in the audience with its multi-touch 3.5-inch touch screen, automatic screen rotation and zoom photos. In contrast, mobile phones with small screens and numeric keypads are simply the products of the last century.
Google, which saw the original iPhone, was also amazed by its new design, in contrast to its own imitation of the BlackBerry full keyboard design has no market competitiveness to speak of, and finally Android adjusted the design plan and quickly followed up with the iPhone design concept.
The release of the original iPhone and the rapid development of the Android system have promoted the advent of the mobile Internet era, and at the same time established the "formula" for the development of smart phones in the future period of time, that is, the concept of multi-touch, large screen, and app store. In fact, the current mobile operating system can do not do much innovation, interface design and interaction is only a small repair, market pressure makes manufacturers need to unite, or find industry foundation support to ensure the sustainable development of the system.
Huawei has previously donated OpenHarmony to the Open Atom Open Source Foundation (head of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology), perhaps based on system promotion and survival factors. In the current form of smart phones, the road to iOS and Android will only become a new loser, as strong as Samsung, Microsoft has not been able to find the market entry, in the foundation-led industry co-construction model can give the system new vitality, until the Internet of Everything, virtual interaction and other new scenarios mature, the system can then be adjusted and developed according to the new terminal, surviving the most difficult initial development stage.