As per reports on sammobile, Mr. JK Shin of Samsung has confirmed that their homegrown bada OS is now dead and will be merged with Tizen in a few months. It however speculated that the latest we will be able to see a Samsung phone running Tizen will be only in the late 2013 as Samsung will most probably have its hands full with development of some major phones on Android and Windows Phone 8 that are also to be released in the first half of 2013.
The reports of the two being merged have however struck the community as odd because the two operating systems might have the same set of features but both have been developed until now rather differently, where bada uses a TouchWiz interface on top of C++, Tizen is entirely based on HTML5. It should however work out for the good as bada was definitely not too popular and was restricted only to Samsung phones. Tizen – an open source linux based OS, is receiving significant support from The Linux Foundation, Huawei, Panasonic etc., apart from being developed primarily by Samsung and Intel, both of which were keen on having their own homegrown mobile OS.
The success of such a platform is however very cloudy owing to the fact that Android, iOS and even Windows Phone 8 are already on the high tide. What’s more there are already a lot of Linux-based competitors in the form of Mozilla’s Firefox OS, HP’s OpenWebOS, Jolla’s Sailfish and maybe Ubuntu too. Also not forgetting the fact that RIM is trying hard to get back with its BB10 OS. This leads to the ultimate question whether the market even has space for such a large number of platforms, with each major organization wanting a pie by developing their own OS. It is however good for the consumer and app developers, as they are bound to be pampered by choice all the more in the coming few years.
