Samsung’s in-house mobile operating system Bada is more popular than you might think. Despite being a fairly new arrival, Bada struck a chord with users when it arrived — and in late 2010 it was the hottest OS launched since iOS arrived on the original iPhone. As of Q3 2011, Bada remained nearly a full percentage point ahead of Windows Phone on the market share charts.
Now Samsung has announced its plan to take things to the next level: it’s merging the Bada code with Tizen OS, the MeeGo re-brand that Samsung began shepherding back in September 2011.
Work has already begun on the merge, and when the transition is complete Tizen will fully support the Bada OS SDK. That means apps built previously for Bada should run just fine and that Bada developers won’t have to learn another SDK to code for Tizen — they can keep plugging away with what they already know.
While it might have come as a bit of a surprise that Samsung was merging Bada with the open-source Tizen, it’s certainly a move that makes sense. There was, of course, speculation that Bada itself would be open sourced in 2012, but the moves around Tizen were unexpected. Samsung was already building phones and creating software for three mobile operating systems when they announced that they were getting involved with Tizen, after all.
This is the second code merge in just under two years for Tizen. In February 2010, Nokia and Intel announced that their Moblin and Maemo OSes would be combining to form MeeGo. There haven’t been a ton of high-profile wins for the platform in any of its iterations yet. The biggest, of course, would have to be the Nokia N9.
With the number one producer of phones at the helm, however, maybe things will be different this time around for Tizen.
More at Forbes
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