Samsung gears up for Tizen rollout as it forms development partnerships with 36 companies

Samsung, the Korean tech giant that beat competitors to become the leading Android handset maker, wrapped up a two-day developer summit in Seoul today during which the company worked to build enthusiasm over Tizen, the company’s early-stage mobile operating system. While reports indicate that the summit brought no major revelations (Tizen smartphone, anyone?), the company did reveal that it had formed partnerships with 36 companies with an aim to develop content on the OS.

The companies that make up the newly-formed Tizen Association (hat tip The Verge) lean towards the software side of the tech industry, with recognizable names like eBay, The Weather Channel, Quixey, Konami, and McAfee sitting alongside various B2B and white label mobile developers. But manufacturers like Sharp and Panasonic also have jumped on board.

Samsung intends to attract a wide range of partners from different industry segments in order to realize the broader vision of Tizen. The company hopes that its Linux-based OS will lure developers in to creating HTML-5 apps, resulting in an OS that can easily reach the lowest of low-end handsets, the highest of high-end handsets, and electronic devices that have yet to connect to “smart technology” on a mass scale.

It’s that latter segment that Samsung likely has high hopes for, as the company has a product portfolio that extends far beyond smartphones. If Samsung ever gets around to making a smart refrigerator, it will probably run on Tizen.

In addition, given Samsung’s weak margins on its smartphone line, Tizen gives the company some hope for earning revenue off of app sales, music, and other services. Right now, every time you shell out a buck for Candy Crush on your Galaxy S4, a cut of that money goes to Google. Samsung would rather sell phones that help it collect revenue after it reaches consumers’ hands, rather than see all that money go to a competitor.

Earlier this year Samsung indicated that a high-end Tizen smartphone would hit the market by August or September, but that time has come and gone with nary a follow-up. A Tizen-based phone looks likely to appear in Spring 2014.

Samsung maintains a strong lead against its competitors in the smartphone space, occupying 31 percent of the market as of October, according to IDC. Apple and Huawei follow, with 13 percent and 5 percent market share respectively. As for smartphone operating systems, Google takes up nearly 80 percent of the market as of August.

Samsung’s not the only firm trying to capitalize on HTML5 in hopes of hitting gold with a mobile OS. This year Mozilla steadily rolled out its HTML5-based Firefox OS in partnership with Eastern European and Latin American carriers. In Asia, Baidu’s Baidu Cloud OS and Alibaba’s Aliyun OS each mark attempts at developing an HTML-5-heavy OS, though neither has gained significant market share.

(Editing by Steven Millward)

(Image via Flickr user retrocactus)