One thing that comes up regularly in the comments section is the cry for Sony to end its reliance on Android and build an OS of their own. Wouldn’t it be great to see Sony run with PlayStation as the core of their systems, seeing how much success they’ve been having with it, or start from the ground up and control their own destiny while becoming less reliant on Google? In theory, it all sounds great but in reality, it’s near impossible to achieve.

For starters, not even Microsoft has been able to expand beyond Windows on desktop and they were in the mobile category long before Apple and Google. Yet with a lead and billions of dollars in the war chest, Windows Mobile continues to shrink and hovers around 1% marketshare. Why is that? One word: developers.

If anybody can detach themselves from Google, it’s Samsung – ironic, since they’ve been one of the key players in the ecosystem, yet that’s exactly what Samsung has been working towards. Samsung doesn’t want to become the next LG or HTC that has its entire future tied to Google. Sure Android started as an entirely open platform but over the years, Google has worked to slowly close up the OS and where they once promised to not take hardware seriously, you can see them finally read to get into the hardware front with Pixel.

Now never mind the spin around this news because two previous times, Google got ‘serious’ about Android hardware and they failed miserably, but it’s to say that the company does want to better control its own products. To that end, their newer initiatives like Android Wear and Android TV allow for almost no tinkering from hardware partners. This leaves a company like Samsung in a pickle as their role is significantly marginalized and so in order to gain control, Samsung has been building its own OS, Tizen, to power its smartphones, wearables, TVs, and yes, even refrigerators.

If any company is in the position to carve out their own path and bring to market a new OS, it’s Samsung. After all, though they don’t have the kind of cash on hand that Apple and Microsoft do, they certainly have billions and billions more than Sony, they ship over 100 million devices each year which gives them a direct relationship with a wide user base, and they market the hell out of their products. But it seems even that’s not enough to draw in developers. Edgar Alvarez writes for Engadget:

 In an effort to drive up interest, the company has created the Tizen Mobile App Incentive Program, which will offer $9 million in cash prizes from February through October of 2017. According to Samsung, devs with apps that end up in the top 100 chart can earn $10,000 per app — definitely not a bad way to lure people in. Those who want to participate in the program can register starting in “early” January. 

And that’s just it; unless Samsung switched to Tizen tomorrow across all of its devices, even they don’t ship enough hardware to justify developers giving them the time of the day and the vicious circle continues – consumers don’t want to purchase hardware powered by Tizen because there are no apps for it and developers don’t want to develop for Tizen because it doesn’t have enough users. Now Samsung is hoping to change that by giving $10,000 to developers and that might be incentive for indie devs but not for Instagram, Yelp, Pandora, and whatever other big developer you can think of. Keep in mind that almost none of the big app developers have their apps available on Windows Mobile which is why Microsoft is betting so heavily on their Windows 10 across all device initiatives.

For consumers, adopting an OS that’s not iOS or Android turns into a terrible experience as any accessory or service they’re interested in has a high risk factor of not working with their new phone. Therefore, in the case of Tizen, the OS continues to power mostly cheap phones whose owners are using them as nothing more than a glorified flip phone. For Sony to entertain the notion of their own OS would be to invite a pyro with a blow torch into their vault where they keep all of their cash.

By the way, does anybody remember Firefox OS or Palm OS?

Discuss:

Do you think Sony should invest in their own OS or do you find it as problematic as I do?