Samsung to merge Bada and Tizen

Looks like Bada is nearing the end of its road as Samsung recently announced that they will be merging their home-grown platform with Tizen, an open source, Linux-based platform currently spearheaded by Intel and Samsung.

Though Bada isn’t exactly a popular choice in the local scene, it once held 2% of the global market share during its prime, making it a viable investment for the South Korean company. However, as competition became fierce in the market where Bada phones are retailed, it only seems logical for Sammy to utilize some of their platform’s features, integrate it with Tizen, before abandoning it for good.

It is said that developers will be provided with the same SDKs and APIs, allowing them to easily create apps for Tizen. Moreover, the use of the same software tools will allow Tizen to be backwards-compatible with apps that were written for Bada.

Samsung didn’t mention when their target date of completion is. However, it’s been speculated that they, together with Intel, will release a couple of Tizen-powered handsets later this year. It’s going to be interesting to see how this will all pan out and how it’ll fare against other newcomers such as Firefox OS and Sailfish OS. Any thoughts on this, folks?

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