India’s first Tizen Developer Summit held in Bengaluru

Close on the heels of Samsung Developer Day 2015 which was held on the 1st of June 2015, Samsung is holding another event for developers in India. This time, for its very own Tizen OS which runs on quite a few of Samsung’s offerings. The Tizen Developer Summit is underway in Bengaluru and is being conducted on 30th and 31st of July 2015. The summit is aimed at developers who’re keen on learning more about Tizen and developing applications for Samsung’s smartphones, wearables, TVs and whatever else Samsung has planned to infuse Tizen with. 

The conference showcased various features for not only developers but also for ISVs, OEMs, hardware and software vendors. Bengaluru being the venue might have been a surprise for the most of us but as we begin to look at the bigger picture around the new ecosystem we start to see the reason as to why Samsung chose Bengaluru for the Tizen Developer Summit. Of the entire developer populace, only one percent are from India but this one percent are highly concentrated towards the mobile platform. In the last one year, Indian developers contributed to 27 percent of the applications published on the Tizen app store. More than 500 Tizen developers are from Bangalore and during the period between January 2015 to July 2015, the Tizen app store saw an increment of 84 percent in terms of applications developed. Needless to say, most of these were to the credit of Indian developers.

Keynotes
Dr. Jason Dongwon Kwak, M.D. Samsung R&D Institute Bengaluru started off the conference by shedding light on what Tizen aims to do in the long run. He was then followed by Dr. Aloknath De, CTO, Samsung India, who highlighted the fact that most of the apps on the Tizen store were developed by Indians and the first smartphone that runs on Tizen, the Samsung Z1 sold over one million units in a period of 6 months. 

Dr. Ajay Kumar, Director-General, NIC and Additional Secretary, Department of Electronics and Information Technology, Ministry of Communications & IT, Government of India then took to the stage to enlighten the audience about the ‘Digital India’ initiative and how open-source projects like Tizen were essential in transforming India.

Other speakers included, Naveen Tewari, CEO of InMobi and Sanjeev Kashyap, CTO and Head of Satellite Network Group at Airtel. InMobi announced the integration of their monetisation platform MIIP with the latest Tizen SDK and Airtel announced Tizen based TVs that did away with STBs all together. 

New Tizen Software Development Kits released
At the summit, new SDKs were released with version 2.3.1 being from the stable branch and version 2.4 for the beta branch. Noteworthy changes to the new SDK include:
 

Tizen 2.3.1

• Wearables integration
• Native apps

 

Tizen 2.4 Beta

• Dynamic Animation Library (DALi) for 3D applications
• Better optimised for hardware usage and power consumption
• Couldbox Feature – interconnectivity with multiple cloud platforms
• Contextual triggers akin to Google Now

 

Future versions

• Application portability across mobile devices, wearables, TVs and home appliances

 
Other highlights
As a move towards encouraging more and more developers to start working with Tizen, it was announced that for the first year that an app remains on the Tizen store, all revenues from app sales are given entirely to the developers. 
The next Tizen Developer Conference (TDC) is to be held in Shenzhen, China on September 17-18, 2015. 
All developers in attendance were given Samsung Z3 reference phones which have hardware that is nearly similar to the consumer model of the Samsung Z3. See below for rumoured specifications of the Samsung Z3.

What is Tizen?
Tizen is a three year old operating system based on the Linux kernel and the GNU C Library. The open-source project is based within the Linux foundation and its evolution is controlled by a Technical Steering Group which comprises of Samsung and Intel. With a purpose of providing a consistent user experience across a plethora of devices including smartphones, wearables, tablets, smart TVs, computers, cameras, media players, printers and even home appliances. 

TIzen has already been implemented in a lot of devices since its inception. The Samsung Gear 2, Gear S and Gear 2 Neo run Tizen and even the original Gear which ran Android at the time of launch was shifted to Tizen as the main OS last year. Samsung’s NX200 and NX300 cameras run on Tizen. Not restricted to just entry level cameras, even the high-end mirrorless NX1 shipped with the homegrown OS. Moreover, Tizen being open-source, most of the source code powering these devices have been released. The Samsung’s Z series of smartphones are all based on Tizen. The Samsung Z which had a 4.8-inch AMOLED screen and was powered by a 2.3 GHz quad core processor was launched in Russia last year. 

Closer to home, Samsung introduced the Samsung Z1 in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and India. The phone sold over 500,000 units and has gone on to reportedly become the best selling smartphone in Bangladesh. The Samsung SUHD series of TVs also run on Tizen. We’ve been testing the 65-inch SUHD UA65JS9000K smart TV and early impressions of the OS make it out to be quite impressive.

Samsung Z3 vs Samsung Z1
All developers attending the event were given a reference Samsung Z3 for developing apps. Here’s a short specification comparison between the two phones.