The Tizen smartphone flopped — and open source is to blame

You know the saying: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Now that Samsung has “indefinitely” delayed the launch of its first Tizen smartphone, can anyone believe any more open source mobile promises?

Open source mobile efforts have a history of failure: Moblin, Maemo, MeeGo, and Tizen are all examples that have been shepherded into oblivion by the Linux Foundation and an assembly of vendors. Canonical’s Ubuntu Touch, Mozilla’s Firefox OS, and Jolla’s Sailfish (derived from MeeGo) all seem to be following similar trajectories to nowhere.

[ Also on InfoWorld: Hands on with the Tizen-powered Samsung Z. | Keep up on key mobile developments and insights with the Mobilize newsletter. ]

Most open source mobile efforts haven’t been that serious The open source Tizen OS has been delayed many times over the last three years, bouncing from Nokia to Intel to Samsung and apparently not going anywhere despite all that movement. Its current mission is to power devices in the Internet of things, which is everything’s mission these days. It’s an easy aspiration in which to hide a sputtering project.

A year ago, Canonical made a lot of noise about its Ubuntu Touch open source OS, with promises of smartphones in early 2014 — but the phones haven’t appeared. More telling, the Ubuntu Touch material on the Canonical’s website is woefully out of date (shipping in late 2013? — uh uh) or furiouslty backpedaling on when the first smartphones will supposedly ship, and Ubuntu Touch was nowhere on the agenda at last week’s OSCON open source conference, which a year ago trumpeted the Canonical mobile OS.

The Sailfish effort seems more of a hobby by former Nokia engineers who can’t let go of their MeeGo ambitions. It’s all about aspiration, not devices. Or progress.

If any of these open source smartphones has a shot in the market, it’s the Mozilla Firefox OS, which is available on real devices in several countries from Alcatel, Hauwei, LG, and ZTE. They don’t show up in any market surveys or mobile Web traffic surveys, so sales are very tiny. But at least there are real Firefox OS smartphones in the wild.

What is it about the mobile world that has led to the parade of open source OSes that go nowhere? There are several reasons, which combine in varying degrees for each project.

One reason, I believe, is that these are treated as hobbyist engineering projects, not commercial endeavors. Volunteers (often unpaid) end up doing much of the work, so it becomes about them. That seems to be the issue at Sailfish and Canonical (whose desktop Linux ambitions have also sputtered). The open source community usually sees major fragmentation and stalling-out as a result of this “what I want” reality. We tend to forget that the vast majority of open source efforts go nowhere. When the community comes together under strong leadership, amazing things can happen. But that’s a relatively rare occurrence, especially for a project as complex as a mobile OS.

But, you may say, Tizen and its Linux Foundation predecessors all had big-name companies behind them, so the leadership and funding has been there to treat the open source effort with corporate leadership. However, these big-name companies all are treating the open source OSes as backup bets, not as serious efforts. Intel, for example, missed the boat in mobile a decade ago, so it has dabbled — and only dabbled — in every platform that came after the iPhone to try to break in. Intel is a chip company at heart, not a maker of finished devices.

Half a decade ago, Nokia had nothing to replace its dying Symbian OS, but with their heads firmly buried in the sand, Nokia’s execs couldn’t accept the end of Symbian, so Maemo, MeeGo, and Tizen never got serious attention at the company. Instead, these projects saw a lot of press releases, then were spun out to an external organization, brought back in, and finally discarded. (Even Symbian bounced between company ownership and open source stewardship, a clear sign of Nokia’s clueless management.) Nokia ultimately adopted Windows Phone, only to be bought and later gutted by Microsoft. For years, its management simply grasped at a series of straws, both open source and proprietary.

A couple years ago, Samsung dropped its Bada OS for Tizen to save money by getting Intel to help foot the development bill. Today, the two companies remain the major powers behind Tizen. But it was clear at the recent Tizen Developers Conference that neither company is serious about Tizen. For Intel, it’s yet another mobile effort.

For Samsung, Tizen is a back-pocket threat against Google, whose Android OS Samsung has successfully adopted to become the second-most-profitable mobile device maker after Apple. The Google-Samsung relationship has been up and down, with Google concerned about Samsung’s user-experience forks and attempts to shove aside Google services (where Google makes its Android money) with Samsung options. When the two fall out, we hear about Samsung’s Tizen plans. But the two companies seem to have made up recently, so it’s no surprise that Tizen is not important again.

Google’s Android is different — and not really open source For many people, Google’s Android is the poster child of open source mobile. But Android is not a really an open source development effort. Google does the development, not the open source community. Google then open-sources the majority of the Android OS, minus some Google services, as AOSP. It’s more freeware than open source.

The AOSP strategy has landed the almost-Android OS into huge markets like China where Google’s services are essentially banned, since such governments often want to keep the monitoring, mining, and money of their citizens under their control, not given over to a foreign company. Google may be hoping that eventually those governments will let in its services, in which case making AOSP devices into Android ones would be a piece of cake. That’s not an open source strategy but a Trojan source one.

Open source mobile OSes don’t move the needle Then there’s the market reality: None of these open source mobile operating systems brings anything to the table that isn’t already there. My hands-on looks at the Tizen-powered Samsung Z and Firefox OS-powered ZTE Open show that lack of compelling capability.

The big reason is that they rely on HTML5, making them essentially browser OSes that run Web apps, with a few extensions to handle the smartphone’s hardware. But Web apps aren’t that good.

Google’s been working on them for a long time and still struggles to make them as capable asf a native app, as a comparison of Google Docs to Microsoft Office shows. HTML5, even with the libraries now available, simply isn’t as capable as a “real” OS. You can see that reality in Microsoft’s Web version of Office and Apple’s Web version of iWork. They’re all getting better, so maybe one day that’ll change — Google’s Android-Chrome OS convergence strategy is banking on it — but not this year or next year.

Being based on HTML5 means that the underlying hardware can be cheaper than what runs Android, iOS, or Windows Phone. Ubuntu Touch, Firefox OS, and Sailfish are all aimed at the developing world, where most people are really poor and can’t afford a $150-to-$250 smartphone like the Motorola Moto E (a perfectly capable Android device if you don’t need LTE), much less a $500-to-$800 device like an Apple iPhone 5s, BlackBerry Z10, or Samsung Galaxy S5.

So they hope by having a free OS that runs on weak hardware that they can get huge volumes of $40-to-$75 devices in the market. The problem is that Chinese, Indian, and other mainly Asian manufacturers are doing the same with older versions of AOSP, selling the equivalent of Android Gingerbread devices — which can do more than HTML5 “OS” smartphones can. Plus, they sell Android devices for the middle and upper classes, so poor buyers can see a path forward to better devices as their economic fortunes improve. Supporting people’s aspirations for a better life is a powerful factor that a bargain-basement mentality doesn’t satisfy.

Microsoft recently licensed Windows Phone for free, though its hardware requirements mean its price range will be in the low hundreds of dollars, aimed at the same middle class that more modern Android versions address and that Apple is dabbling in with its sales of older iPhone models in some countries.

Where this leaves the open source mobile OSes is at the very basic entry level in terms of hardware, apps, and services. That’s a tough sell anywhere. It may be better than nothing, but it’s not what people really want. As hardware gets cheaper (it always does), Android and perhaps Windows Phone and iOS will get the sales in emerging markets. They may cost a little more, but buyers know they will do more and likely last longer, making them a better investment for their scarce dollars.

If anything, the bargain-basement smartphones get people in the door, where they then decide (perhaps with a salesperson’s help) to get something better. I’m confident that’s the role of the Firefox OS smartphones now on the market. It’s a classic, proven sales strategy.

All of these issues — a hobbyist mentality, a back-pocket strategy, and a low-capability focus — explain why open source mobile OSes have gone nowhere. Sure, there’ve been plenty of failures in the proprietary world — Nokia’s Asha and Symbian OSes are now dead, as are Palm’s Palm OS and WebOS (outside of LG entertainment devices), and BlackBerry and Windows Phone continue to struggle. But there’s also been the amazing success of Android and iOS, as well as a continued, determined effort to make Windows Phone succeed.

Until open source mobile OSes have that level of commitment, leadership, and aspiration, they’ll continue to go nowhere.

This article, “The Tizen smartphone flopped — and open source is to blame,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Galen Gruman’s Mobile Edge blog and follow the latest developments in mobile technology at InfoWorld.com. Follow Galen’s mobile musings on Twitter at MobileGalen. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.