Samsung to stop using Android on its devices

The world’s leading smartphone maker Samsung will this year shift from using Google’s Android operating system onto Tizen, an open-source operating system the company has been developing with chipmaker Intel.

This was announced by Lee Young Hee, executive vice president of Samsung’s Mobile Business, who said the company is set to roll out Tizen-based handsets before year end.

“The Tizen phone will be out in August or September, and this will be in the high-end category,” Young Hee told Bloomberg.

“The device will be the best product equipped with the best specifications.”

This is a surprising move by the electronics maker considering the company has just recently launched the Samsung Galaxy S4 on the Android platform.

Samsung has not explained the sudden shift, but Chase Perrin, an official with the Tizen Association, told Bloomberg: “Android, among other mobile operating systems, is tightly controlled. As an open-source software platform, Tizen is designed to make it easy to develop for a range of devices.”

Experts believe the Samsung Galaxy S3 owes its huge success to the Android OS.

“The Galaxy series couldn’t fly with any other OS, especially given how little Samsung has invested in Windows Phone,”Aapo Markkanen, a senior analyst at ABI Research, blogged.

There are no Tizen powered devices in the world just yet, and Samsung’s new phone, yet to be named, will be the first to operate on the platform. Intel and Sprint have also announced their plans to move away from Android to Tizen in the near future.