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Since adopting Google’s Android platform, Samsung has witnessed massive growth in its smartphone sales, currently rivaling Apple for the top spot globally. The company’s march to become the smartphone king began in earnest last year with a solid strategy: Design one great device and tweak it slightly for individual carriers as needed. The Samsung Galaxy S was that one great device last year, and its successor, the Galaxy S II, is already Samsung’s fastest-selling smartphone ever.
But Android is only part one of Samsung’s master plan. Part two is Bada, the company’s own proprietary mobile platform. While Android has boosted sales and market share, it has also allowed Samsung to invest time and money in Bada as a platform and an ecosystem complete with its own application store. The upstart operating system is already doing well, reportedly outselling Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 platform in the first quarter of this year, with estimated sales of 3.5 million handsets. So why then would Samsung want to make the mistake of open-sourcing the Bada platform?
The talk of turning Bada into an open-source project comes by way of a “person familiar with the matter” who spoke with the Wall Street Journal. The newspaper ran the story on Tuesday and reports that Samsung may take this step next year. While one can’t predict the future, it’s easy to look back and learn from the past, and in this case, Samsung need look only to Nokia, which has recently dropped to being the No. 3 global smartphone maker.
Nokia’s Symbian platform eventually failed in the market for a number of reasons—a slowness to modernize, a sometimes clumsy user interface, and being late to the game with effective touch controls, to name a few. But Nokia’s decision to consolidate the platform in 2008 with plans to open-source it and rely on other hardware partners to improve the code didn’t help either. A few niche handset makers such as Fujitsu still use Symbian, but Sony Ericsson, Motorola, and even Samsung eventually abandoned the platform and moved to Android. Nokia, too, has moved on by partnering with Microsoft this past February to use Windows Phone as its primary smartphone platform in the future.
Given that Samsung is able to expand Bada smartphone sales and build up the platform’s application store—prior to adding support for Android in March, the Samsung Apps store already had 13,000 Bada titles and enjoyed 100 million app downloads—it simply doesn’t make sense to give up control of the platform. Samsung has little to gain and much to lose in the smartphone market if it does open-source Bada.
Perhaps Bada will mature marginally faster through the efforts of outside companies or developers, but I’d argue that the platform is moving along quite nicely on its own. When Bada first appeared in 2010, it looked like a relatively basic mobile operating system—so much so that I thought it was a mistake to launch the platform. Fast-forward to present day, and you’ll see that Bada 2.0 has quickly gained more advanced features, and the sales figures have proven me wrong. Last month, Samsung announced capable new Bada 2.0 phones.
With Bada 2.0, Samsung has created what it calls a “smartphone for everyone,” meaning it’s a platform for the masses, not for the early adopters, and it has done so on its own. What incentive is there to open the platform up to others? If another handset maker wants to use Bada, it won’t help Samsung’s hardware sales or market share, although the company could gain marginally through its app store or media hub. There’s just no tangible benefit to taking this path, and given the pace of improvement in Bada, no reason to give up control of the platform.
