Re:Huawei is working on its own mobile OS in case things sou...
by pjmlp on Friday June 24, 2016 @03:29AM
(#11967496)
Tizen is also a very schizophrenic OS.
First they ditched the API inherited from Meego by their own BADA flavored ones with that Symbian C++ touch, and recently they ditched those again by C + EFL with another new C++ one to avoid losing C++ developers.
Also the native APIs aren't available everywhere where Tizen runs, for example on TVs only the Web app runtime is available to all developers. For native one needs to pay extra.
So besides going back to stone age C style APIs, their continuous change of direction doesn't inspire any confidence to invest into the platform.
The only OS other than iOS and Android that has a managed language runtime is Windows. It's not a bad phone OS. But it is US-made and if you are Chinese, you don't want NSA inside.
Possibly the best alternative is to do an OS derived from AOSP. But only Amazon has done a good job with this, building a really polished commercial product with a complete (for their purposes of media consumption) ecosystem.
Then there is Sailfish. The main problem with Sailfish is that C++/Qt/Linux is not a competitive app environment compared with Swift on iOS or Android's Java-like runtime.
Web app runtimes on Tizen and other contenders taking this route have also proven to be underdeveloped, slow, and too under-resourced to get them past general problems with web apps, framework consensus, etc.