The last couple of weeks have undoubtedly seen significant upheaval in the smart device market. With Google’s plan to buy Motorola Mobility, the supplier of the smartphone platform de jour (Android) will become a competitor to its partners. And with HP ending its manufacture of webOS hardware, the future of this fledgling platform is in turmoil, with any number of companies lined up as potential buyers – and no word from HP on what its plan may be.

When Google’s alliance with Motorola was first reported, it seemed that Samsung’s decision to create its own smartphone platform, bada, made a lot more sense. Here was a platform that Samsung owned and controlled, providing it with a “plan b” to fall back on should its feelings toward Google or Microsoft – its other smartphone platform supplier – change.

With Samsung facing numerous legal challenges related to its Android devices from Apple, the in-house platform also looks to be an appealing alternative for mass-market smartphones in this regard.

Which makes reports that the company is looking to open-source bada somewhat unexpected.

Chequered history
For starters, the track record here is not great. There is only one example of a device platform transitioning from a closed to an open-source platform in the mobile industry, and that is Symbian OS. While this operating system still generates some significant shipment volumes for Nokia, its day in the sun has passed. And at the point where it was made open source, when it was not so clearly end-of-life, this still failed to drive any new impetus in a stagnating ecosystem.

Certainly the perception was that open-source or otherwise, Symbian was dominated by Nokia, making it less appealing to other companies looking to gain share in the then nascent smartphone market.

In mobile, to date there has only been one successful open-source platform – Android. But as much as it is open source in name, Google has driven its development, much of which was done behind closed doors. Indeed, the company has been widely criticised for its strategy with Honeycomb (3.0), which still hasn’t been made available to the community.

At least on some level, the benefits of opening a platform are fairly clear. By increasing the reach of an OS, it becomes more appealing to developers.  By increasing developer support, more applications are available to users. With more devices and apps available, the whole proposition becomes more appealing to customers. Which leads to an increased reach…

But there are a number of question marks here. Developers don’t need a platform to be open-source to write apps, so the argument that the move is intended to drive support from this group seems somewhat flawed. And Samsung has made no noises about licensing bada to third parties, although doing this on a non-commercial basis may make such a strategy more palatable to potential partners.

Going it alone
Samsung, as the world’s second largest handset maker and undoubtedly the vendor with momentum on its side, is clearly able to drive growth for bada off its own bat. If the issue is reducing its dependence on Android, then shipping more bada handsets would be a good way to do this. As the iOS ecosystem has shown, multi-vendor support is not a necessity to create a healthy ecosystem – it is volume that is the key.

In addition, Samsung could look to make bada central to its “connected home” proposition, making this its app platform for televisions and other consumer electronics products. This would enable developers to address a broader and more varied ecosystem while using familiar programming tools, as well as creating the potential for a number of new apps which work across multiple screens – assuming that bada could be scaled to work with large displays, and different input methods.

While there was much lip-service paid to the fact that Google’s mobile internet proposition made it a competitor to operators and (to a lesser extent) some handset vendors, this did not blunt the growth of Android. However, as soon as it was announced the company is set to buy Motorola Mobility, making it a competitor to other Android handset players, there were rumblings that some vendors were starting to keep a very close eye on the situation.

With this in mind, Samsung, as a handset and consumer electronics giant already, is less than likely to make an appealing handset platform supplier.

Steve Costello

The editorial views expressed in this article are solely those of the author(s) and will not necessarily reflect the views of the GSMA, its Members or Associate Members