A variety of new smartphone platforms are expected to surface this year in an attempt to snatch some market share from Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS. Both these platforms account for more than 90% of the fast expanding smartphone market, as companies like Microsoft and BlackBerry continue to compete against each other for the distant third spot. Several Linux based open source platforms are expected to release this year; Mozilla’s Firefox OS being the latest entrant. There has been lots of speculation surrounding these operating systems, simply for the fact that the target customer base for these operating systems is going to be emerging markets.
An analyst at IDC asserted that there is definitely room for a couple more operating systems in the smartphone market. He further added that although their reach might not be truly at a global scale, there are several markets which could be potentially lucrative. The emerging markets are one such example. An IDC survey showed that iOS and Android accounted for a combined share of 91.1% of all smartphone sales last year. This, however, did not stop the expansion of other platforms as their numbers rose by almost 46% in the last year.
The developer of the Firefox browser and the much anticipated Firefox OS, Mozilla Foundation, claimed that a total of 17 operators are on board and said that plans of expansion in countries like Brazil, Columbia, Hungary, Poland and Spain have already been initiated. Samsung has emerged as a key player among all this commotion. The biggest smartphone maker with a share of 40% among Android phones announced the possibility of launching phones on its Tizen OS, which is a Linux based platform developed in collaboration with Intel. Having support of companies like Orange in France, NTT DoCoMo in Japan, China based Huawei and Intel in the US, Samsung believes that its openness and transparency will attract many carriers and developers.
Some analysts are still in doubt as to which side Samsung will eventually end up on (Android or Tizen), given that Android has been the platform responsible for the company’s swift growth in recent years. Development of apps is considered one of the biggest hurdles that these new platforms have to overcome. Even if these platforms are compatible with apps developed using HTML5, native apps are essential for a platform to progress further.
