[Developer] Tizen Developer Summit helps strengthen the Tizen ecosystem

Tizen Developer Summit 2015 India

India hosted the first ever Tizen Developer Summit on July 30-31 in Bengaluru. This event marks clearly the importance of the Indian market for Smartphones and the need for new Tizen application developers. According to a recent report by the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations, India’s app ecosystem could be worth Rs 2,000 cr by 2016, which means lots of app developers and also now Tizen developers.

The Tizen Platform

The Tizen OS allows developers to create applications that can work cross platform on mobile devices, wearables and TVs, all powered by our favourite Linux OS. Tizen is now further spreading into the Smart Home with Smart home appliances and the Internet of Things (IoT). This is an exciting opportunity for us all to help create a platform or apps that can Integrate into un-thought of peripheral devices.

Tizen Sessions

Developers learnt about the Tizen Operating System and the different target platforms that exist. There we tracks covering Platform, Mobile , TV, Wearable, Biz Opportunities and IoT & Cloud. SDK, UI, Multimedia, Gaming, Cross Platform Development and more.
The feedback received by us from developers is that they hadn’t realised the true potential of the Tizen OS and how they could contribute and have multiple monetization opportunities.

Keynote Speeches

During the two-day event there were keynote speeches by Dr. Aloknath De on the need for an Open Tizen platform, current devices and the new opportunities that we have with the Internet of Things (IoT). Ajay Kumar, Joint Secretary of the Department of Electronics and Information Technology India, spoke about the ‘Digital India’ initiative and how open source is playing a crucial role it. There was also Naveen Tewari, CEO of InMobi, speaking about the evolution of mobile monetization from banners to native advertising and how Tizen developers could take advantage of it. Sanjeev Kashyap, CTO and Head of Satellite Network Group at Airtel, spoke about the change in Indian DTV viewership patterns and how this impacts on Samsung Smart TV and Tizen applications.

“TDS 2015 Bengaluru is significant as nearly half of the apps in the Tizen Store are created by developers from India. This reflects the enormous opportunity in India where a large base of platform and app developers continues to show significant interest to develop Tizen OS and high-quality apps,” said Dr. Aloknath De, Chief Technology Officer and VP-Samsung R&D Institute India Bangalore.

“This is also the first Summit which is being organized in the backdrop of commercially available products, for example, the Samsung Z1 smart phone, which sold over one million units since its launch and Tizen Operating System powered SUHD TV which was recently launched in India.” Dr. Aloknath De added.

TDS has also attracted companies and organizations such as InMobi, Unity, Airtel and Nasscom.

New Software Development Kits (SDK)

Tizen 2.3.1 and Tizen 2.4 beta New Software Development Kits were announced at TDS. Now the new Tizen 2.3.1 SDK integrate with Wearables and therefore allow developers to target both Smartphones and other wearables. We have also seen the Integration of native application development into wearables, which is something that lots of developers requested.
Tizen 2.4 beta gives you the option to use Dynamic Animation Library (DALi) for full 3D applications, with the promise of high performance, low power, and low memory consumption. Cloudbox enables users to get more content from several Cloud systems. While Contextual Triggers help to customize Tizen functions based on users behavior.

Developer Device – Samsung TM1

Attendees of TDS were give a Samsung TM1 device in order to developer or port their existing applications to Tizen. The TM1 comes pre-loaded with Tizen 2.4 Beta which will get devs ready to develop for the next version of Tizen. We are hoping there are frequent firmware updates to this model, as previously seen on the Z1, bringing new features to developers. This is a 1.3 Ghz Quad-Core Smartphone, 5.0″ Super amoled HD screen, 1Gb RAM, 8Gb Internal storage, 8MP Main camera, 5 MP Front facing camera with a 2,600 mAh battery.

What’s Next

Over the next few months we expect the Samsung Z1 to be go on sale in more countries, expanding on their current market of India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal. More Tizen based devices are on the way, including the Next Gear Smartwatch and the Samsung Z3 Smartphone.
The Tizen Developer Summit India 2015 was a huge success. Next we have the Tizen Developer Conference 2015 which will be held in Shenzhen, China. The Slogan for this conference will be “TIZEN, THE BEST WAY TO CONNECT EVERYTHING”, and as you can guess there will be a strong Internet of Things (IoT) theme to the event.