I found quite amused when I saw the following two news article appeared the same day in Ars.
Two phones with new Mobile OS debut to the market around the same time.
The mobile OS world have been crowded with two dominant players (Android and iOS) and several smaller players (Windows, Blackberry, …) trailing far behind. The convention wisdom is that the new OS need to have tons of Apps to build up a sustainable eco-system. It took Android and iOS many years to build up it. The Windows Phone backed by the powerful Microsoft tried and didn’t get much traction so far.
It it not an easy world for any new OS to come in. So what is the fuzz and motive behind these two new OS?
For Tizen, we can think of it as a way Samsung bargin against Google for Android terms. Even though the critics considered it as a “bad clone of Android”, it still serve the company well strategically. Because the Android is posing tight control on the OEMs.
For Ubuntu case, the Canonical (company behind Ubuntu) introduced concept of “Scope” which detoured from the “App” approach. Basically it allowed the content and service providers to push their content to users with moderate effort for development. You can read this article for more information.
It would be interesting to see how things unfold in this fast changing world.