After the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona where Samsung made as much noise as possible about Wave and Bada I have remained curious about the development of yet another OS platform. I really wonder how Samsung plans to actually stand up to the open platform of Android and the existing WinMo and other fringe platforms like LiMo. How could they get developers to actually adopt still another OS and thus fragment the market yet further… not to mention make things even more complicated for development houses.

It is quite obvious what motivates them.. they want to replicate Apple’s success and to a lesser extent to Android’s extent. Samsung wants an app store that allows them a piece of the pie!

Being one of the largest handset manufacturers in the world (about 20% of world wide handset sales) of course does give them a certain pull. But this didn’t do it for Nokia which remains the largest by far but still struggles with imposing Symbian as a viable platform and it’s other ventures such as Maemo/MeeGo flounder. Nokia’s OVI remains an app store player but not a run-away success.

Samsung has recently launched their first Bada phones in Europe and claim plenty of big name content providers who have developped in Bada : Electronic Arts, Gameloft, The Associated Press, CNN, WeatherBug, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Universal Film, Layar, Expedia Affiliate Network, ZAGAT, and many others.Including well-known applications such as Need for Speed Shift (EA), Weather Bug(WeatherBug), Zagat to go(Handmark), and Travel Booker(Expedia) are cited as Bada developers.

But can Samsung really replicate what Apple has done with a closed circuit ? Well a tidbit in their press release seems that they hint at not keeping it closes :
This content will facilitate the development of applications for not just the Samsung Wave, but all other mobile phones that adopt Bada as their platform of choice.

So Samsung plans to licence out the Bada OS ? Seems like it.

But they plan on then selling all applications developed via their store as evidenced by this statement :
Applications developed with the bada SDK can be sold through ‘Samsung Apps’, Samsung’s application store.

Now that seems strange… would LG developers to sell apps for their Bada phones via Samsung’s application store ? I think NOT! So what are we talking about here ? A multitude of app stores for each handset manufacturer ?

I really don’t have the answers but I thought that this article was very interesting article which gives a projected market like this :

So in that hypothetical model the market shares among the Top 10 would be in a couple of years something like

Symbian (Nokia) 35%
Android (LG, ZTE, SonyEricsson, Motorola, Huawei) 23%
Bada (Samsung) 21%
Blackberry (RIM) 4%
iPhone OS/X (Apple) 3%
all other smartphone makers which would include 15 more brands for Android, plus HP/Palm, Microsoft, plus some Japanese etc on Symbian, Linux Mobile etc would share the remaining 14%

Whatever the case it is quite exciting to see what will happen over the rest of year. Lets watch and see..

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