Somewhere in the end of September this chart appeared on the net:
So Samsung had something in the works for which it had pretty high hopes. Some time later in the middle of November the news came that Samsung is going to release a platform called bada. The only thing we knew for sure that it will be a platform for mobile phones and not much more.
Now the developer site is open (only documentation for now, but an SDK and an IDE is coming soon). I really like to see new technologies, so I jumped fast to the tutorial section. The titles were promising, location, media, web… so everything a developer would need.
I started reading. C++ API, with coding standards and a few platform enforcements to avoid common pitfalls of the language. So far so good, it’s not as easy as Java but close.
And suddenly page 10 and 11 of UI & Applications crushed all my excitement:
• In the bada platform, there are two application types:
• Base applications:
– Stored in the ROM and not removable from the Application manager.
– For example, phone idle, contact, camera and player.
• bada applications:
– Installable and removable applications.
– All 3rd party applications are bada applications.
– In this document, the word “application” means a bada application.
[...]
• bada platform enforces single tasking
• Only one bada application can run at a time.
– If a bada application is already running when launching another bada application, the first is
always terminated by the platform.
• One bada application can run simultaneously with multiple base applications.
– Multi-tasking is available between a bada application and base applications.
OMG didn’t they learned from the biggest mistake of Apple in the iPhone OS ? Do they really think that a single tasking OS can compete in the SmartPhone market in the long run with real multitasking OSes ?
I really hope they rethink this approach fast, or bada could be an Epic Fail (yes they can force it on consumers for quite a while, but that’s a different story, a lot of mobile makers did that for years until iPhone OS and Android stirred the calm warm yellow waters)