Hi,
I’ve been developing for Tizen (Wearable, Web) now for more than 1.5 years and today I finally decided to stop any development and leave this crappy platform. The struggle was there from the beginning but now I’ve decided for myself that enough is enough. Here’s why Tizen is not a professional platform:
Implementation
Samsung tries to do everything in one platform, but the entire concept is not so sophisticated at all. It starts with different platforms (mobile, wearable) and web vs. native. Let me give the latest example: Since Tizen 2.3.2 widgets are now also supported with web apps. The problem is just that they are entirely useless as
- The WidgetInstanceId’s are not persisted after a reboot (but they are with native or mobile!)
- A widget cannot retrieve its own WidgetInstanceId (but it can with native or mobile!)
- A XHR request can be POST or GET, but not PUT or DELETE (of course it makes sense to reduce capabilities for performance and power considerations, but limitations like this are just artificial)
- Many more like system fonts do not get applied, white flickering upon activating etc. etc.
What I want to tell with that is that it’s nice to support web widgets, but all those bugs and restrictions make this ENTIRELY USELESS (unless you just want a widget with a static image?!?). Samsung has no concept about what they are doing nor are they testing it.
Documentation
I’ve already complained about this a year ago but the situation got even worse! For example there is documentation that is obviously not finished i.e when the documentation ends in the middle of a code example. But what actually is FATAL is that there is documentation that is entirely WRONG. For example refer to https://developer.tizen.org/development/guides/web-application/application-management/application-information-and-controls/widget-information.
This documentation explicit mentions that this is available for wearable web applications. After a lot of frustration I was able to get a response from a Samsung developer. His answer: “getContent() for web widgets is, unfortunately, not supported. We understand that the document[see above]can be misleading”. Seriously? Samsung writes documentation for this, implements all interfaces but it is not intended to work – with no error and no exception?
Unfortunately this is not the only case – this is just INACEPPTABLE, even more as the situation got worse over the last year.
Seller Office
The seller office is in fact nothing than a PAID service offered by Samsung to devs. I mean we actually pay them 30% of our income so one could expect some service level. It started already with the registration where you have to send in a copy of a passport issued by the government. My passport, just like the ones from many other countries, is written in multiple languages, also in English. Unfortunately my request has been declined multiple times as “it has to be in English or Korean”. I had to tell them multiple times that this is an official document issued by the government and it they do not only read the first word they could see clearly that English is there as well. What are they doing over there? Was this the first time they’ve seen a non-Korean passport?!?
Then there is the duration of the certification progress. Sometimes it takes 3 days, sometimes it takes 3 weeks and for 2 times I had to tell them that one of my apps was stuck in the progress. Response: “that can happen”.
The next thing that happened was their own miserable store. If you’ve ever uploaded a beta of your app, you know that when you get the email to download the app from the store you’ll first get an error. After ~10 minutes you can successfully download the app. unfortunately their so called “testers” do know nothing about that and rejected the app because it caused errors in the store. I’ve simply reuploaded the app, waited 3 weeks and everything went well.
But it gets worse: once they had screwed their own store, so it did not recognize a privilege I am using. I asked what’s wrong and they told me that this privilege has now another name. So I changed it, reuploaded the app and it failed once again (took again 3 weeks). When I asked them again they said that their response was wrong as they had internal issues and as they have seen that I’ve already reuploaded the app they, they did don’t think they have to notice me.
Btw: as they do not have the required hardware to test my app they let it pass anyway – I have no clue what those “testers” are doing over there. For that that they get 30% they offer a TERRIBLE service.
Community
I do not know why this is the case but unlike other communities, this one is entirely useless! Most questions are answered totally wrong: either the response has nothing to do with the question or the response contains 1:1 the same code of the question. Srsly, are there so many ignorants or does nobody understand English?!? Every community has its flaws, but during my entire career I’ve never seen such a community. To be honest, I do not think that there are any capable devs in here…
Dear Samsung,
If you ever want Tizen to compete with other platforms you have to make huuuuge steps forward. This platform, it’s tools and its support can only be described as “early alpha”, “work in progress” or to be fair: “crap”. Seriously, we can clearly see that Samsung is not a software company (do you even try?). But this is just my opinion which is why I am out – good luck with Tizen.
Bye,
Philippe