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
[1].
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
Links:
------
[1]
https://developer.tizen.org/development/guides/web-application/application-management/application-information-and-controls/widget-information
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