In February 2010, Samsung unveiled the Wave, the first phone running its homegrown Bada operating system. Five weeks later, it introduced the Android-powered Galaxy S. The two phones arrived with remarkably similar flagship hardware, including the same 1GHz Hummingbird processor, 5-megapixel camera, and 1,500mAh battery. The Wave even reached European stores first and debuted Samsung’s Super AMOLED display technology.
Android would eventually dominate the smartphone market, while Bada faded into obscurity. Yet Samsung’s own platform was not an obvious failure from the start. For a brief period, it sold millions of phones, built a real app ecosystem, and looked capable of becoming a sustainable alternative to Android and iOS.
Samsung built a smartphone OS from its feature-phone software
The word means ocean, and the ambition matched it
Bada, the Korean word for “ocean,” was announced by Samsung in November 2009 and introduced to developers in London the following month. The platform grew out of the software Samsung had developed for its feature phones during the 2000s, including its Mocha and Samsung Handset Platform technologies. Rather than starting from an existing rival, Samsung built Bada around its own established framework, which could be adapted to different kernels, hardware tiers, and device categories.
The timing was unusually charged. Nokia was trying to modernize Symbian, Apple was expanding iOS; Google had finally pushed Android into credible smartphone territory, and Microsoft was preparing to abandon Windows Mobile and begin again with Windows Phone. Across the industry, hardware companies were arriving at the same conclusion: owning the software beneath their phones offered far more strategic control than depending entirely on a competitor’s platform. That desire for independence also explains why Samsung has repeatedly pushed its own apps and services instead of relying entirely on Google.
Samsung introduced Bada on the premium Wave line with a task manager, WebKit-powered tabbed browsing, advanced camera features such as face detection, and a dedicated Samsung Apps marketplace. Early versions could multitask between system functions, although full multitasking between third-party apps did not arrive until Bada 2.0. At the same time, another part of the company was building the Galaxy phones that would soon make Samsung the world’s largest Android manufacturer.
It was an aggressive two-platform strategy, but not an irrational one. For a brief period between 2010 and 2011, backing both Bada and Android looked like a remarkably effective hedge.
For two years, Bada was a real contender
It briefly outsold Microsoft’s mobile platforms
Samsung expanded the Wave series into a broad lineup that covered several price points and form factors. The range included the premium Wave II and aluminum-bodied Wave 3, the affordable Wave Y, and the Wave 533, which paired Bada with a slide-out landscape QWERTY keyboard.
The strategy was that Samsung could undercut many mid-range Android phones while still offering competitive hardware. It worked well enough to produce a surprising result. In the fourth quarter of 2011, Gartner recorded 3.1 million Bada smartphones sold to end users, compared with 2.75 million smartphones running Microsoft’s mobile operating systems.
Bada’s software ecosystem was also more substantial than its later reputation suggests. By late 2011, Samsung Apps listed more than 70,000 applications across Samsung’s supported platforms and had passed 300 million cumulative downloads. A contemporary Samsung research report [PDF] said that more than half of its registered applications and downloads were associated with Bada.
The platform performed particularly well in Russia, where contemporary figures put its share at 10 percent in the first quarter of 2011, rising to 15 percent by the third quarter. It also found buyers in other price-sensitive markets, helped by attractive hardware, strong carrier relationships, and prices aimed at people for whom flagship Android phones and iPhones remained unaffordable.
Bada was therefore never a small experiment confined to a research lab. It was a mass-produced platform sold worldwide and used by millions of buyers.
The ceiling was always the app store, and everyone could see it
Even half of 70,000 was not enough
The comparison that ultimately mattered was not Bada’s sales milestone, but the size of the competing app ecosystems. Although more than half of Samsung Apps’ 70,000-title catalog was associated with Bada, the Android Market had passed 400,000 applications by late 2011, while Apple’s App Store had already grown beyond half a million.
Samsung had built a stable, and commercially credible platform, but independent developers had limited time and money. Most understandably concentrated on Android and iOS, where the larger device bases offered a better chance of recovering their investment.
Windows Phone was ahead of its time in several respects, but it eventually encountered the same app-gap problem: developers rarely had the resources to support a third mobile platform.
Bada’s early technical limitations made that problem worse. Versions 1.x initially barred third-party VoIP services, which kept Skype, one of the period’s most important communication apps, off the Wave. Samsung relaxed the restriction in 2011, but the early absence demonstrated the problem Bada faced. Features such as face-detection APIs and tabbed browsing looked impressive, yet they mattered less when the platform lacked applications many buyers expected to find by name.
Bada reached its high point in the third quarter of 2012, when it accounted for roughly 3 percent of global smartphone sales. That was respectable for Samsung’s secondary platform, but nowhere near enough to reverse the concentration of users and developers around Android and iOS. It also became harder for Samsung to justify maintaining a separate operating system while its Galaxy phones were rapidly turning Android into the company’s obvious route to global scale.
Samsung ended Bada, not its platform ambitions
The ambition moved to a larger vessel
In early 2012, Samsung began discussing plans to integrate Bada with Tizen, a new open-source Linux platform it was developing with Intel as a successor to MeeGo. The company initially described the effort as an integration rather than the immediate termination of Bada, but the outcome became clear at Mobile World Congress in 2013, when Samsung confirmed that Bada would be folded into Tizen.
Samsung did not simply transplant Bada into Tizen. It retained several familiar application programming interfaces and provided migration tools to reduce the effort required to port existing software, although developers still had to adapt their applications to the new platform. Bada’s bug-reporting service closed in April 2014, but Samsung Apps continued supporting Bada applications until December 2016.
Samsung still tried to make Tizen work on phones, beginning with the Z1 in India in 2015, but the platform found longer-lasting success elsewhere. Samsung continued using Tizen on its smart TVs, while the platform also powered several generations of wearables, including the Gear series and Galaxy Watch Active. Samsung later worked with Google to merge Tizen’s strengths into a rebuilt Wear OS, which debuted on Samsung hardware with the Galaxy Watch4.
The twin that lost was never the weak one
Place the Wave beside the original Galaxy S, and Bada does not look like the obvious weak twin. The Galaxy S had a larger 4-inch display and more generous storage options, while the Wave offered a metal body, a camera flash, the same Hummingbird processor, and Samsung’s newest display technology.
The decisive difference was not raw hardware. Android offered a rapidly expanding install base and an army of developers building for devices from multiple manufacturers. Bada proved that Samsung could create credible smartphone software and sell it in meaningful numbers. What it could not build quickly enough was the cycle of users, developers, apps, and manufacturer support that was already making Android difficult to dislodge.