Samsung may be the best-selling manufacturer of devices that use the Android platform, but the Korean company also has its own OS - the Linux-based Tizen - which is found in some of its TVs, wearables, and a small number of smartphones.
According to a report from the Korea Times, an anonymous company executive claims Tizen will eventually replace Android on all Samsung devices. The exec says that Samsung needs to establish its own platform in the same way that Apple has with iOS. "If you don't have your own ecosystem, then you will have no future," they told the publication.
While Samsung's Tizen-based Z smartphones sell well in India, shifting 64 million units, it's hard to imagine the OS expanding to other regions to become a potential "Android Killer."
Reviews of the first Tizen smartphone, the Samsung Z1, were far from glowing, and the company will likely have concerns over the continuing decline of non-Android/iOS mobile platforms such as BlackBerry 10 and Windows.
The executive did say, however, that more incentives and support will be offered to third-party Tizen developers, though he or she didn't go into details as to what these would be.
There's no doubt that Samsung wants Apple-like total control over its ecosystem, but the question is whether that would be worth the risk of losing potentially millions of customers who are unwilling to switch from Andriod.
At the moment, everything is still just speculation, but, as there have been rumors of a planned switch to Tizen in the past, an eventual move may not be as unlikely as it sounds.