Samsung has released an SDK for Tizen-powered wearables

Samsung today announced the release of a new Tizen Software Development Kit for the recently introduced Gear S smartwatch. The SDK will let app developers tap into network, call and location based APIs, as well as notifications and the device’s various sensors. While other companies are investing heavily in Google’s new Android Wear platform, Samsung is clearly still hoping that developers will embrace its own Tizen-based platform. It hasn’t completely abandoned Android for its wearables, however, as it also recently launched the Android Wear-powered Samsung Gear Live.

This morning Samsung has announced that the Tizen Software Development Kit (SDK) for their newly revealed Samsung Gear S smartwatch. This will allow developers familiar with Tizen to create apps for Samsung’s Gear S. Samsung, in a blog post, has told developers that they will be able to include “enhanced standalone features”, include “new sensor APIs”, include “rich notifications”, and “transfer data” in their Tizen apps for the Gear S. All of these features will allow developers to create some pretty interesting apps for the Gear S. The blog post by Samsung also makes it seem like getting your Tizen app on the GALAXY App store will be pretty easy which is always a good thing to hear from a developer standpoint. For those of you who are throwing your arms up in the air every time the word Tizen is mentioned in this article because you have no idea what it is, let me help you. Tizen is Samsung’s “homebrew” operating system (OS) that they created for reasons that are still kind of fuzzy to the public. But needless to say it is an Android-like OS that is based on Linux Kernel, again, just like Android, that is on a handful of Samsung devices including the Gear S. Again, Samsung’s purpose and plans for Tizen are kind of fuzzy but we are slowly seeing Tizen pop-up on a few of Samsung’s devices.