Bada

» see developer.bada.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

bada means "ocean" in korean. samsung shipped it as the operating system on the wave s8500 on may 24 2010, several months before the galaxy s established samsung as the android flagship vendor. the strategy was the strategy any phone maker would have wanted in 2010: own the os and the store, and avoid being a hostage to google. the wave s8500 was a real device with a super amoled screen and an 8 megapixel camera, and it sold a million units in its first month. in europe and southeast asia it had a real run.

under the hood bada was either nucleus rtos or linux depending on the device, with a four-layer architecture and a c++ developer sdk. samsung published an sdk and ran a small developer program. the bada app store had a few thousand apps at peak. on paper this was a serious attempt at a third smartphone os in an era where the windows phone people were trying to do the same thing with significantly more marketing budget.

the bada hardware sold well enough that by q3 2012 samsung was shipping 5.2 million wave units per quarter, which put bada at around 3% of global smartphone shipments. that put it above windows phone in the same quarter. and then samsung pulled the plug. on february 25 2013 the company announced that bada would be merged into tizen, the intel-and-samsung linux-mobile project, and no new bada devices would ship. the bada app store stopped accepting new submissions in early 2014.

i never saw a wave in turkey. samsung sold them but never pushed them, and ttnet and turkcell ran their phone marketing around android galaxy devices and the iphone. the wave hardware looked nice in catalogs and was priced just below the galaxy s. anyone in turkey who walked into a turkcell store in 2011 with money for a samsung phone walked out with a galaxy. bada was the unsold variant on the shelf, the one for people who did not know the difference.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

the wave s8500 was samsung's actual attempt at a flagship phone before the galaxy s line got its identity sorted out. the super amoled screen was the best mobile display on the market in mid 2010, and the camera was competitive with the iphone 4. it also had haptic feedback that was years ahead of competitors. european reviewers liked it. samsung sold a million units in the first four weeks at a moment when only the iphone was doing those numbers.

the wave 2 in 2011 and the wave 3 in 2012 extended the line. samsung shipped midrange bada phones aimed at the asian and european prepaid markets where android had not yet saturated the under-200-euro price band. for a window the wave 525 and wave y were genuinely useful cheap smartphones, and bada at the low end was lighter on hardware than android 2.x was.

~ what killed it ~

android won. by late 2012 android had passed 70% of global smartphone shipments and samsung was the dominant android oem. running a parallel proprietary os against your own android volume made no internal sense. samsung also needed a hedge that was politically usable against google, and intel was offering tizen as exactly that hedge with the additional benefit of being shared with a chip vendor. bada got the merge call. the samsung galaxy line absorbed the wave price points. the bada engineering team rolled into tizen, which itself never became a real phone os and ended up on samsung's smartwatches and refrigerators instead.

~ what got buried with it ~

the wave hardware lineage is the one piece worth remembering. the super amoled display work that samsung perfected for the wave became the standard for every galaxy device that followed and eventually became the screen tech that iphones started buying from samsung in 2017. the bada app store and developer program left no trace. the bada apk format had no migration path, and the few thousand apps that existed are not archived anywhere. the developer accounts went dark in 2014. if you find a wave s8500 in a turkish flea market today, the phone boots and the apps that were preinstalled still run, but there is no way to get a new app onto it. the developer servers have been off for over a decade.

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