Tizen Surpasses BlackBerry OS to Become Fourth Largest Smartphone Platform: Report

A new market research report claims Samsung's Tizen OS, which now powers some of the company's smartwatches and mobile devices, overtook BlackBerry OS to become the fourth largest smartphone operating system in Q3 2015. The report adds that Tizen for the first time surpassed BlackBerry to gain a place in top five largest OS platforms.

To recall, the last BlackBerry OS-powered handset, the BlackBerry Leap, was launched back in May this year. The Canadian company has since then has been revamping its smartphone business and has been primarily focusing on its first Android powered, Priv.

Strategy Analytics' Wireless Smartphone Strategies (WSS) service has also claimed that Android registered a year-on-year increase in overall market share. The report added that Microsoft's Windows Phone and Mozilla's Firefox OS, apart from BlackBerry, showed a decline in smartphone platform market share. Further, it said that Apple saw strong demand for the new iPhone models.

The rise in Tizen's share of OS platform has in no small part been boosted by its recent launches. Samsung launched its second Tizen-based smartphone in India last month, the Samsung Z3 (First Impressions). Back in July, Samsung India had announced that it sold a 'record' 1 million units of the Tizen-powered Z1 smartphone in the country in the six months since its launch. Samsung's Tizen-powered Z1, after making a poor first impression in India since its launch in January, did reasonably well.

The South Korean company last month had also announced that its proprietary mobile operating system (OS) Tizen had the second-largest market share in the budget segment of smartphones in India after Android OS.

One of the possible reasons for Tizen OS rise in budget segment can be driven by the fact that apart from Google's Android, there are not many options available in the market, apart from Windows Phone.