Samsung aims to expand Tizen by giving away $10,000 to app developers

To grab the market from Apple and Google, Samsung has announced the Tizen Mobile App Incentive Programme. This new initiative is calling developers to submit their Tizen mobile apps, and in return, the Korean giant is set to give away $10,000.

Samsung has a total budget of $1 million in cash prizes that it will distribute to qualified developers from February through October next year. The prime condition to qualify the programme is to develop one of the top 100 most downloaded apps from the Tizen store.

“We are excited to launch this new incentive programme to help develop and bring the best mobile apps to the Tizen community as well as provide customers with a better mobile experience,” said Woncheol Chai, vice president of global product management — mobile communications business, Samsung Electronics.

Developers can participate in the programme with apps such as gaming, social and lifestyle. Also, Samsung has explicitly confirmed that apps that are already available in the Tizen store can also be selected among the winners.

However, all developers are required to register their app titles for participation on the official incentive webpage. The window to receive participation requests will open starting January next year, while the winners will start getting notifications each month starting March 10.

Primarily targeting at Indian developer community

Samsung made the announcement of its latest Tizen incentive programme at the NASSCOM Game Developers Conference in India. The convention emerged as the place for startups like Mauj Mobile to launch their initiatives for developers. Moreover, this was a part of the ongoing programmes to persuade the Indian developer community to build apps for platforms other than Android and iOS.

In August, Samsung expanded its Tizen smartphone lineup by launching the Samsung Z2. The open source platform is also getting expansion over smart TVs and IoT devices. Apart from Samsung, companies like Panasonic, Vodafone, Huawei and Intel are the members of the Tizen Association that operates its community.