Samsung’s new smartphone to sport Made-in-India apps

KOLKATA: Samsung, the world’s second-largest mobile phone maker, plans to make India a global application development hub for its recently unveiled Bada smartphone operating system. The company is already working with 270 application development companies in India and plans to fund development of 50 such applications, a senior company official said.

The company has received a huge response from Indian application developers. There has been almost 8,000 downloads of the software code to develop applications for Bada in India. More than 30% of all technical discussions around Bada in global developer forums originate from India. “At a time when applications are becoming a key deciding factor in the smartphone market, Indian developers have shown a huge interest,” said Samsung India Electronics director (mobile & IT) Ranjit Yadav. “We expect to build a robust eco-system in India for such development. Already, 20 proposals have been identified for funding,” he said.

Samsung has plans to turn its Bangalore software development centre into a global hub for all activities around Bada and smartphone development. The facility already recruits around 3,000 people which will be expanded in the forthcoming months.

It has also set up a separate laboratory for developers to test out the success of applications on the Bada platform. “The Bangalore facility has already filed 30 patents. Apart from Bada, the unit also undertakes a lot of software processes and hardware validation work for the future product pipeline. This includes browser, wireless protocol development and multi-core computing,” said Mr Yadav.