Summary
- Tizen is an operating system developed and maintained by South Korean tech giant Samsung.
- While Tizen has previously been used on Samsung smartphones and smartwatches, the OS is primarily used on the company’s smart TVs these days.
- As a smart TV OS, Tizen is competitive with Google’s Android TV, LG’s WebOS, Apple’s tvOS, Roku OS, and others.
If you currently own (or have previously owned)
a Samsung smart TV
, then you’ll be familiar with the custom operating system that powers your flat panel. This software is called
Tizen
, and it’s an in-house OS built by
Samsung
for use in its lineup of TV products.
Unlike
Google TV
,
tvOS
, and other software platforms, Tizen remains a fairly enigmatic operating system with little public notoriety. As it turns out, however, Tizen has a storied past — here’s the lowdown on what exactly makes Tizen unique, and why Samsung smart TVs ship with it out of the box.
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What is Tizen, exactly?
Tizen is Samsung’s in-house operating system
Pocket-lint / Samsung
Tizen is an in-house operating system owned and maintained by South Korean tech giant
Samsung
. The OS is built using Linux at a foundational level, and many of its core components are open-source. Samsung released the first version of Tizen in April 2012, with the latest stable release, version 9.0, arriving in October 2024.
Technically speaking, Tizen’s roots extend as far back as 2007 — Intel, Nokia, the Linux Foundation, Sprint, Samsung, and others all played a role in the conceptualization, founding, and building of Tizen. Today, the OS remains largely in Samsung’s hands due to a series of business mergers, changes in development plans, and other industry developments.
Samsung went on to release several
Tizen-powered smartphones
and smartwatches in the 2010s, in an effort to rival Google’s Android platform in the mobile OS arena. Tizen phones ultimately failed to take off, and Samsung switched from Tizen to Wear OS on Galaxy smartwatches after
joining forces to co-develop Wear OS
with Google in 2021.
As a result of all this, Tizen in 2025 is primarily understood to be a smart TV platform, with all the latest and greatest Samsung flat panels shipping with the OS preinstalled.
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What does Tizen run on?
Tizen runs primarily on Samsung smart TVs
Samsung
Samsung provides a dedicated web portal which lists all currently-available smart TVs that run its Tizen operating system. This list includes models such as:
- Samsung Tizen 4K AU7000
- Samsung Tizen 4K BU8500
- Samsung Tizen 4K Q80B
- Samsung Tizen 8K QN900B
Tizen is available across the breadth of modern Samsung smart TVs, whether we’re talking about entry-level panels, mid-rangers, or premium flagship models.
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Why does Samsung use Tizen on its TVs?
It all comes down to software ecosystem control
Samsung
Samsung opts to ship its Smart TVs with its own
Tizen OS
in order to exercise control over both the software and hardware of its large-screen devices. Being the de facto platform holder, Samsung is able to host its own digital marketplace of Tizen applications. The company can also curate the user interface as it sees fit, which it wouldn’t otherwise be able to do if it relied on Google’s Android TV platform.
As a major player in the consumer electronics space, having control over Tizen provides Samsung with the ability to better tie together its smart TVs and its Galaxy-branded phones, tablets, and laptops for a more cohesive ecosystem. For example, Tizen TVs are compatible with Samsung’s
SmartThings
smart home platform, as well as its Smart View system for mirroring content from phone to TV.
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What makes Tizen stand out from the crowd?
Tizen offers a solid set of smart TV features and functionalities
Samsung
Tizen is a full-featured smart TV operating system, with all the essential tools and interface elements that you’d find on rival platforms in the space. The OS features built-in support for Wi-Fi Direct and Bluetooth (for sharing files and screen mirroring), integration with voice assistants like Bixby, Alexa, and Google voice control, and more.
Tizen’s digital marketplace is filled with all the most popular streaming service applications, including Netflix, Prime Video, Apple TV+, Disney+, YouTuve, and more.
One of the most compelling aspects of Tizen is its Multi View feature. As its name implies, the tool allows you to split your screen into separate sections for displaying dedicated content on the same panel. You can split a single Samsung TV screen into quadrants, allowing you to watch terrestrial TV, mirror your Galaxy phone screen, run third-party apps, and more all at the same time.
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