Samsung said it is working on merging its homegrown “bada” smartphone operating system with Tizen, an operating system project the company is conducting with chipmaker Intel, according to a report in Forbes.

“We have an effort that will merge bada and Tizen,” said Tae-Jin Kang, Senior Vice President of Samsung’s Contents Planning Team in an interview at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). Kang said he didn’t know when the work would be complete but that it was already underway.

When the integration is finished, Tizen will support mobile applications written with bada’s SDK (software development kit). That support will include backwards compatibility for previously published bada apps.

Post-integration, bada and Tizen developers will be given the same software tools (SDKs and APIs), said Kang. The idea is that if developers know how to program in bada, they will understand how to make Tizen apps, too.

By merging bada and Tizen, Samsung hopes to tap into the existing bada community, including thousands of bada app developers.