How is NCS better than SDK17?

[myself]

Hi sir,

  I would like to know the advantages of NCS to illustrate customer adoption NCS.

  Thank you and best regards.

[niebert]

Like, "nRFSDK" is deprecated?! You have no choice, really!

[Nguyen Hoan Hoang]

nRF5_SDK is freedom

with NCS you're a slave. You do as you're told.

[daviddedwin]

It appears less risky to me to use the nRF5 SDK for the nRF52 series and these are my comments on it.

If the customer's needs are satisfied by the nRF5 SDK I would stick to the nRF5 SDK. (No, the nRF5 SDK is not deprecated). If I am using the nRF53 then NCS is the only choice.

The nRF5 SDK has been built over the years and has had multiple interoperability issues that have been solved for older iOS, Androids and other vendors, it has a degree of robsutness to handle older OSes.
Test coverage for the nRF5 SDK is far more as it has been developed and tested over almost 8 years as compared to the fledgling NCS.It appears more risky for me to use the NCS for nRF52 as compared to nRF5 SDK at this point.

I expect that eventually as more and more engineering effort is expended on NCS it will slowly get to a usable point on the nRF52 series.

[niebert]

Let me clarify, the idea that SDK is deprecated has been suggested in Webinars about NCS, so it comes from Nordic. Of course, SDK will continue to receive corrections, but not any new features, that is my understanding. For an existing product, there may be no reason to switch.

For a new product beyond BLE connectivity (IP connectivity, Thread, Zigbee, CHIP ...) I would really recommend to switch.

Here is why I switch to NCS for teaching, and this experience might convince you: My aim was to build a toy light control system with LWM2M connectivity for my students. SDK as NCS integrate OpenThread, but that is really where things get messy as one would have to port a LWM2M client to work with the openthread IP API. It's possible, but why do it when you get this combination in NCS for free?!

In NCS/Zephyr, there is a much better chance to have third party software components integrated and it is in fact easy to get the LWM2M demos running on Nrf52833 and Nrf52840 with OpenThread and the Zephyr IP stack. No line of code had to be adapted, only you have to configure the compilation to make it work. And that is the great thing about NCS, there are not only good APIs for IP, with KConfig you can plug different implementations of different platforms together and it works. True modular software!

I agree though that NCS/Zephyr has a steep learning curve and that you have to understand concepts that just would not occur with SDK, notably KConfig and DeviceTree. On the other hand, for an embedded software engineer who might touch embedded Linux as well, learning at least about DeviceTree is a very useful thing to do. That does take time so be prepared for it.

[Nguyen Hoan Hoang]

I lost 2 big customers on the nRF9160 because they don't like NCS. They went with competitor for freedom of choice.  Leveraging existing code is one major decision choice.  So in fact it is Nordic that actually lost them.  They produced 100K units with Nordic competitor.