I'm truly sad this failed. The Ubuntu phone was the first phone I've had that I didn't hate. I loved the idea of the phone, and it was nice to be able to use the same scripts that I use on my laptop on my phone. I'm really sad that Canonical never gave it a good effort.
I'd pay a lot of money for an actual open linux phone, but nobody wants to make one.
There is SailfishOS[1]. It's real Linux. It has proprietary parts (e.g. Android drivers, UI widgets, core apps), but Jolla (the developer SailfishOS developer) has contributed a tonne to Linux on the mobile[2].
I use it as my daily phone, and I've developed apps for it, so feel free to ask me any questions.
SailfishOS should hopefully be available for the Sony Xperia X soon (within a month according to their blog posts).
I am interested in Sailfish, but I expect to be able to buy a phone running an OS on my carrier, and it doesn't sound like that is coming with the Xperia X or anything else anytime soon.
If you have to flash the OS to use it, they've already lost, and I'd argue that was one of Ubuntu Phone's biggest problems too.
Besides the fact that the Neo900 is still not available and might never actually end up available, its specs are way outdated. It might have served users back in 2013 when there was still hope the product will become available quickly, but at this point it’s like trying to resurrect Sharp Zaurus hardware and expecting users to not find it horribly antiquated.
(For comparison, the Jolla 1 phone has equal or better specs to the Neo900, but its users have been clamoring for better hardware for years now.)
The website doesn't make the stat easy to find. It's here http://neo900.org/estimate (spoilers: it's estimated to be 990 EUR before tax, or about $1100)
I definitely think Canonical bit off more than they could chew:
Mir
Not making use of existing Android drivers (I think they resolved this issue later on)
Building their own app deployment and isolation system (Snappy)
Building their own browser (although they did wisely reuse CEF, or was it WebEngine?)
Convergence
I really wanted Ubuntu Touch to succeed, I even backed the Ubuntu Edge when it was first announced.
However, I think Jolla/SailfishOS did a number of things better:
They used Wayland.
They used existing Android drivers (using libhybris).
App installation/deployment is done using regular RPM. There's currently extremely minimal app isolation. This is a very hard problem. Let the Flatpak folk solve it, then adopt it.
They used Nokia's browser (based on Gecko) and office suite (based on Calligra). These were used on the N9, which had a larger install base than all existing Linux-on-the-mobile projects.
They used a well-tested ConnMan/ofono combo (these were used on the N9, see above).
The libhybris situation is a pretty miserable compromise. You land on an old, busted Android kernel, with a userland that mostly works. It exists only because the major SoC vendors have no motivation to support a chip after they've shipped a BSP that successfully builds and makes the hardware occasionally provide the desired features.
(Apologies for being a bit harsh; I've wasted a ton of time recently hacking on Allwinner and Amlogic chips)
The libhybris situation for the time being is "good enough".
Sony last year announced their intention to "mainline" their Xperia devices (their main phone brand)[1]. This could eventually mean running Android on the latest mainline kernel, and perhaps even GNU/Linux[2].
[2] Jolla (developers of SailfishOS, a real-Linux-on-mobile OS) announced in February that they are partnering with Sony to bring SailfishOS to the Xperia X (https://jolla.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Sony_Jolla_pres...), which should hopefully be out this month. It's taken a long time, but real-Linux-on-the-mobile is getting closer.
Linus has a vested interest in taking credit for the most prolific mobile platform. I don't think there is any common sense in the 'Android is Linux' argument beyond that though.
As a software platform, it isn't even remotely similar.
Android is an operating system built on top of the Linux kernel project. "Android is not Linux but ${DISTRIBUTION} is" is just stupid, operating systems simply cannot be compared to a kernel.
Linux is a kernel, and Linus has all the right in the world to make that claim. It doesn't in any way strengthen your argument though because of the different userland. You are comparing apples (operating systems) with oranges (kernels).
I tried to tell that his "real-Linux" (kernel) already exists (I don't know if he meant (in another comment, he said that he meant userland) userland e.g gnu, freedesktop.org etc by "real-Linux")
Jolla/Sailfish had (and quite frankly, continues to have) many problems, making it unsuitable as a phone, or for mobile development.
* Jolla has always used (and continues to use) outdated hardware, Ubuntu Phone OS shipped with or ran on reasonably performant hardware. Only after several years is Jolla now discussing the possibility of porting the OS to a somewhat modern device (Sony Xperia)
* The Sailfish SDK relies on VirtualBox for the emulator and for native compilation, a drain on resources and memory, and an indication that the development team was not well versed in creating cross compilation ecosystems or tools. Ubuntu Phone SDK was limited to Ubuntu Linux, but ran natively (Sailfish SDK required VirtualBox even on Linux)
* For years, Jolla withheld from or misled the public on the state of internal affairs (Canceled tablet, no refunds for crowdfunders, CEO and key employees quitting, lack of funding, relying on volunteers for key areas of development)
* Sailfish OS has always lacked basic security features for applications (QT Quick embedded in plain text) or for the phone itself (encryption, permissions). Sailfish's security problems may be just as problematic as Tizen's
* Sailfish OS was never true open source, even less so than Android, although it has always been advertised as such.
* Very poor/non-existent developer relations - A few developers attempted to make games for Jolla, but encountered serious problems that the developers weren't interested in fixing (i.e. SDL2 on Jolla not supporting landscape mode, preventing games from being submitted), even worse, the developer for the SDL2 Wayland port flat-out refused to fix the problem or provide the source code for other people to fix the issue. Such problems or resistance from the developers were never encountered on Ubuntu Phone OS.
> Jolla has always used (and continues to use) outdated hardware
But Jolla has shipped. Jolla 1, Intex Aquafish, Turing Phone, Inoi R7[1]. Limited runs of Jolla C, Tablet. Sony Xperia X should be coming soon. This is a startup of (these days) less than 50 people, cut them some slack, they're competing with giants.
> The Sailfish SDK relies on VirtualBox for the emulator and for native compilation
It's infinitely more efficient to build and ship 1 VirtualBox OS Bundle, v.s. building and maintaining at least 3 different cross-compilation toolchains (one for each of: Windows, MacOSX, Linux). With limited developer resources, I'd choose the latter route too.
I also prefer this setup to things like scratchbox2 and Android's (or iPhone's) emulator. It's portable between base OS's and it makes use of existing and well-known tools (VirtualBox).
> For years, Jolla withheld from or misled the public on the state of internal affairs
The Tablet fiasco could have been communicated better. At the same time, that's the risk you take with Kickstarter/IndieGoGo. It's a startup.
I don't agree with any of your other points, they're a startup, it's not all smooth sailing.
> Sailfish OS always lacked basic security features for applications (QT Quick embedded in plain text) or for the phone itself (encryption).
In regards to packaging, or app isolation, Jolla's wisely chosen to work on "mobile problems" and leave package management to the heavyweights (e.g. RH with Flatpak).
VPN support was added in the last release. The public git repos show ongoing work to filesystem encryption.
> Sailfish OS was never true open source, even less so than Android
Significant pieces of SailfishOS are proprietary. However, I think it's a more "inclusive" OS than Google's Android. Google develops Android. SailfishOS is GNU/Linux, it's developed by Red Hat (e.g. Linux kernel, systemd), Intel (Connman, ofono), Qualcomm (BlueZ), Qt (Qt Company), Mozilla (Firefox), GNU (CLI tools), KDE (Calligra), Collabora (gstreamer), etc.
I'm hopeful that one day SailfishOS will be fully open source.
> But Jolla has shipped. Jolla 1, Intex Aquafish, Turing Phone, Inoi R7[1]. Limited runs of Jolla C, Tablet. Sony Xperia X should be coming soon
Proving my point - all of these devices (except for Experia, and possibly the Tablet) ran on hardware outdated at release time. Ubuntu Phones ran on reasonably performant hardware (Edge, Meizu MX5 and Google Nexus 5) at release time.
Your personal preference for VirtualBox, or VirtualBox being "well known", is irrelevant. Virtualization is unnecessary and a waste of resources compared to cross compilation and emulation via QEMU.
> At the same time, that's the risk you take with Kickstarter/IndieGoGo. It's a startup.
The tablet problem was more than a matter of communication. It demonstrated that Jolla wasn't ready for prime-time the way they advertised. Backers will empathize with a product not ready for prime-time if the people involved are transparent. Whether you like it or not, unaccounted product delays, CEO's quitting without explanation, staff being laid off, and other internal matters do erode consumer confidence and burns bridges.
> VPN support was added in the last release. The public git repos show ongoing work to filesystem encryption.
Perhaps Russian government involvement is finally starting to pay off? They certainly couldn't have been bothered to add these things towards the beginning.
> I'm hopeful that one day SailfishOS will be fully open source.
Sure, with less than 0.1% of the market space, what do they have to lose. They've certainly lost a lot of other things though.
> Disagree. They hold fortnightly meetings
That wasn't always the case, certainly not the case in 2014/2015. Sailfish's lead SDK developer actually spent more time promoting his personal CMake alternative than his work on the Sailfish SDK.
Ubuntu Phone OS developers were always responsive to SDK issues, even when they didn't have the answer.
Error by me in the last sentence, I meant to say "former", not "latter".
> It's infinitely more efficient to build and ship 1 VirtualBox OS Bundle, v.s. building and maintaining at least 3 different cross-compilation toolchains (one for each of: Windows, MacOSX, Linux). With limited developer resources, I'd choose the latter route too.
"People crying for a third alternative mostly didn’t do so because Android or iOS had a bad reputation, or were too limited, or gave people a bad user experience, but because they (rightfully) feared a Google monopoly."
Do consumers really care about monopolies? I believe they don't and I think nowadays Android's reputation is not very good. People have a whole bunch of useless outdated android devices laying around, have some horrible experience with them and could appreciate an ungoogled/unappled linux-like distribution with more control for the user and updates.
People almost definitionally do not like monopolies - whether they realize it consciously or not. A monopoly has price power. They get to decide that the market will get fewer units of the good/service than the market would otherwise demand. Now this isn't some sort of "if someone wants a phone they should get one." I'm saying there are fewer people who own a phone, full stop, than would if the market were efficient. This actually hurts both sides - the monopolist winds up selling less goods/services than they could, too. (This is also where things like product tiers come into play. Those are still inefficient.) From an efficiency stand point, monopoly power leaves everyone worse off and produces waste.
The truth is, there doesn't have to be conscious effort on the monopolist's side to arrive at a monopoly. If anything, markets tend to award and create monopolies.
> People have a whole bunch of useless outdated android devices laying around, have some horrible experience with them and could appreciate an ungoogled/unappled linux-like distribution with more control for the user and updates.
I don't think this segment is very large. In fact I doubt most people care about the mechanisms of updates at all. The market of mobile is, as far as I can tell, basically a race to the bottom: consumers expect devices to be (relatively) disposable things, not worth expending too much effort worrying over. They want something that works well enough for their use that they can throw away and replace without being burdened by too much other context.
It isn't a large segment, but it could easily be a relatively high profit margin. Look at projects like the Pyra -- it's effectively a one-man show producing an LTE connected ARM handheld while he holds a day job running a video production company. He has next to no upstream vendor support. It's been a slow road, but he's made it to the point of mass producing most of the components, and is shipping developer devices.
This dude is at a major disadvantage in absolutely every single way when it comes to access to economies of scale, access to vendor documentation, and sheer manpower, but is still managing to ship a device geeks are clamoring to buy.
I can't help but think one of the big players could serve those same geeks in a much more efficient (and profitable) manner, given their resources compared with what a community project can accomplish.
He didn't say a lot of people were crying out for a 3rd way, just that some were. I'm guessing there were not many.
It's the same with the GNU/linux desktop. In the overall user population only a tiny fraction of people care about "freedom" and most (including me) are happy to go with Windows or OS-X.
The fraction of people who care about this stuff is vanishingly small.
Android was a bait and switch, it was touted as an open platform but most of that has been stripped away with functionality being shifted to proprietary packages.
You'd think they could, but they had Windows Phone, and that flopped. Not saying that Ubuntu Phone couldn't do better, but unless they got devices in carrier's stores, they wouldn't have a chance.
I've always installed Ubuntu from an ISO, never pre-packaged on a PC.
Similarly, any business model can't rely on handset sales. Apple and Samsung sell them by the millions and we're talking a few hundred here.
Community ROMS such as Lineage OS supporting (per wikipedia) 165 devices suggest that there is grass-roots support for tinkering. Devise a foolproof method for device support on any handset (Halium) and solve the app gap by containerizing Android (Anbox) and the users may follow - but on their own hardware, NOT a custom device.
UBports lives on by the community, for the community - in spite of Canonical abandoning the platform.
That's fine for a tiny community, but Canonical is a business, and they need to sell devices in decent volume. That means getting them into US Carrier stores. I'm glad you guys are able to continue using, but as long as the path was to flash a custom rom, they were never going to hit mainstream.
> Canonical is a business, and they need to sell devices in decent volume
I'm saying that approach was never going to work, when even an established vendor like RIM couldn't chisel out a market with their revolutionary BB10 OS.
I think the biggest reason Window Phone flopped is actually the same as ubuntu and firefox, they were trying too hard be different. Ubuntu had it's scopes thing, MS had their tiles, Firefox had their adaptive search.
I think if they'd focused on being better than android, faster and more developer friendly, then they would have had a lot more luck.
Everything listed may or may not be true. But I think it elides over the biggest reason it failed: failure is easier than success. Microsoft didn't make those mistakes (it made different mistakes, to be sure) and spent a shitton of money and didn't have the sort of success Ubuntu Phone would have needed to be sustainable. So it's really hard for me to believe that these reasons are the biggest things standing between Ubuntu Phone and success. I think it's far more likely that the market doesn't need a third phone OS in and of itself, and none of these competitors offered a "killer app" that you couldn't have on iOS or Android that consumers actually wanted.
Another factor the article only partially addresses are "moat apps", which are really platform services. Mapping is perhaps the leader among these, and arguably the killer app during the advent of mobile. Did Ubuntu Phone have any mapping solution at all?
Even if it did, the article cites "Mobile data was unreliable, [...] The location service was very unreliable." bodes extremely poorly for the device being usable for mapping services at all.
I think the biggest factor, mentioned in this article, was the (lack) of platform. Android hardware is so radically different. Only window mobile had arm+uefi (with a locked bootloader).
Device trees aren't used on most mobile hardware. Mobile ARM is like the PS4 .. Intel arch chip, but totally not PC compatible.
I feel like Microsoft needs to give out the keys to their phones. Their platform is standardized enough devs could buy up old hardware and make a real oss mobile operating system without having to build totally different kernels per device.
What we are seeing is convergence from the android direction. Android devices continue to get more and more powerful, only thing that's painful to do on android is develop android apps but its possible with AIDE (unlike ios which requires at least a machine running in the cloud to build). Debugging on AIDE is not great at all but for more simple apps it works fine. Using termux you have the entire console gnu stack, ruby, node, gcc, python, pip, git, emacs, etc... You even have csound for doing serious academic level electronic music composition on android. Combine those kind of tools with galaxy s8's ability to turn into an android desktop with the base station and you have Shuttleworth's vision of convergence happening but from android rather than an ubuntu phone.
I don't see what any of that has to do with running Android itself. Linux made it big with developers and for servers because it could run on any x86/PC platform. ARM is not a platform. We can't just release a new open source operating system for ARM devices because they're all radically different and non-standard.
There are thousands of models of Android phone, probably over 10k, but to what extent are they all radically different? They all seem to end up using the same chipsets from a few manufacturers, and surely product lines within a single company reuse a lot of code.
If Canonical didn't spend so much time engaging in Not-Invented-Here fantasy 5D chess, and instead focused on advancing the emerging standards, then they would have had more momentum. By working against the community (e.g. Mir [especially the Wayland FUD]), they cost themselves time and enthusiasm.
I think this had a lot to do with the cancelling of Unity 8 as well.
Thinking back, I'm impressed with how far they got. If they had collaborated where it didn't help to compete, then I think they would've had a better chance of entering the market. I hope that this experience doesn't steel them against working on ambitious things entirely in the future.
What community? Is there really any Linux community that speaks with one voice?
'Community' seems to be a pretty nebulous ill defined term in this context used to prop up whatever argument the poster happens to be making.
If Ubuntu wants to invest in Mir how is that a bad thing, if Redhat invests in Systemd inspite of a multitude of other init options how is that a bad thing? This is usually how progress happens in the diverse and uncontrolled open source ecosystem and failures are part and parcel of this. Using words like 'NIH' seems misplaced here and sounds like some people want to 'control' what other people can do.
For instance who gets to decide what is NIH, given Ubuntu's Snappy is Fedora's Flatpak NIH? But there is no 'community' antagonism towards Flatpak. There appear to be some double standards at play here.
Snappy's Git history starts at basically the same time (literally one week apart) as Flatpak, and both of them only became viable recently. Snappy is written in three languages (Go, C, and Python) and two of those are not as popular for Linux low level infrastructure projects, Flatpak is written in one language. Flatpak was developed by an independent developer, Snappy was developed almost exclusively at Canonical it seems. Snappy is also GPLv3, where Flatpak is LGPL; while this is a minor issue for workstation and server users, on kiosk/embedded systems the anti-tivoization requirements of GPLv3 can be an issue.
Snappy has higher memory requirements, takes up more disk space. Flatpak is implemented in about half as much code (granted with slightly different feature sets) despite being written in C rather than Go.
And despite these signals, I don't see any broad community "antagonism" towards Snappy at the moment. You can find an angry blog post on almost any topic, doesn't mean the opinions are popular. I don't feel any particular way about it since it seems to do something at least a little different than the competition. For example, Flatpak only really tries to sandbox desktop applications, much like .app directories on OS X.
It is a little suspect that Canonical always shows up with their own version of something which everyone else (SUSE, Arch, Red Hat, [Oracle/Novell]) mysteriously can't even manage to build and package successfully. In the case of Snappy, I think it's more or less a coincidence that it started within seven days of Flatpak. It might turn out to be better (or serve a completely different purpose). Another thing in favour of Snappy is that at least snapd and snap-confine (but not snapcraft!) are widely packaged for distributions other than Ubuntu.
The thing is, the rest of the industry is running on independent contributors. These independents manage to widely distribute and standardize on the best. Meanwhile, Canonical consistently goes off on their own and builds something that ultimately nobody can even package (Mir, AppArmor, Unity), let alone adopt.
Canonical clearly wants to differentiate, and that's entirely their right, but their differentiation factors often seem to wither and die after a couple years of bragging and some small progress.
I got the impression that everyone who didn't work for Canonical thought Mir was a bad idea, so that was a rare case where there was pretty much one voice. IIRC, the best case for Mir (if it had shipped on time with no bugs) would have been basically at parity with Wayland, which was started years earlier. This justifies claims of NIH.
The Snappy/Flatpak situation is different because each system has its own advantages and disadvantages and Snappy didn't come years after Flatpak.
You whole assumption rests on your 'personal impression'. You simply can't know what other people in the open source world think or presume everyone agrees with you. To claim 'one voice' seems a rather large stretch. There are tons of Ubuntu users and others in the ecosystem who may think differently.
What makes you so sure Mir would not have some advantages? It seems impossible to say either way. For all we know it could offer benefits and choice to the ecosystem. Or die because users would reject it.
Open source has always been about diversity and choice. There is now an unfortunate trend of some commentators misusing words like 'community' to push their own agendas or trying to pass off personal opinion as a widely held fact. This basically challenges open source diversity.
The "tons of Ubuntu users and people who support diversity" are completely unimportant in both the Mir/Wayland and systemd cases. They don't contribute anything (except maybe a lot of drama), don't have the technical knowledge to decide anything and don't have to support anything. They're just spectators shouting from the tribunes.
systemd was resented by some users, but for developers it had so many advantages (especially stuff like logind) that a huge part of them just started happily using it.
investing in systemd or mir is one thing. what the post you replied to say is that they were buildind their alternatives from scratch, like Xservers used anywhere else but by them.
I think it was unrealistic to expect to have any "significant" market share compared to Android and iOS, even 1% is a huge number.
What I would have done is to focus on apps first, staying on Android. Make worthy competitors for the built-in apps, like GMail.
Then, make it easier to write apps. Mobile app development is a baroque hell. Most apps nowadays are just lists, or maps, with a JSON backend. I don't want to deal with Adaptors and Fragments and Providers and what not for just that, when the app could be done 90% declaratively, and styled with a bit of CSS.
Why did they ditch all the work put into Maemo to make Gtk touch friendly years ago? Merge that stuff, or use modern Gtk, and let me write apps in Python+Gtk.
Then, once you have kick-ass apps, make a great rooting tool. Then, make a great android distribution (don't call it a ROM!). A vanilla android + your apps + a tool to extract drivers from the backup partition, so that it works on dozens of devices. Then add debian in a sub-tree. Then add apps to tie the linux world and the android world together (e.g. a Android terminal, maybe written in your "awesome" framework).
I think a piecemeal solution is the only realistic way to build an android competitor.
Thanks for posting this, I think I just found my next phone.
Can anyone comment on what the development story is like? It looks like it's just as complicated as android, but I want to be able to just write c++ code and a makefile in vim and not bother with QtCreator and especially all that qml rubbish.
> Can anyone comment on what the development story is like?
I can. I've developed and released an app for SailfishOS, and am currently in the process of developing a second one.
I do all my app development in emacs, and VirtualBox (running an i486 version of SailfishOS). My app's written in Python. The UI parts are written in QML (basically JS). I have a Makefile that does an assortment of things for me (setup dev env, package application, clean up stuff).
My second app is going to be written in Python and Go, with the UI once again in QML.
It's real Linux underneath, so you can write your application any way you like (as long as it runs on Linux/arm). However, it's easiest to write the UI in QML, as it handles all the input/widgets for you.
And do you have the source and Makefiles available? I would really love to see that, and maybe even get going there.
I am still in doubt if I should learn Qt or Python.
Well, technically you can also just use Vim and a Makefile to write C++ code for Android. SDL2 has backends for all the Android stuff, for example, as does Qt5.
I really liked the idea and would have bought an Ubuntu phone, but I'm glad I never did. This:
> The phones were slow and had to be rebooted on a regular basis. The Meizu MX4 overheated. The battery indicator tended to show bogus data. Mobile data was unreliable, (national) roaming often didn’t work at all. The location service was very unreliable. The phone didn’t always ring when called, or you couldn’t make an outgoing call because the UI hid the buttons. The alarm didn’t work reliably. Bluetooth only supported audio devices, and later input devices, but not even basic file transfer. WiFi would not connect to WPA Enterprise networks until OTA-5. I think at one point the music player even started deleting files while indexing them. Et cetera.
I understand making an OS for a lot of different devices is hard. But this is just unacceptable regardless of the circumstances.
I'm very sad it failed. I think one thing could have made it a success: Target existing popular devices like the latest Nexus/Pixel or the OnePlus models and make it very easy to flash and restore. That way one can put their toe in the water without spending money on a non-android device and that risk is negated. I gave the OP3 dev some money I would have loved to play with Ubuntu Phone and especially with convergence, it might have stopped me from buying a laptop. But I didn't want to buy an expensive, high-end non-android device (I didn't like that high end Meizu) and I didn't want to try it on a cheap device either. I would certainly have bought a recent Nexus/Pixel to try it though, if I knew I could always go back to Android.
Another real-Linux-on-the-mobile project, SailfishOS, has community ports onto popular Android devices[1].
Jolla, the main developer of SailfishOS, is set to announce an official port of SailfishOS, to the Sony Xperia Z sometime this month (according to their blog)[2].
I think the actual reason why it failed was that it was not Ubuntu at all. When I got mine, I expected to be able to apt-get install everything. The form factor may have been wrong and uncomfortable, but from day 1 I would have access to thousands of applications I was familiar with. I also expected convergence from the start.
It turned out to be a completely separate ecosystem that started from scratch. So, there would be no actual advantage in having the Ubuntu name on it. It was just a marketing move, but it had nothing in common with the Ubuntu I know from the desktop
The reality is that mobile OS that will offer free IOS/Android wrapper for apps that actually works out of the box will win the market. This way from day 1 there will be enough apps for users to consider switching.
That was IBM's strategy for killing Windows with OS/2 -- shipping OS/2 with extremely robust support for running Windows applications right alongside OS/2 ones. The marketing people pitched it as "a better Windows than Windows."
It didn't work; third party developers saw that a Windows app could serve both the Windows and OS/2 markets and focused all their energy on their Windows app, usually not bothering to write an OS/2 version at all. The result was that Windows' big moat -- its application library -- actually got deeper. IBM's big plan to kill Windows ended up cementing its position as a dominant platform.
This is a classic lesson. Firefox OS tried to invert it. You could run FxOS apps on Android devices. And Windows devices. And Linux devices.
MS is doing somewhat the IBM thing with their Linux for Windows. I've been curious to see if that would have the same result for them that it had for IBM.
They were both growing rapidly in a brand new market. What I am proposing is a solution for low budget OS to have ANY chance against duopoly. If Mozilla would allow painless wrapping Android apps, I bet their platform would be in a different place now. I remember my non-technical friends saying they like Mozilla for price etc, but they won't get it as there is no apps.
I don't think you're right. What killed FxOS was not a lack of wrapper to run Android apps (we actually got one that worked).
What makes or break a Mobile OS is the availability of the key apps for the market you're going after: whatsapp, FB, Twitter, etc. (that varies based on the region).
I don't think you ever saw the one I'm talking about. It was done in collaboration with a partner and was never released. Also, lawyers were involved ;)
In practice, Google and Apple had something to offer over Blackberry and Symbian. It was never obvious to me what Ubuntu Phone offered -- Android is already built on Linux and translating existing linux apps built on X (for example) directly to phones was never going to create a usable experience. Ubuntu phoned seemed only to offer a vastly inferior experience in return for more openness, and that is a hard sell.
Note that it took behemoths like Apple and Google to enter the cellphone market. The sheer size of those two companies, combined with the carrier lock-in landscape at the time (VZ offered GPS nav for $10 a month!), made for an opportunity.
What’s the corollary today? What need are Google and Apple underserving, and what company is large enough to mount a challenge to their duopoly?
Microsoft has been in that market for much longer and yet cannot get traction. One of the biggest things for me with both Windows Mobile and Ubuntu was the lack of actual phones I could buy through my carrier. If they're not available to me I cannot buy them, if I cannot buy them, neither can anyone else on my carrier who would love to, and I'm sure there's plenty of people frustrated with Android and iOS alike. Shame we cannot have a true Linux OS.
Edit: To be fair I saw some phones from Microsoft on my carrier, but their battery life that was advertised was terrible, and there were few of them. If there had been 2 ~ 3 phones and new ones every few months, now we're talking... Ah well. I would prefer to see a Linux phone but I wouldn't mind buying a Windows one if they didn't feel like they could be abandoned like a couple of Microsoft's products wind up.
True, but IIRC (and I may not), Microsoft didn’t try to challenge the grip the carriers had on their network and devices. Not in the same way Apple did. And by the time they finally did release a modern smartphone, the market had already been divvied up between Android and iOS.
But fair point, sheer size isn’t enough to disrupt a market, but it damn well helps. It’s also worth remembering that Apple had to grant AT&T exclusivity to get their way initially. That’s how powerful the carriers were.
I still see a lot of AT&T first phones. AT&T still seems to have some "power" to themselves. It's once you establish a specific phone's brand that you push it out to other carriers I suppose. It took Apple quite a while too as far as I knew. Never owned an iOS device and I probably never might despite enjoying macOS.
> One of the biggest things for me with both Windows Mobile and Ubuntu was the lack of actual phones I could buy through my carrier.
I never really understood this line of reasoning. Is there a reason why people can't opt to buy an unlocked mobile device online and just put their SIM in it [1]. That's what most people do for other types of hardware like desktops, laptops, and tablets.
[1] I'm not sure how this would work for devices on Verizon or Sprint (which is why I don't do business with them a opposed to AT&T or T-mobile).
I agree. Although I'd still pay for a resurrection of maemo/meego and IMHO, given time and resources, that would be good enough to challenge Android / IOS.
This is a great write-up. As someone who bought the Ubuntu tablet I wondered what was happening at times and this gives a lot of information.
Readers might be interested to know that the Ubuntu for phones [and tablets] project continues as UBports.
Their wiki[1] and latest blog post[2] might also be of interest.
If you check out the blog post you can see that they have been consulting with app developers and are working on a solution to the notifications issue - "To service notifications in the future while improving user privacy, we will implement “headless apps”. The OS will call these every few minutes and allow them to do some work in the background such as check for messages. This will be done with battery savings and user control in mind."
There's a more detailed report on the meeting on the forum [3].
Finally HN readers might like to check out the Halium project - which aims "to standardize the middleware software used by various projects to talk with android daemons and make use of hardware". Some details on it's progress in [2].
there's a ton of room! there's a vendor stranglehold on android architecture that is stifling movement in this area. Use your imagination a bit, dude.
if we had a hackable open source and libre linux phone, even if the user base were 1 percent or .5%, we would likely start to see shifts in user interface and functionality design on the mainstream platforms-- besides, it'd be super rad to be able to actually use my phone for m0re than mindlessly scrolling 'feeds' and messaging.
as a cash-strapped third worlder constantly on the move in a mega-city, termux has been a huge relief for me and postmarketOS and other players looks promising.
i'd seriously be interesting in commercializing such a device to the raspbi/arduino/developr/hacker crowd. it's got lots of money, lots of clout, is clearly identified, growing and diversifying, and has been proven to spend money on interesting and useful tech. Any takers ?
1% market share is huge. webOS barely had 1% when they launched their third device out of an eventual total of 6. webOS was critically lauded and meant to be used and accessed as you saw fit. No blocking of the homebrew community. I know you're proposing something different, but if webOS was around 1% market share in 2011 in the middle of their device launches and when smart phones were still in their relative infancy...I don't see much chance of an OS like you describe grabbing .5%, much less 1%.
The issue of apps will always be an issue. No matter what commmunity you go to, most people will probably want at least one of a number of popular apps that won't be on this OS. Some can be reverse engineered or use hidden APIs but not always.
Examples being: Messenger, Whatsapp, Snapchat, most other messaging apps or video chat apps like Skype or Viber, Instagram (website doesn't have tagged photos of people or uploading), Pandora, Spotify, Netflix, Hulu, basically any tv sort of app, most dating apps like Tinder, Shazam, and any major mobile games.
The first part says it all. The fact is that the mobile world has tons of power structures, weird issues across all the various devices, and a level of tie-in to services that no other format had or has. It's extremely hard to break into that market given the entrenchment now with all the apps and such for the two known platforms.
I think this is utterly tragic for society. The only way out involves somehow coordinating enough people around rejecting the worst of this stuff (e.g. enough public will to demand that governments outlaw the worst lock-in and privacy-invasion practices etc.) I'm not hopeful.
For a platform to succeed you need developers, and developing for the Ubunto phone was hard to get into, I couldn't find any guides, couldn't order a test device, etc. If you want to make a platform, you have to start with the developer experience!
I'd pay a lot of money for an actual open linux phone, but nobody wants to make one.