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Mobile Carriers Cry "Less Operating Systems"
A NYTimes story says "Multiple systems have hampered the growth of new services, mobile phone executives say. " The story does a good job of capturing some of the changing dynamics in the mobile OS market — but rightly raises the point that given the sheer size of the mobile market, it's unlikely we're going to see the homogenization we have in the desktop market.
it's unlikely we're going to see the homogenization we have in the desktop market.
I sincerely hope so. More competition -> better products.
Right now if a mobile phone gets popular it's because it has features that more people want, not because 'everyone else uses that one'. That's the way it should be.
Now if only we could get the desktop market to behave that way.
Say what you will about Windows on the desktop, but the homogenization of the desktop OS is one of the main things that accelerated the growth of the PC. I'm not saying that it would be good for the mobile market by any stretch of the imagination -- one of the reasons we have so many OSes is that we have so many devices, each targeted at different tasks.
However, in my mind only one OS could possibly fill the bill for all mobile devices, and that's Linux. Linux is easily and readily modifiable, not just by license, but by the way it's grown into a modular kernel that's fairly platform agnostic these days, one that can be stripped down to the tiniest sizes if necessary.
If I had one mobile OS to choose from -- well, Linux would be it. And it's not just because I'm a Linux-using geek, but because it really is the best tool for the job.
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You have to feel for the poor mobile telcos.. They have to work so hard supporting a number of operating systems on phones so that they can hobble them and make sure that their customers are wrung of every penny they can be.
Now, instead of crying about possible missed new lock-ins because it's too much effort to write the shackling software they should just shut-up and let the phone makers produce phones that the public want rather than those designed purely for the mobile telco's mean, narrow minded, penny pinching marketing departments.
Agrajag: "Oh no, not again!"
I logged in JUST to type the same thing. That grated on my eyes something fierce. I thought "Might they mean 'less operating system' as in a smaller one?"
Perhaps. But despite what the article claims, the problem is not a proliferation of operating systems. The problem is a proliferation of userland APIs. If the phone presents a consistent API to userland programs, then the underlying OS is irrelevant. To an extent, the mobile world has a standard API in the form of J2ME. But it's far from universal, and support is patchy, so an app written for one phone may or may not work on another phone. And of course, J2ME isn't necessarily the best choice of API in the first place. But your single OS solution could still potentially suffer from the problem of multiple APIs, so that in itself isn't a complete solution. I'll admit that it would probably help the situation, though, and agree with you that it's unlikely to happen.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
What REALLY makes me LMAO with this thread is that this is EXACTLY what you all rail against on the desktop, where y'all get a glowy feeling imagining a world with hundreds (or thousands) of different desktop operating systems.
Here the cellphone operators are telling you that this is a bad thing, and, ironically, you're by and large agreeing with them... Why not tell them that every vendor should pick their own linux distro that they can customize and install and be unique? Afterall, it's EXACTLY what you'd all do if the platform in this article were PC's instead of mobile phones...
-AC
Hmm... not sure whether the parent has really worked on a mobile phone platform. I've worked extensively on several: many proprietary RTOS platforms, Linux and Windows Mobile, with a little Symbian thrown in.
...)
Linux is a kernel. A pretty good one, I grant, but it only provides kernel services. The key to a mobile device is what sits on top of the kernel, and Linux has less of a good story to tell. Look at Windows mobile or Symbian and you'll notice that they each provide a well-defined set of telephony oriented services and APIs and a set of applications which use these.
If you want to build a product based on Symbian or Windows Mobile, you basically just have to implement a set of well-defined APIs and device drivers for your platform and you're good to go. While this is far from being a trivial undertaking, it provides a stable environment for 3rd party application developers, who stand a reasonable chance that their application will work as expected on any device supporting the OS.
The Linux situation is fast-developing, but there's no question that the rich telephony middleware layer isn't really there yet. There are a variety of different consortia, all of which have websites with "white papers" and some of which have formal API documents. To my knowledge, however, none has anything close to a complete, commercial quality implementation of a reasonably full suite of telephony middleware and user applications. I don't doubt that this will eventually arrive (there's a lot of pressure in that direction), but there's no 'standard' that I can see.
Let's just look at UI and application framework: there are at least two common options and a rich variety of more-or-less unsupported options: QTopia (which is probably the most mature right now, but costs $$$) and GTK+ (which is free but less mature on embedded platforms). If I'm an application developer, which do I target. Unlike Linux desktop machines, most of which resolve the problem by installing most of the libraries for both, space is at a premium on mobile devices - so QTopia devices require QT for the UI (and lock out GTK+ applications) and GTK+ devices do the converse. This is important to operators as a QTopia based phone is sufficiently different to a GTK+ based phone that they would really need to treated as separate platforms even though the kernel is the same.
At least the UI frameworks exist and work pretty well. What about the code to do things like:
* Manage a SIM-based phonebook
* Interface with a CDMA or UMTS modem (which needs to be specified
in an abstract way to support the many different chipsets out there)
* Implement the SIM toolkit
* Implement all of the user notifications required for SMS, supplementary
services, SIM and so on.
* Gracefully manage multiple network connections in a seamless manner
(upmarket device probably has cellular packet service, Bluetooth,
WiFi, possibly tethered connection to desktop machine, IrDA,
* Secure update of the software images on the device
* Over the air provisioning of connections and services
I could go on, but I guess the point is made.
Sadly, Linux for embedded mobile devices risks becoming marginalized by a repeat of the 'desktop wars': several incompatible implementations of some pretty basic services which end up fragmenting the market because none achieves critical mass. Success means reducing the number of 'initiatives' (probably to one) and showing us the code. Enough of the white papers...
That isn't the problem at all. The vendor of each OS has to deal with that problem, not the carrier.
The problem is that carriers want to develop features they can charge for on a recurring revenue (pay-per-use) basis. In a multiple OS, high flexibility world, features exist on the handset, not on the network. That means the customer gets to use music, video, voice dialing, games, photos, VNC, SSH, instant messaging, e-mail, etc, and it all looks like data to the network, or doesn't even use the network. This stops them from charging you per message/photo/song/minute of video, because messages become tiny bits of inexpensive data, photos get transferred to the user's PC via a memory card reader or data cable instead of through the high priced photo service (or as a message that is indistinguishable from a tiny amount of data), etc...
Developers don't write for mobile platforms because they aren't welcome there, not because there are too many OSs. When the carriers say that the number of OSs limits new applications, what they really mean is that it limits their ability to lock down applications as a service.
What REALLY makes me LMAO with this thread is that this is EXACTLY what you all rail against on the desktop, where y'all get a glowy feeling imagining a world with hundreds (or thousands) of different desktop operating systems.
No, I don't. In my perfect word there would be one or two core OS, and they would be OPEN SOURCE. So, there is nothing ironic about my viewpoint.
The fix for this is easy, and I understand already implemented in Finland and a few other countries - phone manufacturers can't sell service plans and network companies can't sell phones.
Open access, open API's, competition in the phone market, competition in the rate plan market.
This appears to be the sweet spot for government regulation in this market because it increases competition, not decreases it.
I imagine it also drives towards Internet-based services as a means to avoid redundant negotiations with multiple carriers for every new feature a phone manufacturer wants to implement.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
But as a consumer, why should I care about how hard a market is to develop for? Are the prices a little higher? Maybe, but nothing like what they are under a monopoly. Price out Microsoft Office or Vista and then price out the most expensive thing you've ever purchased for your cell phone.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
This may be flamebait, a troll, or just general bitching, but I've got some karma to burn, so WTF. I am always amazed that computer geeks have such a negative attitude about spelling and grammar, considering that most people here have some knowledge of and experience with programming, and many program for a living. It seems to me that if you can't spell, you can't program.
int main() works, but
innt mayn() doesn't
So why is it that people who are proud of their fluency in C++, or whatever, are proud to sound like a drooling mouth-breather in English?
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
...what most people rail against is the illegal monopoly Microsoft established in the operating system market, without which, operating system independence for applications would have been established a long time ago.
Sadly, Linux for embedded mobile devices risks becoming marginalized by a repeat of the 'desktop wars': several incompatible implementations of some pretty basic services which
And this is different from Symbian, how?
so QTopia devices require QT for the UI (and lock out GTK+ applications) and GTK+ devices do the converse
That's incorrect; GPE is based on X11, and it can run Qt applications. Furthermore, the amount of space the Qt libraries take is not that large.
QTopia (which is probably the most mature right now, but costs $$$)
I think this is pretty much the deciding factor: QTopia is little different in terms of licensing from Symbian or WinCE; we don't need another proprietary phone OS. GPE on Linux is a fully open source and free phone OS.
They are very careful to play Symbian off against Windows and (to a lesser extent) Palm.
As soon as one OS is dominant, the owner will be able to demand a larger portion of the pie.
No industry is going to let Microsoft own the space if they can help it.
Open source may change this...
VLC Remote for iPhone and Android