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Two Ubuntu Phones Coming In 2014, Aiming For Top 50 iOS/Android Apps
An anonymous reader writes "Mark Shuttleworth just had a conference call with the press where he announced Canonical has partnered with BQ in Europe and Meizu in China to manufacture Ubuntu phones that will ship in 2014. By the time devices ship, the hope is to have ports of the top 50 Android and iOS apps available on Ubuntu."
Mark Shuttleworth notes "The mobile industry has long been looking for a viable alternative to those that reign today. Ubuntu puts the control back into the hands of our partners and presents an exciting platform for consumers, delivering an experience which departs from the tired app icon grid of Android and iOS and provides a fluid, content-rich experience for all."
Mark Shuttleworth notes "The mobile industry has long been looking for a viable alternative to those that reign today.
This explains the vast numbers trashing their iOs and Android devices and switching over to Windows 8 phones. Good thing we'll have another trusted team like Canonical added to the equation. /sarc
You can have my SIG when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
That, right there, makes everything about these new smartphones, and Ubuntu in general, entirely worthless. The entire point of all this is to put control in the hands of the USERS, not "partners!"
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I bet most of the popular apps are front-ends to private services like f...book, google, pictures sharing services, $streaming_service etc. which invariably collect your data and try to lock you in. I question the value of a Free and Open Source OS, and of the front-end apps themselves even if they're Free and Open Source, when all the "cloudy" back-end is where the interesting stuff happens and it is locked, out of control and may be working against your interests.
Even as a desktop linux user I'm suffering from this already, what with all the tracking when browsing the web.
If we want Freedom on the mobile OS we're going to need Free back-ends to go with it (i.e. if you store private data on the web/internet, you should have the option of doing it on your own server, like installing the back-end software easily on a small VM that you pay a couple dollars per month for).
We need more chat apps, sharing apps etc. using open and universal protocols (like e-mail, IRC, XMPP) rather than made solely to be one customer of a single one company.
Aiming for top 50k apps. Anything less than supporting all the apps I use simply diminishes the value. I don't need to switch to a less valuable device.
The type of people who value less closed systems are also those, as a group, with a wide range of needs. If I value my privacy and am willing to use less popular devices, why would I then be willing to use the most popular apps?
What I believe the ecosystem needs more than another device are apps that provide features available in the popular ones, but with the least possible amount of information gathering or sharing.
Anecdotal evidence is anecdotal. I know a lot of people who use Siri to set alarms, make appointments on their calendar, and search for things such as nearby restaurants.
Windows Phone sold over 20% of what Apple iPhone sold in Q3 of 2013. I think that is very viable.
If I can do half the things I could with my N900, I might buy two.
Is that so you can do 100% of the things that you want to do?
/ducks
Hopes?
Hmm, RIM/Blackberry tried to throw money at this, didn't work. Magic wishes and dreams will not cause a company to spend money for a developer to work on a new style platform with unknown revenue chances.
Getting the apps running on Ubuntu is going to require that the app developers see value in releasing for the platform. It's already hard enough getting developers to make apps for Windows phone. Will Ubuntu with it's even smaller market share be able to convince app developers that it is worth their time to port the apps to Ubuntu?
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Samsung GS4 user here, still running JellyBean 4.2. Heard about AppOps (system-level permission manager) that Google decided to pull over how it affected apps' ability to access permissions if the user wanted to deny specific ones (like Location, SD card, shell).
Enter XPosed framework + XPrivacy. 10 minutes with XPrivacy's access logs showed several apps constantly pinging certain permissions including some I'd decided to deny. As in, almost none of my apps gets Location except those that directly need it.
However, finding a way to actually stop these apps cycling on and off in the background proved a challenge until I found Llama + the TaskKill plugin for Tasker is very good at killing (force-closing) apps. I have about 20 events defined to cover the most obnoxious apps. I can use the apps like normal, but once I switch to something else and the marked app is in the background for a specified interval (I use 5 minues for most) it executes a force kill. You may be saying this is overkill, but for me it was the ONLY way I could stop Facebook Messenger from firing up even if I didn't use it. My wife does from time to time, so I keep it around. But as long as Facebook is running (fore or background) Messenger will be restarted, My solution was to kill both after a 5 minute delay.
I also wound up using ES Task Manager to deny startup privs to a bunch of things, so my boot time is really short. With Llama on duty to kill apps after normal use, I find a lot less in the XPrivacy logs and I'm not as concerned about battery life and performace.
Defending IP by destroying access to it? That makes sense, RIAA/MPAA. Go to the corner until you can play nice!
Sorry, but until you *used* an n900, you simply have no idea how limited an android phone is. Full terminal by default, I can remote-X phone applications from my laptop, openvpn is 3 clicks away, I can run fucking lighttpd and torrent trackers on it (with the DEFAULT repositories). I wrote a Mandelbrot generator for a class project (in pure SDL and unix IPC). Took 5 minutes with a chroot to get that sucker compiling and running on my n900.
You could spend a week rooting, customizing and overhauling the best android phone out there and still not come close to what the n900 would do out of the box.
Only a year of two until Canonical shuts down then. They're not making any money, They're unlikely to make any money and generally people don't want an Ubuntu based anything.
Their server support business is lacklustre (Redhat, Novell, IBM and Oracle eat their lunch) and not enough to support a business.
It's hard to call Canonical a successful company - it's only still around because of its unique financial status.
The hardware Ubuntu phone OS needs is not low end. They might have had a chance with low-end phones, but the OS is too heavy and doesn't offer enough compelling reasons to use it. With so much abstraction, it's sure to be buggy as well.
Like Ubuntu TV, Edge, Unity and Mir this is going nowhere. Their hardware "partner" will load a few hundred phones with Ubuntu, they'll also sell Android Phones with the exact same hardware. It doesn't cost them anything, if they don't sell - the manufacturer will just reflash them.