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Why It's Important That the New Ubuntu Phone Won't Rely On Apps
tedlistens writes: To tackle the chicken-and-egg problem faced by the Windows Phone or Blackberry — you need an app ecosystem to gain market share, but you need market share in order to entice developers to your platform — Canonical, the creators of the free, open-source Linux-based OS Ubuntu, have taken a novel approach with their new phone, which will be launched in Europe next week: The phone — the Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition, made with Spanish manufacturers BQ — won't feature apps. Instead, it will have a new user experience paradigm called Scopes. These are "essentially contextual home-screen dashboards that will be much simpler and less time-consuming to develop than full-on native apps." For instance, the music Scope will pull songs from Grooveshark alongside music stored locally on your device, without strong differentiation between the two. The user experience, writes Jay Cassano at Fast Company, seems a lot more intuitive than the "app grids" that dominate most devices.
Cool spinmeistering, brah. But all I hear is someone making up excuses for why Ubuntu phone will have less developers and fewer apps than even Windows Phone. And that's no small accomplishment.
Why do we even need native apps anymore? Most things don't need native speed and work fine as websites. I can't tell you how many websites now publish an app for the exact same content they offer on their mobile version of the site.
3D games are probably one of the few exceptions.
How will scopes resolve the lack of games like Angry Birds or Candy Crush? Or things like SnapChat or Whatsapp?
This space for rent.
That the iphone originally didn't allow people to make native apps. So you either did stuff with the built in integrations, or made web apps with the iphone's theme. People bitched long and hard about it until they caved in, then made it seem like it was their brilliant and novel idea.
This is incremental over that at most.
We won't have "apps", instead we'll have mini websites that kind of function like apps, but not really. But we won't call them apps so you can't complain that there are no apps.
EOM
'When you want to listen to Nas's Illmatic you don't think "I want to fire up Grooveshark so I can listen to Illmatic." You just think "I really want to listen to the one of the greatest rap albums of all time right now."'
Not me. I do think "Should I fire-up Subsonic and pre-load a bunch of music for later off-line use or stream now from Pandora?" Apps give not only content but specific functionality for their use-cases.
Maybe I'm showing my age - but I prefer my apps to provide specific functionality rather than these sort of "mashups" where we just put a bunch of crap in front of the user and hope they find what they were trying to do.
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
iframes good, apps bad. Because integration between iframes is easier than integration between apps...right?
It sounds like these "scopes" are going to rely heavily on data usage. They must have truly unlimited data in Europe. I don't see this going over well in the United States.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Ubuntu Phone *only* runs Crapps written in QML, which is basically JavaScript with a "declarative" UI. In other words, worthless crapps that make a modern quad-core CPU run like a 486.
For instance, the music Scope will pull songs from Grooveshark alongside music stored locally on your device, without strong differentiation between the two.
Right. The Unity/Amazon Shopping Lens - 'cause searching for something on my device isn't any different than searching for stuff on the web - or a vendor.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Because they just sound like really shitty apps, to me.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Didn't Grooveshark lose a massive copyright infringement case recently? I notice they are still online had have a lot of music there, some of which I know is ripped because one album they have has never been released on any digital music service that I know of (and they still have Taylor Swift...). Why are they still around? I'm glad they are but I can't see how they can justify their existence.
The problem with "rich user experience" is that there are so many of them.
From the audio player app with graceful curves instead of square corners, the circle/bar (poweroff symbol) somewhere instead of "X" in the corner to close, shelves that open when you hover over a specific part of the app... you have to learn a new way of doing things, and it's only for that one app.
Download images from a camera or phone, but it doesn't identify as a "disk", it requires an install disk so that it appears as a separate something in the disk listing, at the end, with a different icon. With no "plus sign to open". And I can copy images from camera to disk, I can delete images from camera, but I can't "cut/paste" images from camera to disk.
The original "Mac Paint" was awesome because the icons represented what the program actually did. Flood fill was a paint can spilling paint, select (the icon) looked like the selection box, and so on. Now everyone uses different icons to mean the same things.
"Customize and control" is three horizontal bars (Chrome), or a gear-like thingy (GMail) a little arrow (Facebook) or a sometimes a wrench. It's not hidden under a menu any more, because customization is something we need to do frequently, of course. And menus are out of style, no more pesky named categories of things you might want to do.
Whenever a new app is installed, the user has to spend time rummaging around the system figuring out where everything is, and they have to do this for every application. There can be no muscle memory, and little or no reliance on previous experience.
(For a particularly awful user experience, install Anki sometime. And then try to work with it.)
The solution to every problem is to google "how do I do $action in $application", follow the obtuse and labyrinthine instructions, and forget about it. For Mozilla, it's always an obscure flag in about:config.
Most of the time these are differences for the sake of being different (a marketing advantage, apparently) - there's no advantage or utility or even consensus on what is best. Why is three horizontal bars better than a gear, or a wrench? Why does customization even need to be at the top level?
I realize that as a developer you want to provide me with a rich user experience, but there's significant advantage in making it the user experience I'm familiar with in my OS and in my other apps.
Can we still run it like a regular desktop machine? install KDE, use a keyboard, mouse and external display? I imagine not, but hope so!
So basically they are saying it will only support web apps not native, and they are spinning this as a selling point rather than a deficiency.
Native apps all the way, since I don't actually have a dataplan enabled on my smartphone.
Only gave it a cursory glance, so apologies if I've missed the crucial differentiator -
Windows Phone combines all your contacts from different sources, all your chats from facebook, twitter, Skype and SMS, all your emails (if you want) into linked mailboxes.
This just seems like a natural progression. however the above is incorrect. some of these features, which were so useful in one place, had the providers changing the APIs or Policies to prevent it. I used to be able to chat seamlessly with a friend on sms, then swap over to facebook chat mid flow. But then Facebook insisted MS remove this, as they wanted everyone in the app, so they could control what they see, make it more difficult to swap to another chat method, and place ads. even worse they then decided they wanted to spin out the chat functionality from the main app into a new one....
so, are all the media providers going to be happy with their products to being intermingled with other providers, and limited opportunity to redirect them to complementary services or 'upsell' content? I think the answer is probably not, and we'll see moves to disrupt it, or insist on greater control over what gets pulled alongside the content into these 'scopes'.
it's a shame, as it's a simple system for the user, and great workflow, but that's not important is it?
...that makes neat features accessible to both developers and users.
And by "solid platform", I mean something that demonstrates a consistent philosophy and design from the UI and APIs down through the kernel and the hardware.
There should also be a specification (like Multi-Media PC was for Microsoft in the 90s) of what a minimum hardware configuration should look like for a given platform (mobile, desktop, etc) to support most of the apps users will find enticing.
If you build a consistent, feature-stable platform with neat features the app developers will come. Maybe not in droves, but you will start seeing some very interesting new ideas and apps written by the sort of people who do NOT like to tinker with kernel options in grub.cfg or have to dig through /etc with a text editor to get things working.
Tim Berners Lee wrote the first web browser on the NeXT platform which had a tiny user base. Now Ubuntu is trying to compete with iOS, which is the progeny of NeXT.
Why all this garbage? What we want is General Computing Device that we can configure and fully control. The rest will come.
So sooner phone manufacturers get out of software business, sooner we will get over walled garden's walls.
In other words, it's an iPhone 3G. (Which you might also call "iPhone 1"). That's one of the few things Steve Jobs was wrong about. Fortunately, he came to his senses.
I own a record label and have battled them for years, they just keep posting our material, they never pay for it, they make it horrifically hard to get it taken down. Robert Fripp of King Crimson did manage to get them to stop loading their material at one point, but the lawsuits against Grooveshark have been going on for ages. I'll boycott this device simply because it promotes music piracy.
http://www.gsmarena.com/lenovo_a316i-6296.php
And its specs is no way less than the one Ubuntu is offering
"For instance, the music Scope will pull songs from Grooveshark alongside music stored locally on your device, without strong differentiation between the two"
I love this idea! I use my Android phone constantly and mostly listen to Pandora myself. I do have some music I purchased through Google and would buy more except what I want is to somehow mix my purchased music with Pandora.
For example, I have a doc by my bed, another at work and one in my car. For each I get to setup alarm clock and driving modes. In them I get to pick a Music player. The same goes with the various voice assistant apps I have installed.
But which music player do I pick? Play Music or Pandora? I get bored with the same songs repeated so I pick Pandora. But that means I never listed to what I paid for. So.. I don't buy any more. I'd love to mix them!
But.. then the different Music providers don' t get to sell their brand as much. Your experience is Ubuntu, not Google or Pandora or Grooveshark. I don't see the various mainstream providers accepting this. So.. it will always be fringe. Oh well...
"the music Scope will pull songs from Grooveshark"
Man I left Grooveshark years ago. Once I created a 800+ playlist and as time passed it got to have 200 songs, the rest were removed/deleted by grooveshark. I don't want to waste my time anymore with Grooveshark.
The first reasonable phone able to do that competently is going to be a game changer.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
This sounds a lot like the "hubs" from Windows Phone.
And I guess that this concept misses the point commercially. Yes, these scopes/hubs could be nice from a user's perspective. But how about that of the developer? Think about Facebook, would they really prefer that messages and status updates appear in a stream of updates from other websites, rather than presenting them in a branded user interface where they can place advertisements? Of course not. So whereas Apple and Google make tons of money by facilitating selling apps, Ubuntu would rather need to indemnify the content providers for the loss of ad revenue and brand visibility.
Within a few years time.
Many of the apps out there are superfluous and frivolous. Some are totally unnecessary. For example, there's no need to book air tickets or purchase movie tickets with a dedicated app when a touch-optimized website would suffice.
There's also plenty of scamware, adware, crapware. Games that are designed to scam more money from you instead of publishing a complete product in the beginning (freemium bullshit). Redundant apps (chat apps, email clients).
Perhaps except for games (to be treated as media for consumption just like movies, ebooks and music), the other apps will whittle down in number. The small dogs die off due to lack of funding and monetization. The big dogs go through a series of mergers and acquisitions.
There are several offerings for in-car Android head units, however they all struggle with interface design, apps look and feel. This is particularly a problem in a car where interface can consume only a limited amount of the drivers attention and should be super simple. The Scopes paradigm sounds like the perfect fit for in-car entertainment systems where a single press of a button needs to bring up the respective function - media - radio - nav - phone - car stats - reverse... etc..
Please excuse my ignorance... is there a live CD to test-drive that before I buy a new phone?
This phone is nothing but your run-of-the-mill low-to-mid range phone.