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.

Comments

We won't call them "apps"

[hawguy]

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.

Re:The spin is strong in TFA.

[Anne Thwacks]

What part of "It is an Ubuntu phone that wont run ubuntu apps" did you not understand? This is the Open Source answer to Windows RT!

Not only will it start with no apps, there never will be any. It is a phone designed to appeal to NO ONE.

I for one am bitterly disappointed. I would love to run Ubuntu on my Samsung Note 3 - and run all the apps I run on my Ubuntu desk top, including the six virtual desktops or work spaces, or whatever the buzzword of the week is. I would love to press ctrl-X on my hacker's keyboard, and bring up one of many terminals. I want to have a machine with the power of a desktop in my pocket, and plug in an MHL cable and use a full size screen and keyboard when I want them. And I want to install mt-st and run Amanda with my USB DAT72 backup drive too!

The Note 3 has 100 times the power of my old 486, which ran BSD386 fine (after a year or two of editing Xorg.conf). Hell, even an S3 outperforms every VAX I have ever used (and likely most Crays I have used too).

Now we have nearly 50 years of learning how to produce a UI for a computer, why do phone manufacturers have to put so much effort into having crippled IUs? The answer is a choice of Gnome2 or KDE. What is with the rest of this crap? Seriously!