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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.
How will scopes resolve the lack of games like Angry Birds or Candy Crush? Or things like SnapChat or Whatsapp?
This space for rent.
Because websites aren't available offline, are much less responsive, have security and privacy issues, provide worse UX, and are less integrated with the hardware and system so can't provide polish that other apps can (such as sound muting if the user picks up the phone). Websites are ok if your purpose is to get up to date information, but they're a poor replacement for a real app.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
'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
Because websites aren't available offline, are much less responsive, have security and privacy issues,
The ignorance is strong with this one.
provide worse UX, and are less integrated with the hardware and system so can't provide polish that other apps can (such as sound muting if the user picks up the phone). Websites are ok if your purpose is to get up to date information, but they're a poor replacement for a real app.
You really haven't seen what the web platform is capable of these days, have you? I think the OP's point is sound. Realistically, I believe people get bored with installing apps, and at some point slow down with it. Also many previously installed sit around locally taking up resources auto-loading, auto-updating, and generally become even more of a security concern, as well as open up privacy issues that websites never could. The user doesn't visit the site? The software doesn't run.
Web apps, for a lot of scenarios can be just as good as natives apps, as well as just as invasive. When you run them.
I don't use an iphone, but when I see one it just looks dumb. A grid of icons of uniform size. Whereas android has widgets so you can see a chunk of information at once without opening an app first; and Windows Phone lets you resize the "icon" to be larger and make it an active icon displaying more than the number of unread emails. So I don't think Ubuntu is strictly being new at this style, instead just taking it a bit further and hiding the app grid altogether; maybe the scopes are just glorified widgets?
The snag then is what happens when there's something new out there. Ie, the next killer phone game (angry bird ninja), does that go into the ubuntu "game" scope, is there a way to select it and open it, or...? The way it sounds right now, you'd need serious integration work into the scope for each new type of thing you want to do as opposed to stand-alone apps, so developer effort does not seem lessened even though that is the claim.