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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.
Most things don't need native speed and work fine as websites.
Yes, most things may not. Many things do. For example, I go and visit a small town only about an hour away from where I live. For much of the trip there and while in town I have either no data connection or one that measures at best in the 10s of KBs. How exactly am I going to play my music/audio books, in those areas if not with a native app? Pretty sure a website is going to be very much help.
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. . . .
That's because most people just half-assedly slap together an "app" version of their web page that is usually dumbed-down and poorly optimized (if even at all). I've written about a dozens apps for myself to make certain websites I use better on my phone and even with the overhead of the having to parse the HTML for the bits of data I want, my apps are still faster and far more responsive and better to use than rendering the webpage in my browser. That also is probably due to the fact that I'm not having to run the gobs of javascript required for rendering the ads, web trackers, etc. as the browser does.