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

The spin is strong in TFA.

[Desler]

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.

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!

Re:The spin is strong in TFA.

[Darinbob]

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.

Re:Why not websites?

[AuMatar]

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.

Re:Why not websites?

[Lunix Nutcase]

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.

Re:Doesn't make much sense

[mobby_6kl]

The same way it did for Apple - by scrapping the stupid idea in the next version in favor of native apps.