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

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.