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Software Developer Explains Why The Ubuntu Phone Failed (itwire.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the post-mortems dept.

troublemaker_23 quotes ITWire: A developer who worked with the Ubuntu Phone project has outlined the reasons for its failure, painting a picture of confusion, poor communication and lack of technical and marketing foresight. Simon Raffeiner stopped working with the project in mid-2016, about 10 months before Canonical owner Mark Shuttleworth announced that development of the phone and the tablet were being stopped.
Raffeiner says, for example, that "despite so many bugs being present, developers were not concentrating on fixing them, but rather on adding support for more devices." But he says he doesn't regret the time he spent on the project -- though now he spends his free time "traveling the world, taking photographs and creating bad card games, bad comics and bad games."

"Please note that this post does not apply to the UBPorts project, which continues to work on the phone operating system, Unity 8 and other components."

8 of 137 comments (clear)

  1. It's easy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The Ubuntu phone failed because it's a fucking stupid idea. People want smartphones with a large base of popular apps.

    1. Re:It's easy by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 3, Insightful

      existing players in the market would not allow ports of their apps.

      An obvious solution would be to use the Android ABI, so no port would be needed. Barring that, they were doomed from the start. If a behemoth like Microsoft couldn't break the Apple/Android duopoly, then Canonical never had a chance.

    2. Re: It's easy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      No, we chalk that up as the world now is not 10 years ago.

    3. Re:It's easy by Opportunist · · Score: 3, Insightful

      When nobody has it, neither do you. If everyone has it, so do you.

      Old school MMOs had few, if any, quests, lots of grinding, horribly long travel times, insanely slow progression, really, really painful death penalties and no instanced pre-packaged content. But I dare you to make one like this today.

      --
      We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
    4. Re: It's easy by kurkosdr · · Score: 3, Insightful

      There is a solution to that: It is called "being (mostly) compatible with an established API". This brings porting to the realm of bugfixing instead of the realm of a rewrite. For example, DOS was mostly compatible with CP/M and GNU/Linux was mostly compatible with Unix. Even Windows was compatible with DOS and Mac OS X was compatible with Mac OS 9 (via emulation, but provided users with a transition path). Very rarely does an OS with a completely new set of APIs (and not compatible to anything old APIs) becomes successful. The first Mac OS, Amiga OS, Symbian S60, Symbian UIQ, iOS and Android are the only examples that come to mind, and they all happened immediately after a new UI paradigm emerged in the industry. Canonical did the same mistake Microsoft did: The expectation that all devs will retool to support an OS with totally incompatible APIs that was late to the market (years after the new UI paradigm emerged). The Xbox example is irrelevant because game console APIs are expected to not be backwards compatible in general.

    5. Re:It's easy by exomondo · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Windows Phone wasn't really a "shit product", in fact none of the real competitors to the smartphone market were. They were just late entrants to an established market that offered no compelling feature/innovation.

      Like you say, Apple upended the Blackberry/Windows Mobile duopoly with compelling innovation, Android then made that new paradigm accessible to everybody. The same is true of the desktop, Linux on the desktop is by no means a "shit product" but its usage share is low because it doesn't have that one thing that users say "yes, I will abandon my current computer and learn a new way of doing things because this feature makes my desktop computing so much better", that is what happened with cell phones when iOS/Android were introduced.

  2. Want the list? by Voyager529 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    1. Not solid through US carriers.
    2. Focus on low cost hardware; no "flagship phone".
    3. Primary benefits were ideological; no new features or distinction over incumbents.
    4. No integration with a movies/music/tv ecosystem.
    5. Practically no existing market to leverage.
    6. Dependency on browser over App Store model.
    7. No focus on a migration path. ...so yeah, there were seemingly no advantages and lots of disadvantages to moving.

  3. Linux's core problem. by petes_PoV · · Score: 1, Insightful

    "despite so many bugs being present, developers were not concentrating on fixing them, but rather on adding support for more devices."

    This could be a generic description for Linux in general. It is hard to get people who volunteer their time to do work (or is it really play?) on things they don't want to.

    Writing new stuff is fun. People will do that. Fixing bugs is hard work. It requires effort and thought and understanding. You can't persuade people to give up their time to do that, it's not fun.

    --
    politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons