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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."

17 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 Duckeenie · · Score: 2

      That is what's commonly known as passing the buck.

    2. 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.

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

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

    4. 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.
    5. 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.

    6. 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.

    7. Re:It's easy by TheRaven64 · · Score: 4, Informative

      Remember when blackberry owned 100% of the smartphone market?

      Nope, I remember Nokia owning 76% of the smartphone market and Blackberry having most of the high-end corporate segment.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  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.

    1. Re:Want the list? by Voyager529 · · Score: 2

      Regarding #3 - Why does *EVERY* new phone need to have new features? I would be perfectly happy with a cell phone ecosystem that doesn't constantly change all the time. Two year lifetime of a cell phone doesn't seem to be enough.

      You missed the point entirely.

      I agree that the continual rearrangement of furniture in the Android market isn't exactly a 'feature'. However, the point was that the Ubuntu phone needed a differentiator other than "open source OS" to differentiate it from iOS and Android, if it was going to give people who already own a smartphone a reason to switch. "It's cheaper" wouldn't be it, because cost-sensitive customers can already get sub-$100 Android phones already, either through low end units from the carrier, or by getting "last season's" hot phone in the secondary market. Ubuntu doesn't have an ecosystem to leverage in the same way Apple leveraged the iTunes Music Store to create incentive when the iPhone was first released, so that wouldn't help.

      I'm not talking about the Galaxy S-series phones needing a new gimmick every year to the point of regression, I'm saying that if Ubuntu wanted to make inroads, there needed to be something superior to what existed at the time. With no apps, no music/movies, no hardware specialties, no incumbent market to leverage, and no carrier deals, it was DoA. Microsoft had millions of dollars, an overconfident CEO, a history of industry strongarm tactics, the Nokia name and hardware, and the Zune/Xbox ecosystem, and *they* couldn't get a half decent market share.

    2. Re:Want the list? by u801e · · Score: 2

      1. Not solid through US carriers.

      Why would that have to even be a requirement? People can buy other types of computing devices online and start using them. An unlocked GSM phone could work the same way. Order online, install the SIM, and start using it. The fact that people want to get phones through their carriers is the major reason why the cell phone market in the US was so far behind the rest of the world in terms of device features and capabilities until the iphone came along.

  3. Re:Free market at work by Zontar+The+Mindless · · Score: 3, Funny

    You're basically another APK, only with (slightly) better punctuation.

    --
    Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
  4. Not a total loss by ISoldat53 · · Score: 4, Funny

    It can always serve as a bad example.

  5. Re:Haha by allo · · Score: 2

    route and ifconfig always were shit.

    route had a horrible syntax. "ip route" now has a syntax which is almost proper english and you can always use the same command and swap add for del to remove the very same route.
    ifconfig and multiple ips on one interface ... ohh this new idea, who needs it? Lets call it eth0:1 instead!
    iproute2 is a nice idea.

    systemd on the other hand started with solving a few problems (dependencies of initscripts, cgroups to assign ressources and reliably detect running processes and kill them if they are not stopping) and grew to a horrible monster. Nobody would object a cool initsystem. I remember the old days, when systemd came around with fancy bootcharts and fast booting and everyone saw it as the next cool thing.
    But they did not know when to stop. If this is successful, let's add that, it will be successful as well and we're knowing what we're doing, aren't we?

  6. It makes joe_dragon look like Robert M. Pirsig. by Hognoxious · · Score: 4, Funny

    starnge, pesonaly [...] duoe to pacwards copatibility. knowlage [...] hav the inklination

    I'd run that through babelfish if I knew what language it was supposed to be.

    --
    Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
  7. Re:You're unquestionably a "ne'er-do-well" by Zontar+The+Mindless · · Score: 2

    I love the fact that you have no other purpose in life than to scan Internet forums for occurrences of your initials, and knowing that I can summon you up anytime I want just by inserting them into a post. It's like the master whistling for his dog. HAND.

    --
    Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
  8. Re:Haha by allo · · Score: 2

    this was the most common (and an easy) command. Did you ever do something more complicated?