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

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."

Comments

It's easy

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:It's easy

[exomondo]

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.

Re:It's easy

[TheRaven64]

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.

Want the list?

[Voyager529]

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.

Not a total loss

[ISoldat53]

It can always serve as a bad example.

It makes joe_dragon look like Robert M. Pirsig.

[Hognoxious]

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.