End of the Line For Remix OS as Jide Shifts Its Energy Towards the Enterprise (neowin.net)

An anonymous reader shares a report: It was only in July last year that Remix OS, an Android-based operating system for PCs, was bumped up to Version 3.0, which featured Android 6.0 Marshmallow under the hood. In fact, news of the upgrade came hot on the heels of an announcement from Chuwi with regards to the release of its $239 Vi10 Plus tablet that dual-booted Remix OS and Windows 10. A little over a month later, Jide Technology then followed up with a "developer preview" of the OS leveraging Android 7.0 Nougat. However, after a somewhat brief period of existence of just a few years, the company has announced that it is shifting its focus away from the consumer segment to the enterprise. In a statement on its website, Jide stated that: "Over the past year, we received an increasing number of inquiries from enterprises in various industries, and began helping them build great tools for their organizations by leveraging Jide software and hardware. We see huge potential in the role that Jide can play to revolutionize how these businesses operate. And given our existing resources, we decided to focus our company efforts solely on the enterprise space moving forward."

Comments

Oh well

[norweeg]

Honestly I think the future of android on the desktop is a containerized runtime like Anbox https://anbox.io/

Re:Oh well

[norweeg]

Ah true. With ChromeOS picking up android compatibility, that basically makes it a desktop version of Android. I still don't get why there's a distinction between ChromeOS and Android

Re:Why...

[jawtheshark]

I happen to have a Chuwi Hi10 Plus which has both Windows 10 and RemixOS on it. I expected Windows 10 to work best on it, but as a matter of fact, it's horribly slow and the UI experience in touch on Windows 10 is pretty suboptimal. It works, but it's a pain. Granted, you don't expect much of an Atom x5-Z8300 and only 4GB RAM... but RemixOS works admirably on it. No slowdowns, snappy all the time, the interface is clearly made for touch and much less resource usage.

All in all, Android is a better experience than the Windows on this particular tablet. I'd put Linux on it, but from what I heard, Linux is pretty bad as touchscreen support. (Disclaimer: I haven't tried. I only *heard* it was sucky. If you have decent suggestions, I'm all ear. I usually only run Linux on laptops and Desktop. This machine is pretty much the exception)

But remember kids, the GPL is cancer!

[Shane_Optima]

Question: if the GPL "viral" or "cancerous", what do you call this, this son-of-Apache closed source freeware license that Jibe used for Remix OS ?

Because if the GPL really is those things, then non-OSS freeware must be "toxic" (and by extension, "permissive" licensed software is "permissive" only of various forms of toxicity.) I briefly played around with RemixOS because it would be handy to have it available, preferably running in a VM, as a handy to use Android-only applications. Spent a couple hours tinkering with it, trying to get it to work properly. And then I noticed it wasn't open source.

Dropped it like it was radioactive and never looked back.

Not a nutter against all forms of closed source software, but when it comes to OSes and staple workhorse applications, life is just too damn short to waste it on non-OSS.

Re:But remember kids, the GPL is cancer!

[Kjella]

Question: if the GPL "viral" or "cancerous", what do you call this, this son-of-Apache closed source freeware license that Jibe used for Remix OS ?

The "viral" nature referred to the need to release source code so it would be "non-contagious". If you want a better genetics-style analogy they're like a ship that left Open Source Island, settled on their own Proprietary Island and went extinct so whatever unique traits they had became dust. Other Proprietary Islands like macOS still thrive, but they only allow a few carefully selected people to return to Open Source Island. The Free Software Islands is like a federation, they'll let you travel to any island for what you seek as long as others can travel to your island for what they seek. And the inhabitants of Open Source Island are pissed because people from the Free Software Islands cherry pick people from Open Source Island, but they can't bring anyone back because they don't want to join the Free Software Islands. So far it's the Holy War with least bloodshed in history though.

Re:But remember kids, the GPL is cancer!

[Shane_Optima]

I'm not sure I follow your analogy. You don't seem to be properly differentiating copyleft open source (GPL) from permissive open source (BSD / Apache / MIT / public domain), which was a central point of my post.

Let's see if we can clarify this a bit more: what happens if proprietary source code is discovered in another project, be it OSS or proprietary code from another company?

Now, why isn't "toxic" a perfectly apt response to the "GPL is viral" claims? Unauthorized use of proprietary code, such as that found in RemixOS,would result in a cease and desist and all efforts on the derivative being wasted. That's a reasonable analogy of "toxic".

This is true even within projects like OS X, where components like (for example) Rosetta are apparently unilaterally terminated by Apple even though demand for them still exists. In the OSS world, such a project might (if it didn't have a major sponsor) have spotty support and be stuck in alpha status or suffer progressive bit rot that is only partially addressed by some ad-hoc backporting attempts or myriad other issues... but popular, important compatibility-enhancing software layers like that almost never simply die completely overnight. This is the toxicity of proprietary software at work. You can rattle off a long list of advantages for OS X or Windows; I'm not saying those advantages don't exist. Of course open source has major issues. And of course having more money than God helps companies like MSFT and AAPL sidestep a lot of those issues.

But in regards to this specific issue, this much-maligned "viral" aspect of copyleft licenses (GPL)... it is not being fairly compared to what the analogous proprietary situation looks like. If proprietary code infects your project, your project dies unless it can be excised entirely. And if a proprietary project like RemixOS dies on its own, usually nobody from the outside can resuscitate it.

PhoenixOS

[emil]

I haven't tried PhoenixOS yet. They've brought out Android 7 Nougat since I last browsed their site.

I wonder what will rise from the ashes of Remix?

Re:Good call. Consumer market is saturated.

[unixisc]

Particularly w/ ChromeOS being rigged to be able to run apps available on Google Play. Better focus would be making more fully featured Chromebooks: not all of them have to be barebones netbooks based on Atoms & w/ 1GB RAM and 4GB storage.

What about...

[puddingebola]

What about these dudes? http://www.android-x86.org/

Re:Good call. Consumer market is saturated.

[luther349]

remix isnt hacked up. its andorid x86 with a nicer desktop friendly ui.

Why do companies do this braindead manoeuvre?

[Anonymous Coward]

They make a great product, and build great in-roads to it.

Then enterprise comes along. 'woo enterprise'.

Then dump their great product X, and burn the inroads.

Forgetting how it was that the enterprise discovered them in the first place.

Then cease growing.

There's a haiku there somewhere.

android-x86 was upstream from Jide

[emil]

I'm not sure if there was a division of labor between the projects - if so, then the parent will suffer.

Right now on android-x86 home page, I see:

2016-10-12: Remix OS for PC version: 3.0.206 is available for download.
2016-08-17: Remix OS for PC - Android M rc2 (version: 3.0.201) on Android-x86 project is available for download.
2016-07-26: Remix OS for PC - Android M Version on Android-x86 project is available for download.
2016-07-06: Remix OS for PC - Latest version built (version: 2.0.402) on Android-x86 project is available for download.

I would not be surprised if Android-x86 releases slowed. They were stuck on KitKat for a LONG time.

Note this is a Chinese company...

[emil]

...and Lenovo is a customer.

Beijing Chaozhuo Co.,Ltd. - appears to be a startup and mentions an angel investor.

we can't make money on "consumers"

[Anonymous Coward]

so we're going to try to fool some ignorant corporate executives next.

come on, they *could have* pursued that while also having a product for lowly end users.. but there's no big pay day in that plan.