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Slashdot Asks: Does the World Need a Third Mobile OS?
Now that it is evident that Microsoft doesn't see any future with Windows Phone (or Windows 10 Mobile), it has become clear that there is no real, or potential competitor left to fight Android and iOS for a slice of the mobile operating system market. Mozilla tried Firefox OS, but that didn't work out either. BlackBerry's BBOS also couldn't find enough taker. Ideally, the market is more consumer friendly when there are more than one or two dominant forces. Do you think some company, or individual, should attempt to create their own mobile operating system?
Works nicely on very low power devices.
Fran
:):):)
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how is sailfish doing? I haven't heard much about them since they went software only.
lose != loose
It's time for TempleOS Mobile!
my, your, his/her/its, our, your, their
I'm, you're, he's/she's/it's, we're, you're, they're
Both are / has a mobile version of their OS. Someone should branch it and get it working on commodity hardware. We need truly open source devices. Its ridiculous that Android phone I bought a year ago will never get a security update. Or that I have to basically pay for a security update from Apple.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
One thing we have seen is that it is a tremendously expensive undertaking. The Android example shows how difficult it is to handle the unruly mob of independent manufacturers, so I think we will see such an OS one day, but that it will follow the Apple model of integrated hardware and software.
The market demand in the US and Europe is not terribly high for such a beast, but I could easily see, say, China or Korea deciding that having a new platform was of strategic value. Samsung has even tried it already.
In China, for example, if it were announced today that Android and iOS were going to be forbidden starting in 2021, you would have a pretty complete alternative ecosystem by then.
When the two major offerings are not serving the whole market an opportunity will develop... but I don't think that time is right now. At some point, Apple will do something more dramatically stupid than removing the headphone jack, and maybe then an alternative will make sense.
because... why not?
I have never met a customer who knows what he wants until he sees it.
So I don't think the question can be answered; the only thing we know for sure is that, at this time, not enough people want something like FireFox or BB OS to make them viable; or at least if there are enough people nobody has figured out a way to get it to the people who want it.
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> Microsoft tried, people preferred to choose between the OSes that are more popular. Mozilla tried Firefox OS, but that didn't work out either. BlackBerry's BBOS also couldn't find enough takers
> Do you think some company, or individual, should attempt to create their own mobile operating system?
Lots of people and companies DID try. Big companies and small.
> Ideally, the market is more consumer friendly when there are more than one or two dominant forces.
Apparently not in this instance, in which consumers are served by having a wide range of apps to choose from, on a wide range of hardware. Android offers hardware from $50 to $1,500, with millions of apps. Apparently that's what consumers want. They could have chosen Windows Mobile, or Firefox OS, or Blackberry, or several others. They prefer the well-known platforms with millions of apps and a wide choice of hardware.
There IS a third player - Samsung. Samsung's phones are "Android based" in the same way that Android is "Linux based".
Hopefully Purism, with their Librem phone and PureOS, will survive, if only as a niche product. Designed to be a super secure phone based on Debian.
https://puri.sm/
Just give me the data to make FOSS drivers and we can put whatever OS we like on damn near any hardware.
Releasing a bin driver is not enough, we are limited to whatever kernel it was compiled for, that was the weakness of cool Linux gadgets like the old Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 or the Nokia N900.
It is not hard, just release the frapping data or a FOSS driver!
Lots of people here will post very specific solutions that they have been following. Each will advocate this, that or the other and each is admirable in its own way. I am a longtime user of iOS but before that I had a Palm, starting with the Pilot and going through a number of devices. But I have a different focus.
We need a third, perhaps a fourth, fifth and sixth mobile operating system because it is vital. It is very important to note that Apple and Alphabet will definitely stop innovating and will reach a point of stasis if there is no alternative. Big corporations will tend to want to rest on laurels and allow the hardware people to carry the load. We saw that with Microsoft in the late 1990s and into the early 2000s under Steve Ballmer. They simply quit innovating on all fronts and assumed that Intel and the other chip makers would carry things forward. The result was Windows XP, which became the least secure thing you could run on a computer and the most fraught with irrelevance.
Were I a multimillionaire, I would look at this particular discussion and I would support upstarts with venture capital—not because I hate iOS or Android but because you need innovation. You have to have real competition and two companies trying to outdo each other are just not enough.
And here is a real-life example: Try to book a flight now that we are, essentially, down to three major airlines. These three have whittled down competition and ceded certain aspects of innovation in a manner that exactly re-creates a monopoly. Oh, they'll tell you that they're competing, but they are simply not doing it. You can bet that Alphabet and Apple will do exactly the same.
Two software companies is not enough to keep innovation fired up. We need more than three, actually.
Gods don't kill people, people with gods kill people.
It't not about the OS it's about the apps. Without a strong app store with applications the end user expects to be there, no new OS will gain market share.
That's the wrong question. The right question is this:
What fundamental problem cannot be solved by trivially tweaking or skinning the existing OSes?
If you have an answer for that question, then clearly there's a need for a third OS. If the new OS is just going to be a knock-off of iOS and Android with nothing fundamentally different, then you might as well just use Android and avoid trifurcating the developer community.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
If I could find a phone that had true security in mind (where updates come quickly) and a permissions model that would allow me, the user, to actually set the what permissions an app has versus it wanting to access every damn thing on my phone, I would buy it in a heart beat.
As of this writing the librem 5 by Purism is $75,000 from being fully funded. It will complete funding later today/early tomorrow and then there will be a fully open source debian based phone. https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/
If you want there to be competition, the next question would be competition for who? Android & iOS are pretty competitive with one another in terms of features and support. The handset makers aren't going to be doing any more competing than they currently are. Samsung is half-heartedly working on their own mobile OS to make it look like they're not completely indebted to Google for their part of the market. Carriers in the US couldn't care less as long as they can continue to dictate bands & crapware services that the OS does for free.
Now if you want something else, like being free from advertisements or removal of tracking, then we have a different set of questions to address. First off, why are you getting a smartphone in the first place? Part of what makes one useful is the fact that it can get your current location and provide a map of the area around you. Or get you directions on where you're going. If you don't want third parties accessing that then we need to talk about how we secure the phone more than needing a new OS.
Why not a device sold with a full featured standard Linux distribution with standard Window systems X11 and Wayland. There never was a need for Google to make yet another incompatable window system when it could have easily adapted X or Wayland to its needs. And please, I dont mean Ubuntus phone with Mir, which was a mistake since Canonical could have worked with Wayland folks to get whatever they needed added to Wayland for their phone project, Canonical coming up with Mir was sheer idiocy and threatened to splinter the Linux ecosystem into a bunch of incompatible window systems.
People seemed to like it until it was run over in the race to dominate the mobile phone market.
what about symbian comeing back?
Microsoft failed in not supporting Android apps from the Start. Now they will stop being stubborn and realize that like their PC predecessors of old - you need to support existing software. They will also realize that their built in apps were complete garbage and needed to be better than the competition instead of simply providing base functions.
A pure GNU/Linux mobile phone
https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/
Security, integrity, user control. Libre software and hardware. That's why it is needed.
Do you think some company, or individual, should attempt to create their own mobile operating system?
What are you asking? As you yourself commented, people have attempted to create their own mobile operating systems.
Are you asking should someone try *and succeed* to create their own *commercially successful* mobile OS?
Every time I have seen a new application, service, etc get overtaken by a competitor is because the new thing filled a hole missing by the masses. The biggest complaints I hear from mobile device users is around their carrier and/or the hardware. IOS and Android are in heavy competition and feature development is at breakneck pace, no startup could compete with that.
And the biggest barrier to entry is app development, people don't care what the OS is as long as they can snapchat and play angry birds.
Ohh and the patent system, throw that in and it really is a fools errand.
Of course it didn't work out. The evidence suggests that that's because Firefox OS was just bad software.
This review of Firefox OS gives some insight into how bad Firefox OS was.
Before you blame the hardware, read some of the things that the review says about the Firefox OS software:
That kind of nonsense is inexcusable. It's no wonder that a product with such problems didn't succeed!
Is called AOSP.
You see, Android and AOSP are different enough, that AOSP qualifies as a third OS all into itself. AOSP is a very fragmented third OS (API wise) and playing catchup with Google's Android Proper, since the only commonality (APP wise) is in some APIs that are delerict and whose advanced functionality migrated long ago to GooglePlayStore/Services APIs. Android can run most APPs that AOSP can run, but AOSP can not run some of android's APPs, due to the use of APIs and Services tied to propiertary parts of Android
But AOSP is very big in places Like South East Asia and LatAm (where the growth is baby!), also, in places where Google services and APPs are not available, or are not the most popular. Also, some big players (like Amazon in it's tablets) have embraces AOSP.
Currently, AOSP has a 26% market share (bigger than iOS'), iOS has a 18% market share and Google's Android has something like 55% of the 3223 Million Smartphones currently in active use worldwide...
If anything has a chance to suceed in the short and medium term to fight the duopoly of Android/iOS, is a broad agreement among players for a sort of universal API to challenge the GooglePlayStore/Services APIs that are present in android but not on AOSP.
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I think now is not the time. It's that simple. We're currently in a situation where Apple's iOS pleases a big segment of the population who like the relative ease of use, the compatibility with many other devices (from clock radios to car stereos supporting "CarPlay"), and like the App Store "walled garden" model where every submission is subject to review (higher confidence of no malware problems or non-functioning software).
The others fall pretty well into the category of being happy with various Android powered phone offerings, because they have more flexibility to customize them, support a hardware model assuming you use MicroSD as additional storage, have more freedom to use alternate "app stores", and are made by enough different companies so you can own one made by some manufacturer you don't have issues with, if you're anti-Apple on principle.
Right now, either way you go -- you can count on any app that's worth a darn running on either platform. That app compatibility is more important to people than a "better UI", most of the time. Otherwise, I think Microsoft's recent attempts would have been much better received.
More competition is a good thing, but you can't expect someone to invest all the hard work and expense in rolling one out if there's no pressing need. Right now, the "needs" people express seem to be more of niches like "more secure platform". (The general public doesn't really believe a current, patched version of iOS or Android's OS is a security risk - and many apps exist for both platforms that offer high security solutions, like Signal for IM.)
If Android or Apple (or both) start displeasing the masses and people stop buying or upgrading to the latest OS as it's offered -- that will be the catalyst for change.
the catch 22 problem Microsoft faced after they missed/messed up mobile was the "Apps gap"
e.g. no one wanted to write apps for Microsoft's mobile OS because there wasn't a big enough user base to make it worthwhile, no users wanted a Microsoft mobile device because there weren't any apps ...
which really illustrates the fact that users want to do "something" with their device (you know "use" the hardware), and the vast majority don't feel strongly about the Operating System
so the long held tradition of questions in the post title being obvious - "yes" the world needs additional mobile operating systems. then the question is "can they get a sizable market share from Android and/or Apple?" probably not.
eventually something will replace the smart phone type device and disrupt the computing industry. Of course I have no idea what that will be ...
if you are old enough to remember the 1990's - the same type question back then was some version of "does the world need operating systems other than Windows" - 20+ years later the question is "can Windows stay relevant"
It ain't what they call you. It's what you answer to. http://mylyceum.us/
"Do you think some company, or individual, should attempt to create their own mobile operating system? " WHY NOT? The more options, the better for consumers to choose from, that seems obvious. It does not matter if Firefox or BB didn't hit the mark this time.
Another viable mobile OS (or two or three) would be a very welcome thing.
We also need second and third intelligent species.
They would pull us back to our senses before we nuked or boiled ourselves out of existence.
Or take they could over where we failed.
You already have an open source OS or at least most of the building blocks for one, it even runs Linux.
1. Download AOSP
2. Find hardware manufacturers that'll give you open source drivers
3. Find open alternatives to the Google services
4. Point the phone to F-Droid or similar as the default/only repository
5. Ship
Why would you start to build another platform from scratch, do you think you can unseat Google? Do you think you can succeed where Microsoft, Canonical, Blackberry, Firefox etc. have failed? I think that at best you can be the free alternative, like what CentOS is to RHEL. And even that is an ambitious undertaking, because most likely the major component suppliers will say no to open drivers. But the point is that they'd probably say no with any other OS too, if you can't get a decent cell phone chipset, bluetooth chipset, wireless chipset, GPS chipset, camera, fingerprint reader etc. you're not getting anywhere. But sure, you can always pile more problems on top...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Try it and see. If it survives the market, the world needed what you built. If it doesn't survive, the world didn't need what you built.
The world didn't need Windows on a phone or BlackBerry but they might like some other Operating System design....The issue will be what does your OS provide that the others don't do as well?
I wish you luck, IOS has a strangle hold on most of the market because it "just works" (usually) and Google has nearly all the rest wrapped up with Android. If you can do it better, have at it.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Elements within Google itself think there should be a third - hence Fuchsia.
Android (*bought* by Google, not home grown) was essentially a quick-and-dirty rollout for time-to-market reasons, and there will certainly be benefits if some deep-pocketed sponsor can roll out something built from the ground up for mobile and not desktop requirements.
Although I guess the question is essentially asking if "Blackberry should die"?
The greatest "what might have been" I think of is Palm/WebOS. Whatever you may think of his shenanigans, Mark Hurd was absolutely right when he ran HP and made the move to buy Palm - that could have been the start of something new. HP may not have much mindshare now but I think a lot of people underestimate how many units it can put out into the market, and get adopted simply because they're pushing it.
Steve Jobs was absolutely right when he fended off all those people arguing (during the "beleaguered" days) that Apple should licence MacOS out (or even just give up and switch to Windows) - an operating system is a core *asset*. Without it you're just an indentured servant to "other people's technology", at the mercy of the true power.
Buying Palm was a bold move to attempt to break HP out of that rut but it got shafted before it got started. I think it could have been done. Instead HP was stuck trying to peddle Windows phones, and ended up getting shafted by MS yet again https://www.theverge.com/2017/...
This is pretty much a waste of time, as the new wearable self-powered circuitry (communicator or sleeve with keyboard) that will replace mobile OS already is pretty much done.
But, hey, keep pushing stuff we don't need, grandpa
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The poster could just as easily be asking do we need Linux? The answer is that yes we need an option that is not a walled garden. An option that is open and community driven. An option where innovation can occur.
I was reading the OpenBSD man pages the other night because I couldn't sleep and while there is some amount of propaganda about them, the truth is that every major security innovation has happened outside the mainstream Desktop OS's ie Mac OS and Windows. Similarly the iOS and Android ecosystems are stagnate and feel like they are crushed under the weight of their many questionable design choices.
Granted Firefox OS and Windows Mobile failed. But they failed fast because they were minor players and importantly they failed because they took bad design choices to the extreme.
A third option is desperately needed. It needs to be independent of carrier and independent of a monoploy hardware manufacturer. It needs to provide security though solid design and by eschewing monetization of end users. It needs to work for app developers and allow for innovation but also require that developers follow user interface and security guidelines. It needs to empower the end user.
Read more here, wikipedia here, the Toolkits here, and the Sony handsets here. And if you are enough of a hardware hacker, there are numerous other handsets to try it on.
Is it 100% complete? Almost, just missing a few sensors and bluetooth, but its sure better than starting from scratch.
There are a few of you around that are anti-Sony or got burned on the Jolla tablet and won't consider this. So have fun with your spy gizmo from Apple or Google.
"The quality of life is determined by its activites."--Aristotle
Too much money for the OS dev.
Too much programming anew for developers.
Too much for matching up with hardware.
Too much for any sane normal phone user to put up with.
WebOS - like the old Palm Pre phones and the new LG TVs.
just in time for Linux to make Android & Apple to sweat a little, i bet a purely open Linux phone comes out soon and users will have more control over what apps get installed and more importantly what apps DONT get installed, say bye bye to grandfathered apps that you cant remove like microsoft office or facebook, (are you listening samsung? because i want to to see a Linux phone steal some of your customers away)
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I think the market would be the most healthy if there were 3 or 4 of them, each with about 30% or less of the market. They would compete with one another for the best features and most stable platform. What we don't need is a highly fractured market where there are dozens of OS choices that would choke any good application development because it takes way too much effort to build for every OS.
Better late then never, right OS/2 Warp team?
The only Google apps most people are using are email, search, address book/contacts and maps. Maps is the hardest one of those to replace well. Addressbook/contacts is just a web database with a table per user that syncs to the phone. Email is obvious, search could be changed to duck duck go/bing/altavista/whatever. Maps is harder, there's open source/data maps but there's no great UI/GPS integration for it at least that I'm aware of, if anyone could jump in with a suggestion....
We don't need another "phone OS"... instead we need the hardware to mature to make porting existing OS to it feasible, there are plenty of OS out there already, the phone functionality is then mostly down to user level apps and touch UI (not saying that there isn't a lot of work that goes into that of course). The closest we are going to get to this in the immediate future is https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/
The way I see it, smart phones are currently in the 1980's stage of personal computers, Amigas', Ataris', Acorns', BBCs', Amstrads' etc, sometimes they use the same CPU architecture, but there is little similarity in terms of a compatible hardware platform and all current consumer hardware vendors do not provide open source drivers anyway.
If it could run apps for the extant operating systems it might stand a chance, but then again... can you make it so it can get into the apps stores to download them?
Hanging around for decades waiting for "The Year of Windows on Mobile" is pretty much equivalent to hanging around for decades waiting for "The Year of Linux on the Desktop." When the market is saturated with two strong incumbents (or, as is the case with the desktop and on mobile ... one strong incumbent and also Apple), it's REALLY hard to get a third platform to take hold. Developers aren't interested in writing to a platform that has few users, and users aren't interested in deploying a platform that has few applications.
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Just open-source Windows10 Mobile and BBOS and you will have one.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
And this while still providing for legacy devices, even like their first Jolla smartphone.
(2.1.2 would be out for it any moment now)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Its ridiculous that Android phone I bought a year ago will never get a security update.
Part of this isn't due to Android, but to hardware manufacturers - drivers aren't avaible / updated.
The current tendencies for chipset manufacturers is to fork whatever Linux kernel version happens to be the base of the Android Letter of the day.
Then slap some binary drivers on it, and call it a day and never ever touch it again.
Hardware manufacturer come, and to be faster to market, basically just re-adapt an existing board design from the chipset manufacturer, and quickly botch some android user space on top of the above mentioned kernel. Once they sold the smartphones to retailer they abandon it and move to the next model.
By they time you want an update for your phone, the phone's manufacturer might not even exist anymore or they might have abandonned it long ago. Even if they wanted to make updates, there would by then the problems of getting a newer kernel + userland drivers set - but the chipset manufacturer has completely abandoned it.
Google might be happily still providing newer versions of android and fixes (currently all the way back to Android KitKat), it will take some tedious work by the people of LineageOS (formely CyanogenMod) to build an image you can actually use... ...as long as your phone will actually authorize you to flash it.
Moving to another OS isn't going to fix these troubles : you'll still be bound to the same binary drivers (running thanks to libhybris adaptation layer, because you want an actual GNU/Linux OS instead of the weird Android user space and driver API).
Case in point, the original Jolla 1 smartphone by Jolla Oy. It runs Sailfish OS (a descendent of Nokia's Meamo/Meego, and cousin of Samsung's Tizen).
As of 2017, the os itself is still getting the same upgrades as all the other devices officially supported by Jolla Oy (currently 2.1.1, with 2.1.2 coming out soonish).
But you're still stuck running on the Jolla whatever Linux kernel (3.4.xx) Qualcomm happened to fork back when they developped the drivers for the onboards Snapdragon 400.
And thus the provided android application compatibility (Aliendalvik by Myriad) is limited to Jellybean, not Kitkat like on the other devices supported by Jolla.
The only exception are a few chipsets by Intel (official upstream drivers in kernel - but they exitet the smartphone market), by Qualcomm (some of their GPU can work with Freedreno driver, if you're lucky) and a couple of chipsets by Freescale (some of their Vivante GPUs are supported by Etnaviv driver, or support could be comming soon. That's part of the reasons why they got picked up by Purism for their Librem smartphone).
But none of the sexier more powerful chipset is currently supported well enough by opensource drivers. Thus you're still stuck with manufacturer-provided, outdated "android" linux kernel and drivers.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/
You probably could have made all those points without calling people dumbasses and idiots, you moron.
Why didn't you claim the same thing when Tesla joined the fray? You could have said: Does the world need a 17th (or whatever car maker count we are at) car maker?
Tired of my customary (Score:1)
If only to keep the other two honest.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
My HP Touchpad is still remarkably useful 6 years after they made the terrible decision to scrap the WebOS mobile project... Breathing some new life into that ecosystem would be easier than starting from scratch. They had the notifications system perfected, the wide-based compatibility with dominant web services right in the OS was great. If only it could handle x.265 encoded video...
Google, Apple, and Microsoft claim their control of all apps is about quality control and customer protection. I say it's about lock-in and free money (from the 30% take of all user purchases of app store software).
Go ahead, make third-party app stores certify through an objective process. Let users rate app stores, like Amazon lets shopper rate third-party sellers.
There's nothing like competition to spur innovation.
MAPS.ME is an offline map with gps functions. There's open source code for it and it isn't based on google apps or services.
They could've owned the business market with a range of phones that combine the lower price of Android with the security and regular updates of of iOS. It is very easy to develop custom business apps for it and it integrates nicely with Windows based corporate networks. The lack of such things as Facebook is probably a good thing in a business phone but in any case had they pursued this strategy and it had succeeded the apps would have started to appear.
We already have three major operating systems for client devices. There is no problem with having more OS's, but we don't want a monopoly across lines of devices. So MS succeeding in the mobile market would be a problem, the same as if Apple or Google would become enormous in the desktop/laptop market. So I am glad MS did not succeed in the mobile market, that would have given them a major advantage. More OS's would be fine, but it totally depends on dominance across all client devices.
But instead of a third mobile OS, I'd like to suggest a standards body create a inter-operations treatise. Let Mozilla define what the web browsing features should be, let some other cosortium define the monimum text, voice bits, music, books, video again with sections for that, and lastly a WebOS style application model, likely build around web assembly. The the OS and other undeylying part scan be anything a vendors wants, and a rich HW and SW supply chain can provide everything, and even be 2nd sourced and such. The device can be submitted for treatise version x.x approval and consumer have an expectation for what the device can do. Then Android and iOS finally become some bloated, that eventuall Apple and Google cave and just adopt the third mobile OS with their look and feel, app mix, and likely content management sauce ... and literally get out of writing so much of the underlying cade themselves anymore. Just sell apps, content, and connectivity to their respective walled gardens.
Sort of like the automitive industry is now - major car manufacture only make a few key compoentes, source everything else from suppliers. Except many mobile OS supplies may be Open Source approved.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If HP hadn't killed WebOS, and it was still in active development, there would be a third. It was very nice to use on the Palm Pre 3 that I had. It was incredibly short-sighted of HP to flush that down the toilet along with the hardware, especially when they then had to spend a lot more money to get another tablet setup to sell.
I still maintain that the BlackBerry 10 OS is the best mobile OS I have ever used. I have used Palm OS, BBOS, BB10, iOS and Android. The 100% gesture-based BB10 was very refreshing. Like all other non iOS and Android systems, it lacked a decent app store. And that's what this comes down to: Will companies and developers embrace a 3rd or 4th mobile OS and the additional dev costs that come with it? I think the answer is no.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
I've been running SailfishOS on a Jolla for several years. Never had a problem. Frequently updated with good, reliable updates. I have full root access to the device. I can add my own scripts and apps. Many packages have been ported. Yup, there are a few missing pieces (like whatsapp but which /.er needs needs them when you can run bash?). Soon to be running on Sony hardware. I think that the Russians and the Chinese think that there is a need for a genuine free OS (as in free from the US snooping) so I hope it won't die anytime soon. Sad that the Jolla tablet didn't work out - that is a truly lovely piece of hardware to use.
https://jolla.com/