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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?
It's time for TempleOS Mobile!
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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/
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.
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.
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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/
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.
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.
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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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"
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Tell that to my refrigerator. Hotspots are buggy. Changes revert without reason. I got a firmware upgrade and everything choked. I ended up doing a factory reset on the built in tablet and starting over.
Not a Tizen problem but the fact that I can't use any of the accessory software on rooted Android devices. Really? I can't get a copy of the shopping list on my phone because I use LineageOS??
I wouldn't trust Samsung to build the OS core on a device I needed to be sane and/or stable.
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...
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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/...
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.
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Firefox OS was treated more like a project like NodeWebkit or Electron: A sand-boxed browser that calls custom external components that could be more sand-boxed browsers. It was inefficient and a memory hog for the hardware it was being designed for. The failure (misrepresentation?) of Matchstick.tv left a bad taste in everyone's mouth.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
I'm told it's not available where I am but they are rolling out version X!!!
https://blog.jolla.com/sailfishx_sales/
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It's worth noting that the next version of Android is trying to fix some of these issues, by providing stable kernel interfaces for device drivers, allowing the kernel to be updated independently of the device vendor. That doesn't help when there's a security vulnerability in a device driver that the vendor won't fix, but it does help when there's an issue elsewhere in the kernel. I suspect that part of the motivation for this is to allow Google to use Android device drivers with Magenta.
The big problem with Android has been that Google has developed its own software engineering practices that work well internally, but don't work in any other setting. The Google model is to have a trunk branch that is deployed into production as soon as it passes CI tests. They have large-scale refactoring tools that can run over the millions of lines of code in their internal codebase very quickly. This means that they don't need to design good APIs from the start, they just throw something together and refactor it later. Unfortunately, this makes it impossible to support multiple versions. When there's a security bug fixed in Chromium, it's often impossible to figure out when the bug was introduced or to back-port the fix. Their only solution is to update everyone to the latest Chromium, which is a problem if it doesn't support an older version of Android. Much of the Android development works like this, which makes updates hard.
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