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?

Comments

TempleOS

[almitydave]

It's time for TempleOS Mobile!

Branch Tizen or Ubuntu

[randomErr]

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.

Re:Branch Tizen or Ubuntu

[randomErr]

Umm, did you read the next two sentences:

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.

Re:Branch Tizen or Ubuntu

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Not sure what you mean by paying for a security update. If you bought an iPhone a year ago you'll certainly get updates. You don't even have to beg your carrier.

It may not come from the USA

[GlobalEcho]

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.

Re:It may not come from the USA

[ArmoredDragon]

The Windows Phone worst enemy was Microsoft itself. It wasn't a bad UI, what feels stupid on a desktop computer works well on a phone.

Speak for yourself on that one; the only people I've met that at actually like the metro interface on phones are all big fans of Microsoft. People who are indifferent towards Microsoft have never liked it in my experience.

Think about it:

- The tiles just flip around at set intervals, and when they do, you may well not have a hint as to what application that tile was for unless it happened to be fresh on your mind, because there aren't really any good hints to that end.

- Some tiles don't offer any hints at all, at any time. Think about the tile in WP8 that just showed a zero-depth picture of a trophy...how is the user supposed to know what the hell it is for? Xbox achievements when you don't own an xbox?

- Unless you continue to stare at a given tile, you could very well be missing something important, like an important email for example, because the tile is probably flipped to something uninteresting, like Amazon telling you about cameras they sell.

(Microsoft told Windows Phone users for a long time that there's no need to rip off Android's notification system, until they realized exactly how terrible the tile system was for notifications.)

This was NOT a user friendly OS. The tile system was a really horrible idea to begin with. Windows Phone fans love to chat up a storm about how lame static icons are...well, at least static icons give users a good idea about what they're for, at all times. There's a very good reason that static icons have been a thing since Xerox invented them 44 years ago. If they really wanted to do away with static icons, they should have adopted Android's widget system where they can be interactive, real-time, have text that makes sense of what you're looking at, and have unlimited dimensions.

Eventually

[aaarrrgggh]

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.

Elon's MuskOS

[Spy Handler]

because... why not?

In decades of developing and promoting tech

[hey!]

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.

Re:In decades of developing and promoting tech

[JohnFen]

I have never met a customer who knows what he wants until he sees it.

I'm getting really tired of hearing that. It may be true (in fact, sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't), but in the last few years it only ever seems to be uttered by developers and companies who want to foist whatever they make onto people because that's what they invested in, not because customers unknowingly want it.

Re:In decades of developing and promoting tech

[JohnFen]

"Foisting" implies just getting to the sale and moving on.

What I mean by "foisting" is when you are given the "choice" between their way or nothing, regardless of whether or not their way is actually good for you.

Also, developers who talk this way are often wrong about what people want, but in their arrogance (that is an incredibly arrogant attitude, after all), are unable to even see their error. The tech industry has gone backwards in several ways as a direct result of this.

Re:In decades of developing and promoting tech

[R3d M3rcury]

This customer knows exactly what he wants, in detail, and you deliver it to him exactly as he asked for it, and they don't like it.

My new girlfriend is just like my mother--looks like her, dresses like her. So I took her home to meet my parents. My father hates her!

I'll be here all week. Try the veal!

Answer precedes the question

[raymorris]

> 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".

Re:Answer precedes the question

[Stormwatch]

More like, Microsoft tried to hijack Nokia's rabidly loyal fanbase. As it turns out, killing the system they already used (Symbian) and the system they wanted to use (MeeGo) in favor of someone else's unproven new system was not the way to win them over.

Re: Answer precedes the question

[Stormwatch]

Not denying Nokia's internal mess, but ultimately they did release a MeeGo device, two months before their first WP device. So they didn't need someone else's system after all. MeeGo was ready on time! And it got stellar reviews! If they had pushed it with all their might, it could have been a strong contender against Android.

Purism

[Checkered Daemon]

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/

Definitely

[mhollis]

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.

That's the wrong question.

[dgatwood]

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.

YES!!!

[deKernel]

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.

Free Software to the rescue again!

[DMJC]

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/

Re:Free Software to the rescue again!

[Checkered Daemon]

They just hit 100%.

What is missing (for the masses)?

[gatfirls]

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.

There is a third Mobile OS already

[williamyf]

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.

This comment is brought you by a Cellular Operator Engineer, Manager and technical trainer in LatAm rocking a Blackberry Q10 with BBOS 10.3.3.

http://communities-dominate.bl...

No

[Kjella]

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...

It is already available: SailfishOS

[Amigori]

From the former MeeGo team, SailfishOS is what you're asking for:

• -- Linux, Open source (mostly), easy to use, Android compatibility, ARM chipsets, not Apple or Google. Also, its not American-centric, if that matters to you.

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.