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.

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.

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.

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.

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/

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...

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.