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The Last Independent Mobile OS (vice.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The year was 2010 and the future of mobile computing was looking bright. The iPhone was barely three years old, Google's Android had yet to swallow the smartphone market whole, and half a dozen alternative mobile operating systems -- many of which were devoutly open source -- were preparing for launch. Eight years on, you probably haven't even heard of most of these alternative mobile operating systems, much less use them. Today, Android and iOS dominate the global smartphone market and account for 99.9 percent of mobile operating systems. Even Microsoft and Blackberry, longtime players in the mobile space with massive revenue streams, have all but left the space. Then there's Jolla, the small Finnish tech company behind Sailfish OS, which it bills as the "last independent alternative mobile operating system." Jolla has had to walk itself back from the edge of destruction several times over the course of its seven year existence, and each time it has emerged battered, but more determined than ever to carve out a spot in the world for a truly independent, open source mobile operating system.
Jolla's Sailfish OS rose from the ashes of Nokia and Intel's ill-fated collaboration, MeeGo. The MeeGo project launched in 2010 in an attempt to merge Intel's Linux-based Moblin OS and Nokia's Maemo software platform into a single open-source mobile operating system that could take on Google. By 2011, Android had already surpassed Nokia in the smartphone market, a fact that wasn't lost on Nokia's CEO Stephen Elop, who in a memo described the company as standing on a "burning platform." Nokia only ever released one phone running MeeGo: the Nokia N9, which ended up being well received despite its limited release. But it was too little, too late. By 2011, Nokia was bleeding talent and it was clear that MeeGo wasn't going to keep the company competitive in the rapidly changing smartphone market. In a last-ditch effort, Nokia struck a partnership with Microsoft to provide the hardware for its next generation of Windows Phones, abandoning MeeGo entirely. The same couldn't be said for those developers who had worked on MeeGo and, before that, an open source mobile OS called Mer, based on Intel's Maemo system. In October 2011, three developers that had worked on Mer sent a message on a mailing list calling for the creation of a "MeeGo 2.0." At the same time, developer Sami Pienimaki and two others left Nokia to found their own company, which would use this new version of MeeGo as the basis for an open source mobile OS. And thus, Sailfish was born. In a cheeky homage to the "burning platform" memo, Pienimaki and his fellow defectors decided to name their company Jolla, a Finnish word connoting a small boat or life raft. Jolla has since turned to Russia and China, both of which were hungry for a secure alternative to Google-based systems. In late 2016, Sailfish OS achieved domestic certification in Russia for government and corporate us. Around the same time, Sailfish was also making moves in China. In early 2017, the Sailfish China Consortium gained the exclusive rights and license to develop a Chinese OS based on Sailfish.
Jolla's Sailfish OS rose from the ashes of Nokia and Intel's ill-fated collaboration, MeeGo. The MeeGo project launched in 2010 in an attempt to merge Intel's Linux-based Moblin OS and Nokia's Maemo software platform into a single open-source mobile operating system that could take on Google. By 2011, Android had already surpassed Nokia in the smartphone market, a fact that wasn't lost on Nokia's CEO Stephen Elop, who in a memo described the company as standing on a "burning platform." Nokia only ever released one phone running MeeGo: the Nokia N9, which ended up being well received despite its limited release. But it was too little, too late. By 2011, Nokia was bleeding talent and it was clear that MeeGo wasn't going to keep the company competitive in the rapidly changing smartphone market. In a last-ditch effort, Nokia struck a partnership with Microsoft to provide the hardware for its next generation of Windows Phones, abandoning MeeGo entirely. The same couldn't be said for those developers who had worked on MeeGo and, before that, an open source mobile OS called Mer, based on Intel's Maemo system. In October 2011, three developers that had worked on Mer sent a message on a mailing list calling for the creation of a "MeeGo 2.0." At the same time, developer Sami Pienimaki and two others left Nokia to found their own company, which would use this new version of MeeGo as the basis for an open source mobile OS. And thus, Sailfish was born. In a cheeky homage to the "burning platform" memo, Pienimaki and his fellow defectors decided to name their company Jolla, a Finnish word connoting a small boat or life raft. Jolla has since turned to Russia and China, both of which were hungry for a secure alternative to Google-based systems. In late 2016, Sailfish OS achieved domestic certification in Russia for government and corporate us. Around the same time, Sailfish was also making moves in China. In early 2017, the Sailfish China Consortium gained the exclusive rights and license to develop a Chinese OS based on Sailfish.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Slashdot:
French toast, m'ladies
(tips stovepipe hat knowingly)
... what about UBports, Plasma Mobile, ... ...
SailfishOS might be the last major-company-independent commercial mobile OS not more not less
What will happen when Mozilla's Gecko and Non SystemD distros become extinct. A ChromesystemD world is not what we want.
Rogue One was better than The Last Independent Mobile OS.
Still no way to directly buy Sailfish X if you're American. According to all of my googling, you still have to access through a VPN.
Would love to know the logic of turning us down, but embracing Russia and China where there is nowhere near enough disposable income for people to buy a second phone and an OS license just to try it out.
At the time of Elop's "burning platforms memo" Android was not outselling the Nokia platforms at the time which included Symbian based smartphones. Yes it was outselling the predecessor to MeeGo, which was only available in like a single model which was ludicrously expensive and available in limited quantities. He basically Osborned their whole lineup with that move.
Add to that that they moved to a version of Windows Phone which was totally incompatible with previous Windows Mobile applications, and those applications were themselves incompatible with the next version of Windows Phone which came out a year or two later and you have a recipe for disaster.
Just to set the record straight. The Nokia N9 was not "too little too late" and Stephen Elop's "burning platform" email was not some rational realization, but rather either the most blatant corporate assassination or greatest corporate blunder.
Nokia did have some serious problems because they had 2 competing factions - the established Symbian group and the Maemo/Meego group. The competition was not doing good, especially for the Maemo side (caused many delays), but at least there was finally a plan that did not alienate app developers: Symbian devs could switch to QT apps, a framework also good for Maemo/Meego.
When Stephen Elop took over, the first consumer Maemo/Meego phone was being prepared (its Maemo predecessor - the N900 was great for devs, pro users etc but not really a consumer phone). What he does, is he sends that notorious memo which alienates all loyal Nokia 3rd party app developers (Nokia still had a vibrant ecosystem) and then he buries Maemo/Meego by declaring a switch to Windoes Mobile. The reasoning he gave for switching away from Meego was that they would only be able to release one new Meego phone per year with the existing strategy, and he claimed that was not viable. Apart from doubting the fact they would not be able to develop more phones, I would like to ask the audience whether they know of another major company that would only release one smartphone per year (at least until recently) and how is that company doing currently?
Elop's problem with his "plan" however was that the N9 with Meego was AMAZING. And since they were already ready for production he had to allow for an initial small run. What he did though, was make sure they were sold only in very minor (even 3rd world where possible) markets. Mine was an import from Romania. I gave it to my non-techie wife to play around with it. She said "wow, compared to your iPhone 4, this looks like it came from 2025". Not being VM based like Android, it was as fluid as the iPhone, but without the imposed limitations of iOS you could do anything on it. For geeks, apart from the native apps you also had a full linux machine, but for non-Geeks the OS interface was where it excelled - I don't like buttonless normally, but the N9 "swipe" interface was the right way to implement it, with very fast and easy switching between apps etc. Due to the very limited availability it got very few reviews in major press - but whoever reviewed it was very impressed.
I had both an iOS, and Android and Meego at the time and the latter was clearly superior - if Nokia dedicated to it we would probably be enjoying much better smartphones right now. I know the saying "do not attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity", but it does seem more likely that Elop went from Microsoft to Nokia with the plan to make it worthless so that Microsoft can buy it to do their Windows Mobile experiment, with himself returning victoriously. That's the only explanation for both not producing the N9 in quantity, and also doing that memo that burned bridges (alienating the most important people - developers) before there was any alternative.
Anyway, I do hope Sailfish makes it, although I have not tried it so I don't know if the interface is as good as the N9 was with its "swipe" interface. But I consider both iOS and Android flawed for different reasons (I currently prefer Android on a Xiaomi Mi Mix 2) and hope we'll get another option at some point. And I don't mean how you can theoretically get a Sailfish phone now by jumping some hoops, but being able to actually get a flagship phone with the OS installed.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Download SHAREit for Windows 7 32 bit Interesting content. I have a lot of science that I find this web
What Motherboard writes regarding Nokia and the demise of MeeGo doesn't square with my recollection of what was reported at the time. The prevailing opinion derived from the reported facts then was that Elop's mission from the moment he took the job at Nokia was to gut MeeGo and effectively make Nokia a Microsoft subsidiary. The only talent bleed I recall hearing about started after Elop killed MeeGo development. I never understood the power dynamic that must have taken place at Nokia that allowed Elop to enter. For a deliciously incendiary and detailed writeup, see https://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2011/06/do-i-really-have-to-ok-ok-ok-i-will-do-update-to-nokia-disaster-year-after-profit-warning.html.
It seems to me that https://e.foundation/ also qualifies as independant mobile os.
Since when does being officially licensed in Russia and China mean "independent" any more than the other OSes?
Seriously Where is my tablet?
Given it contains copyrighted ideas, patents and other stuff from intel and nokia.
Let's hold out some hope that the Purism Librem 5 smartphone turns out to be a real thing and not vaporware:
https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/
There are metadistributions like Gentoo Linux From Scatch, and you can always just fork everything.
we really do...
I think the current state of smartphone OSs proves most of the major points Stallman every made about why software needs to be free.
Absolute statements are never true
One thing we as a community need to fight for is our right to escalate privileges on our devices. We need legislation, and we need technology solutions.
It is NOT okay that I need to ask the manufacturer of my device for the root / bootloader unlock password. NOT okay.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
is there more than the screenshots offer? It's same as iOS.
Phones running alternative mobile OSes (aka not iOS or Android) are a waste of money in 2018. All text and voice communication is now dependent on certain apps officially available only for the big two OSes. Yes there are third-party clients, but it's not the same. SMS and MMS used to be OS-neutral, but the apps that replaced them are not. And then there is the whole content consumption problem with the content being tied to services, and these services may not even have third-party alternatives for alternative OSes. If you want to buy a Jolla phone and enjoy watching it gather dust, go ahead and do it.
I owned a Jolla 2 Sailfish phone and kept it for as long as I could, until the phone was no more (which was fairly soon after purchase).
The Sailfish OS was an absolute joy to use, despite the odd niggle here and there. And the ability to run android apps on it meant that I could retain my favourite android apps if I wanted to. Alo, as a linux user, it was a pleasure to have a linux terminal I could ssh into from my desktop and vice versa and copy files and run batch-commands without any of that mtp crap. I have now gone back to android and really miss my Sailfish phone
However, in fairness, as amazing as the OS was, the company was incompetent and systematically ignored its userbase and their needs. Take this post for instance which has actively been flagging broken Notes functionality in Contacts (a critical feature for a mobile OS) for the last five years and through 3 milestone versions of the OS. The devs always focused on 'sparkly' stuff they could use to promote the OS to investors first, and ignored their users when it came to broken functionality. Combine that with the fact they made some awful business decisions leading to returned products, and physical phones prone to breakage and lack of appropriate warranty procedure or replacement, and you get an idea why they've had to look for the kind of solution they did just now (i.e. "China": every Startup company's dream-turned-nightmare).
I am now holding out to see how that other up-and-coming linux phone will fare, (the Librem phone, the one Bryan Lunduke seems to keep advertising). But that seems like an altogether different solution. Too bad, Sailfish was nice while it lasted.
what the hell is this summary all about.
Elop was an ex-MS guy who simply destroyed Nokia (so MS could buy it). Nokia could have been big in the smartphone market, as they were one of the biggest mobile brands and they were not late to the smartphone party yet.
Just the fact that Jolla is still alive today, is evidence enough it was a good platform, just image what they could have accomplished if Nokia really pulled through on it.
This is just another story where management destroyed the company, very much like the Amiga (see the other recent article on /.)
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
I don't see why it matters. Last I checked, most phones have locked down bootloaders, and there doesn't appear to be a way to install an alternative OS that has drivers for all the proprietary phone hardware out there. Sure, Firefox OS and Ubuntu Phone OS and the like worked on a few 5 or 6 year old phones, but how does that help anyone? A very small amount of people actually owned a Nexus 7.