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So we had Jolla, Ubuntu, Mozilla and even Microsoft trying to create a new major player in the mobile OSs market - all pretty much failed to do so. Is it practically impossible? Are we stuck with Android and iOS forever? This tiny selection of options worries me.
So we had Jolla, Ubuntu, Mozilla and even Microsoft trying to create a new major player in the mobile OSs market - all pretty much failed to do so. Is it practically impossible? Are we stuck with Android and iOS forever? This tiny selection of options worries me.
Offer something people want that the others don't. It's not enough to just not be iOS or not Android, that only appeals to the small segment of people that HN appeals to.
The selling point for Ubuntu, Mozilla and Microsoft's phone was just 'it's not them.' They didn't provide any value. Microsoft had apparently forgotten what they had to do to make the xBox viable against Sony and Nintendo when it first launched, because they didn't just launch it with 'Hey, at least we're not Sony, the developers will show up eventually.'
So we had Jolla, Ubuntu, Mozilla and even Microsoft trying to create a new major player in the mobile OSs market - all pretty much failed to do so. Is it practically impossible? Are we stuck with Android and iOS forever? This tiny selection of options worries me.
At any rate, it seems like two major brands is all the tech world can handle.
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However, WebKit and Chromium are. They are already experimenting on an Electron based browser called Tolfino and on iOS Firefox is built using the WebView.
Mozilla experiments with a lot of stuff, and on iOS any browser has to be built with Webview. None of that means anything.
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Very interesting! Do you work at Jolla or are there any 3rd party jobs?
I do not work for Jolla. I am in no way affiliated with Jolla, other than being part of the Jolla/SailfishOS/Maemo/Meego community. I try to support SailfishOS development (by buying Jolla devices, developing software for the platform and evangelizing its benefits). The paid ecosystem around SailfishOS is non-existent, having said that Jolla are looking to hire: http://jolla.com/jobs
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So their product on day 1 should have been faster, more responsive and had more features than Android / iOS ?
No, they shouldn't enter a market by trying to out do the established players at their own game. Microsoft didn't dethrone IBM by making a better mainframe.
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> it took Mozilla this many years after the fact to admit this failure The first Firefox OS phones shipped in early 2013. After spending around two years trying to make the project work, Mozilla stopped releasing new versions in May 2015 and officially started winding down the project by the end of 2015, as mentioned in the linked newsgroup post. So it wasn't really many years at all; also, it's hard to place the bla…
By middle 2014, many FirefoxOS phones were already months behind on updates and neither Mozilla nor the hardware vendors were putting any effort into supporting their own flagship devices. By that point, the app store was useless, because you couldn't install any apps on most devices due to ABI breakage between versions and a fragmentation worse than Android. Neither CEO did anything to mitigate this issue. I don't k…
Arguably that's great leadership because the CEO knew instantly to cut his or her losses, and not give into the sunk cost fallacy by pursuing this failing venture "because we're so invested in it already; we just have to try harder you see!"
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What? Both Android and iOS are responsible for tens of billions in revenue.
Profit is the relevant metric, not revenue.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-21/google-s-... $22 billion profit.
iOS is a bit more complicated to value, but they've made more than $10 billion just in app store commissions (even not counting increased sales of hardware due to iOS). So if you consider the cost of iOS development as weighed against their hardware sales, and book the software as profit, you'd get more than $10 billion. The real profit numbers are probably higher.
Anyway, the point is that there's no reasonable way to assert that either one of them isn't profitable.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
By middle 2014, many FirefoxOS phones were already months behind on updates and neither Mozilla nor the hardware vendors were putting any effort into supporting their own flagship devices. By that point, the app store was useless, because you couldn't install any apps on most devices due to ABI breakage between versions and a fragmentation worse than Android. Neither CEO did anything to mitigate this issue. I don't k…
> Neither CEO did anything to mitigate this issue. I don't know how that's not bad leadership. Arguably that's great leadership because the CEO knew instantly to cut his or her losses, and not give into the sunk cost fallacy by pursuing this failing venture "because we're so invested in it already; we just have to try harder you see!"
So we had Jolla, Ubuntu, Mozilla and even Microsoft trying to create a new major player in the mobile OSs market - all pretty much failed to do so. Is it practically impossible? Are we stuck with Android and iOS forever? This tiny selection of options worries me.
Of course it's not impossible The issue is where the money is coming from. Also, to move on an entrenched market you need to do a lot of things upfront. Android in, let's say, 2011 was much worse than iOS, today the gap has closed.
I think what Microsoft wasted on Nokia's phone business was something in the magnitude of >$8 billion, so money was not really the problem at least in their case.