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This seems like an abandoned project with no updates since 2019 (!!) Those looking for a more active and stable project: ubports is carrying the torch forward on the convergence front. I have personally used it on my old OnePlus device and it was quite usable. 1: https://ubports.com/ 2: https://lomiri.com/
Does it run my banking app which is Android/iOS based? (Running through an emulator is ok.)
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i struggle to see your point. Your suggestion is that people should carry around four devices with them, poorly integrated, clunky, all for the experience of plugging to their phone? At that point, what advantage is there over a laptop?
No. I'm just saying that "there are no HDMI devices near me" is weird and hard to achieve. To use my phone as a desktop all I need is the phone itself. USB cable I most often already have to charge it. Phone works as a keyboard and mouse and I have large screen to browse web, play, watch videos. ZERO new devices, only things I already carry and a screen that is already there.
Think about a poor person. Are they better served by a laptop or your proposed solution of four different devices?
Even in my own daily life, i struggle to find places where your solution is practical.
It's interesting that in the early 2010s, both halves of the ecosystem were talking about "convergence:" Ubuntu wanted to make its Linux render a single column on a handset and with floating windows on a larger screen. Motorola had a similar project based on Android. A dozen years later, nobody has done that well. Ubuntu gave up. Mobile-targeted Linux distributions aren't good (missing functionality, mobile UX, or bo…
> Recent iterations of iOS are getting closer to being able to replace a Mac for a class of tablet-owning users who don't need desktop software, but the ecosystems are pretty well separated for most. Yeah, apple could solve that instantly. Sadly, they decided to play a cash cow strategy of milking existing users instead for trying to grow market share. Apple is so frustrating. Amazing hardware but then they complete…
Apple decided when the iPhone first came out to redo the whole UI stack to be touch-first. There are hardenings for security and battery preservation, but that's arguably the biggest difference between iOS and macOS.
Windows and Linux have tried to retrofit their ecosystems to also work on touchscreens. It hasn't gone well. Too many apps assume a mouse-equivalent pointing system.
Adaptive design has fared best on the web, but it's still not settled. See, for instance, the back-and-forth around density defaults for web apps like Gmail. Some people really like their pointer-friendly dense UIs with hover buttons, and that makes them really hard to use on a touchscreen.
Perhaps ironically, Apple is also in the best position to bridge the gap. Since they own the UI stack that renders most apps on Apple devices, they could do something clever like say "a button is 32px tall if there's a trackpad and 56px tall otherwise." Rules like that could produce an app that truly adapts to the user's primary modality.
The other systems have too many UI frameworks for that to work. Apple could only pull it off because ~everyone uses their component set (I think it's called UIKit). They also have a reputation of declaring the future and making the ecosystem catch up (going all the way back to adopting USB exclusively on the first iMac).
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The use case for me is mostly hotel stays. When travelling for fun I don't particularly want the weight (and risk) of packing my laptop, but I would like to be able to play movies and music on the hotel TV. With a cheap light keyboard I could also do email and similar light admin things with the benefit of the bigger screen. Until recently I was also travelling frequently for work with a heavy MacBook running a varie…
I tend to bring my AppleTV + HDMI cable with me whenever we travel. Its small size makes it largely inconsequential from a luggage point of view and it’s already fully set up with all my streaming apps. It also doesn’t tie up my phone if anyone else wants to watch TV.
It's interesting that in the early 2010s, both halves of the ecosystem were talking about "convergence:" Ubuntu wanted to make its Linux render a single column on a handset and with floating windows on a larger screen. Motorola had a similar project based on Android. A dozen years later, nobody has done that well. Ubuntu gave up. Mobile-targeted Linux distributions aren't good (missing functionality, mobile UX, or bo…
> A dozen years later, nobody has done that well. I'm writing this from Librem 5 phone running PureOS based on Debian. No Android dependencies and possibility of full desktop mode. How is this not a success?
> Simply plug your phone into an HDMI screen, connect up a keyboard and mouse, and you’ve got a lightweight desktop experience you can take anywhere. No, I can't take it anywhere, because few places I go to have a HDMI screen and keyboard ready for me. And to the ones they do, I carry my laptop.
I think offices are the most likely places to have something like this, though. My company has monitors with USB-C dock inputs set up at each desk; you grab a desk and plug your laptop into it when you get there. But they're just using DisplayPort Alt-Mode, and a phone with a desktop mode would work with them as well.
I wish I could do that for work; would save me from lugging around a rather heavy laptop. :)
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> Recent iterations of iOS are getting closer to being able to replace a Mac for a class of tablet-owning users who don't need desktop software, but the ecosystems are pretty well separated for most. Yeah, apple could solve that instantly. Sadly, they decided to play a cash cow strategy of milking existing users instead for trying to grow market share. Apple is so frustrating. Amazing hardware but then they complete…
It's a product decision. Apple decided when the iPhone first came out to redo the whole UI stack to be touch-first. There are hardenings for security and battery preservation, but that's arguably the biggest difference between iOS and macOS. Windows and Linux have tried to retrofit their ecosystems to also work on touchscreens. It hasn't gone well. Too many apps assume a mouse-equivalent pointing system. Adaptive des…
This is only sort of sarcasm.