321–330 of 342 posts
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As it stands you either give Apple complete control of you software/hardware or you give Google full access to every detail of your life. There should be a sticker "Don't blame me, I supported Firefox OS"
You can easily disable Google services on most Android devices. Or purchase a Cyanogenmod compatible device and use a third party store.
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I was at Phonegap Europe 2013 and there was a big noise about Firefox OS (then still known as Boot to Gecko) there. It looked cool but it was always targeted at low-end, low-cost devices. The problem with that, from my perspective as a developer, is that I don't want to develop apps for low-end devices because it's an enormous pain in the ass. The lack of horsepower and features means you're pretty much required to c…
Well said, my problem with Firefox OS was exactly that it was always targeting the low-end of the spectrum. People who buy the low-end smartphones do not usually care about the platform it's running on, nor can they afford to support 3-rd party app development.
It's a real shame and it wasn't something that was immediately obvious to me at the time because I was very new to mobile development. Now of course I've experienced the same frustrations as every other mobile dev and realised that it's just not worth targeting anything but the top quartile. That is, unless it's a corporate app and you have a large number of lower end devices in the field that you don't plan on replacing before your app is deployed.
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.
I don't count Microsoft out of the space over the long term. Unification of the Windows platform from microcontrollers to servers is fairly far along and mobile phone operating systems are, for Microsoft, just another application of the Windows 10 technology. Windows 10 Mobile has some of the advantages of iOS in terms of security updates and the Microsoft developer infrastructure -- whether that's a good thing depen…
I'd still like to see a credible OSS alternative in the mix as well, and I wonder if Mozilla couldn't make that work if they dropped their low-end focus.
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.
Only speaking for myself but I suspect others might feel the same way: I can't get excited about another essentially closed platform. I'm not interested in what are overpriced and underpowered devices that pretty much behave at best as slightly more open, yet still closed, Android-like devices. I've been living this for the last several years both with Android and ARM devel/hobbyist boards and it isn't much fun. It w…
I don't know of any situation where the ARM ecosystem works like that, the companies compete for differentiation, they have a very limited interest in standardisation. Maybe I'm missing what you're referring to. It also wouldn't get you a phone, it would get you a base board but all the other bits like radios compete on the different manufacturers platforms.
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Google might be, but not the phone manufacturers...except maybe Samsung but it's marginal compared to what share Apple gets.
Marginal? Holy shit, how isn't this completely transparent and dead, like my post will be? Samsung is pulling in about $4B profit per quarter from their smartphones. "Marginal"? In what universe is $16B per year "marginal"? Certainly not this universe. Just as a point of reference, Samsung's smartphone profits are greater than Walmart's profits. It's greater than the overwhelming bulk of world corporations.
At the scale of investment required to run a mobile business, Android is generally a bad thing, it's commodifying them in the way that Intel did to the desktop PC market.
Number 1 reason why I didn't pick up an Panasonic 4K TV, because i knew Firefox OS will be dead some day. And number one reason why I REALLY want an APPLE TV Set rather then Apple TV STB. Most of the Smart TV on the market today are total piece of Junk. They are what "Smart"phones were before the iPhone came out. As a matter of fact, SmartTV from China are pretty good on the software front, and lacking ( price cuttin…
I bought a 2015 Sony TV with Android TV and I'm very happy with it.
This is a problem for TVs and other home appliances that are usually replaced by people once every several years or even once a decade or longer, on average (this does vary across regions and on incomes, but it's definitely a whole lot longer than people's replacement times for smartphones).
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Marginal? Holy shit, how isn't this completely transparent and dead, like my post will be? Samsung is pulling in about $4B profit per quarter from their smartphones. "Marginal"? In what universe is $16B per year "marginal"? Certainly not this universe. Just as a point of reference, Samsung's smartphone profits are greater than Walmart's profits. It's greater than the overwhelming bulk of world corporations.
Yeah, and the bit you're missing is that Google basically forces them the hardware manufacturers to compete in a way that means only one can win for any cycle. It's a zero sum game - the last couple of years Samsung has done well, but it's also integrated in a way that means it offsets investments in other areas (e.g their chip business). Most of the others have no hope of this - look at the bath that HTC has taken i…
How so? Samsung simply executes very well. HTC has notoriously executed terribly, but even with HTC making misstep after misstep, Android has literally kept over 10,000 HTC employees employed for years.
What was their alternative? Cede the market? Go all in with Windows Phone? Try to do their own thing? (See: Blackberry).
Further, you could say that the entire smartphone market is zero sum. Apple is just as susceptible, as seen recently.
Android is generally a bad thing
This is like Donald Trump tearing into trade agreements, imagining up some world where everything is so much different. Without Android, shops like HTC would have been out of business years and years ago. Apple would be absolutely owning the entirety of the market.
Number 1 reason why I didn't pick up an Panasonic 4K TV, because i knew Firefox OS will be dead some day. And number one reason why I REALLY want an APPLE TV Set rather then Apple TV STB. Most of the Smart TV on the market today are total piece of Junk. They are what "Smart"phones were before the iPhone came out. As a matter of fact, SmartTV from China are pretty good on the software front, and lacking ( price cuttin…
I want a dumb display and a smart STB -- because I don't want to have to replace a thousand-dollar display just to get new STB hardware. It's why I have a TV and a Roku, rather than a Roku TV. Why combine them when their upgrade cycles don't match up?
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...why not just regular Ubuntu? Or well, any lightweight Linux distro, really. There's also this, in case that comes closer to what you see as ChromeOS competitor: https://cublinux.com/
I don't want to use the terminal on a phone
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Only speaking for myself but I suspect others might feel the same way: I can't get excited about another essentially closed platform. I'm not interested in what are overpriced and underpowered devices that pretty much behave at best as slightly more open, yet still closed, Android-like devices. I've been living this for the last several years both with Android and ARM devel/hobbyist boards and it isn't much fun. It w…
What examples are there of an "open ARM-based platform" with support for GPU's etc? I don't know of any situation where the ARM ecosystem works like that, the companies compete for differentiation, they have a very limited interest in standardisation. Maybe I'm missing what you're referring to. It also wouldn't get you a phone, it would get you a base board but all the other bits like radios compete on the different…
I'm not suggesting that this be done purely from the standpoint of altruism: for both the IP providers and the various foundations, this would provide them with a possible path to participate in mobile that is closed to them currently so it seems like it's in their interest from an existential standpoint. That said, maybe it really is impossible to motivate any of the players necessary to go down this path. In which case it seems worthwhile for the open source crowd to go all-in on something like RISC-V/OpenGPU and jettison the proprietary IP as completely as possible, as soon as possible.