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We Need to Break the Mobile Duopoly

a16z.com

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Re: We Need to Break the Mobile Duopoly

#71

Post by morenoh149 »

amirmc wrote: post #63
asdkl234890 wrote: post #45

The web is your 3rd mobile OS. Sure the developing world still needs very cheap phones, and they require software close to the hardware. But in the developed world phones and tables get closer to a full PC every day. They basically are tiny PCs. And exactly how the web made Windows and OSX, and Linux less interesting, so it will make the mobile OSs less interesting. Because even if you can't get close to the hardware…

That's not the way the current evidence is pointing. People do like apps and so far the pendulum doesn't seem to be swinging back to the web. See slides 11 & 30 at http://a16z.com/2014/10/28/mobile-is-eating-the-world/

it's more nuanced than that. The web is now also reponsive websites. I'm bullish on mobile mostly due to that very presentation. I'm counting the web under mobile.

Re: We Need to Break the Mobile Duopoly

#72

Post by [deleted] »

bsbechtel wrote: post #62
amirmc wrote: post #61

He's asking for innovation in the wrong place. The OP conveniently ignores all the other mobile OSs out there such as Windows, Firefox, Ubuntu and also people like Fairphone. It's pretty lazy to just claim we need more, when what he really wants is one more (open) winner . I say that he's looking in the wrong place because to "democratize the mobile operating system" is to ignore a critical part of what makes mobile…

>>There should be no real reason I can't point my iOS device at my own infrastructure to co-ordinate sync, backup and sharing of all my stuff (instead of iCloud). I want this as much as you and everyone else who upvoted you, but the problem is there is no obvious business model in it. Sure, techies will pay (app.net?), but the general population doesn't care enough to put out money for this.

[deleted]

Re: We Need to Break the Mobile Duopoly

#73

Post by RyanMcGreal »

Duopoly? Worldwide, Android's market share has increased from under 60% in 2011 to around 85% by the end of 2013. Likewise, over the same period the iOS market share has gone from around 20% to just over 10%, while all other platforms have dwindled down to the remaining http://www.idc.com/prodserv/smartphone-os-market-share.jsp

The only sense in which this is still a duopoly is that the iOS platform, while a relatively tiny share of the total market, is still a significant share of paid apps.

Re: We Need to Break the Mobile Duopoly

#74

Post by minthd »

jankeromnes wrote: post #68

Call me biased, but Firefox OS makes the web run on 25$ smartphones, is fully open and customizable because it's the web, has the biggest "app store" of the world because it runs any web app, is totally royalty-free (just like the other Mozilla projects), and is already being shipped on lots of devices all around the globe. How's that for an open, unlocked and innovation-friendly alternative?

It's just the reviews on such low cost phones runing FFoS are pretty bad, and once you climb to $65 or $100 , windows phone and android offer much better alternatives.

Re: We Need to Break the Mobile Duopoly

#75

Post by amirmc »

bsbechtel wrote: post #70
amirmc wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of ways of making money, including asking your users to pay. Take a look at the number of 'personal cloud' crowdwfunding campaigns to see how much latent demand there is for things like this. Most of those products don't even exist yet . I think it's a mistake to assume that nobody will pay for such services given the vast number of people online now. It's just a matter of appropriate market segmenta…

All good points. I think it's certainly feasible in the future, but not today. There are challenges besides technical and business that need to be solved too. For instance, you have a personal cloud server you set up that runs all your apps, and you have an Instagram-like app for your photos. How do others get to view your photos? There needs to be an aggregator that runs across servers to pull all the content and pu…

Isn't that just a technical challenge? In this world view, you are your own central server and everyone else is their own. Let's take your example and run with it (bear in mind I'm ignoring some rough edges here). You share your instagram-style pics into an app on your personal server to begin with and then from there they get federated out to people who've decided to 'follow' you (or those you have allowed to). Practically speaking, the pic (or rather access to it) is given to the app on the personal servers of those followers. Their server then constructs a newsfeed of all the incoming pics and presents it to their user (via an app or web-interface or whatever). This doesn't happen on the mobile device itself but on the 'personal cloud' of the user. There are many things I've glossed over but there doesn't have to be a central server in this scenario and everything can be encrypted end-to-end.

That's why this is really a distributed systems problem. In order for an app-developer to build such an app, the deeper problems around deployment, sync, and identity/connectivity need to be resolved. Developers just need something to target that provides the appropriate components. That's what the toolstack I previously linked is trying to solve. Without that, we're stuck with requiring someone else to provide the central system/aggregator. Clearly this is a non-trivial problem but if it can be cracked then it'll be as impactful as the opening up of the Web was.

Re: We Need to Break the Mobile Duopoly

#77

Post by tartuffe78 »

minthd wrote: post #32
V-2 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they cared to see their app ecosystem grow, they wouldn't charge developers 100$ (which is actually 1$ more than this greedy evil empire of Apple does :)) for a licence you need even to install your app on your own darn phone

Really ? Their OS really shines in low cost devices aimed at the developing world(it's supposed to be much better and cheaper than whatever android can achieve). I would imagine a $100 is a substantial barrier for developers there.

In my experience developing for both, Android is much easier to develop for. Part of this is the 3rd party services that support Android (Crash logging, analytics, etc.), but even the Play Store's crash report dashboard is so much better than the half-baked crash reporting the Windows Phone and Windows Store have.

Unless you are developing for iOS you can't have all of the devices your users might have, being able to solve issues remotely is huge. Especially when you are dealing with hardware issues on all of the Windows hardware out there.

Re: We Need to Break the Mobile Duopoly

#78

Post by jankeromnes »

minthd wrote: post #74
jankeromnes wrote: post #68

Call me biased, but Firefox OS makes the web run on 25$ smartphones, is fully open and customizable because it's the web, has the biggest "app store" of the world because it runs any web app, is totally royalty-free (just like the other Mozilla projects), and is already being shipped on lots of devices all around the globe. How's that for an open, unlocked and innovation-friendly alternative?

It's just the reviews on such low cost phones runing FFoS are pretty bad, and once you climb to $65 or $100 , windows phone and android offer much better alternatives.

Most of these reviews are unfair (comparing a 25$ FxOS to devices at 2x the cost or more) but you make a point about FxOS not being attractive for higher-end. That's part of why it's currently being reinvented.

Re: We Need to Break the Mobile Duopoly

#79

Post by jankeromnes »

pjmlp wrote: post #8

We already have a 3rd mobile OS, it is called Windows Phone and is doing quite well (actually more than iOS) in a few European countries.

It's really great to have Windows Phone around, but I think the article calls for a more open and experiment-friendly alternative where you don't have to go "through the interests and lenses of the two dominant players" to innovate (making it "three" doesn't help).

Re: We Need to Break the Mobile Duopoly

#80

Post by bsbechtel »

amirmc wrote: post #75
bsbechtel wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All good points. I think it's certainly feasible in the future, but not today. There are challenges besides technical and business that need to be solved too. For instance, you have a personal cloud server you set up that runs all your apps, and you have an Instagram-like app for your photos. How do others get to view your photos? There needs to be an aggregator that runs across servers to pull all the content and pu…

Isn't that just a technical challenge? In this world view, you are your own central server and everyone else is their own. Let's take your example and run with it (bear in mind I'm ignoring some rough edges here). You share your instagram-style pics into an app on your personal server to begin with and then from there they get federated out to people who've decided to 'follow' you (or those you have allowed to). Prac…

>>Isn't that just a technical challenge?

I supposed it could be, or a UI problem....it all depends on the architecture of the code and how you choose to define the problem. Regardless, it's all certainly feasible and possibly will be done sooner or later, it's just a matter of when. Are you familiar with the Diaspora project from a few years back?

https://diasporafoundation.org/

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