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Comment by meri_dian | Hacker News Reader

As the mobile computing ecosystem matures it's becoming clear that it will mirror the PC dominated computing ecosystem. You have the major player (Microsoft/Windows in PC, Google/Android in mobile) occupying about 85% to 90% of total market share [0] while Apple/Mac/iOS will do well in the high end market and control about 10% to 15% share. iOS today controls about 20% to 25% of global market share but Android growth rates far outpace iPhone growth as Apple's first mover advantage continues to be diluted with time and smartphone commodification.

There must be some fundamental dynamic at play which favors the 85%/15% market share duopoly.

[0] https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share...

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This sort of matches Duverger's Law[0], which holds that given a particular set of constraints that sound a lot like the smart phone market, you will always end up with 2 players/political parties.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law

So I guess that means we will start to see a <1% libre alternative pop up? FirefoxOS tried. Ubuntu tried. Definitely interested to see who will occupy this slot in the distribution.

The hard part this time is all the closed source drivers. How did Linux solve that back in the 90s?

It didn't...

> The hard part this time is all the closed source drivers. How did Linux solve that back in the 90s?

It never did perfectly. It's about the same as it is on Android currently. All the basic stuff works but you need proprietary firmware for a few things like WiFi and cell radio. Some even have cell radio working.

Replicant has done a good job doing this on Android devices, see http://redmine.replicant.us/projects/replicant/wiki/Replican... looks like they even have cell working on some Samsung devices.

If mostly-open is good enough though, flashing a stock AOSP build or LineageOS without GApps will get you there, you can install software from sources like F-Droid too.

I always hoped for a more 30%/30%/30%/10% distribution, with two big proprietary players, one FOSS one and a bunch of other more experimental or niche systems. Guess that hasn't happened so far. The only place in technology where I remember three big and roughly equally powerful players was the console market, but only for a while.

Would be interesting to find out details about these dynamics.

Developers seem to be willing to support two competitive platforms, but when there are three or more, they throw up their hands and support just the top one, or maybe the top two.

Source: my own intuition.

It depends on there being strong cross-platform development tools or not.

Back in the early days of the micro-computer, many games used a virtual machine of sorts. The game logic was implemented in VM bytecode and then the VM engine was the only thing that needed porting between systems.

This was to a greater or lesser degree aided by the limited hardware of the time, and that said computers were single task more often than not.

This intrigues me, as it clashes with everything I know about how classic game software was designed. Around what decade are we talking about? Can you name one or two examples of games that were designed like this?

Usually only adventure games, and point and click ones did that.

Think of games like Maniac Mansion or adventure writing software like PAWS.

Ah, alright. When you said "early days of microcomputers" I was rather thinking about the Atari 2600.

The VM approach was in absolute terms actually pretty unusual in the late 80s/early 90s, AFAIK. Perhaps counting only cross-platform games or adventure it was more common, though.

Just a small correction, I am not the author of "early days of microcomputers". :)

Heh. Whoops. Old habits.

Lost Vikings have been mentioned on HN a few times, and Blizzard used a VM for that game.

1993 is nowhere near close to the early days of microcomputers.

They're willing to if they can bundle it in something large enough to be—and otherwise more resource hungry than—a (sane) minimal graphical OS. Electron, say.

Effectively using web tech as a VM, dear deity...

You can think of it like that, but really it's closer to a simple abstraction layer.

We are much further, already. iOS today only controls 10-15% of global market share.

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