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Comment by Thaxll | Hacker News Reader

The reality is it's impossible to compete vs Google or Apple on that field, I'm not sure why Mozilla / Canonical even tried.

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The reality is that mobile OS that will offer free IOS/Android wrapper for apps that actually works out of the box will win the market. This way from day 1 there will be enough apps for users to consider switching.

That was IBM's strategy for killing Windows with OS/2 -- shipping OS/2 with extremely robust support for running Windows applications right alongside OS/2 ones. The marketing people pitched it as "a better Windows than Windows."

It didn't work; third party developers saw that a Windows app could serve both the Windows and OS/2 markets and focused all their energy on their Windows app, usually not bothering to write an OS/2 version at all. The result was that Windows' big moat -- its application library -- actually got deeper. IBM's big plan to kill Windows ended up cementing its position as a dominant platform.

didn't work because Microsoft noticed it and played them perfectly well. getting away with the only rewrite windows ever got (nt) for free.

They were both growing rapidly in a brand new market. What I am proposing is a solution for low budget OS to have ANY chance against duopoly. If Mozilla would allow painless wrapping Android apps, I bet their platform would be in a different place now. I remember my non-technical friends saying they like Mozilla for price etc, but they won't get it as there is no apps.

I don't think you're right. What killed FxOS was not a lack of wrapper to run Android apps (we actually got one that worked).

What makes or break a Mobile OS is the availability of the key apps for the market you're going after: whatsapp, FB, Twitter, etc. (that varies based on the region).

> What killed FxOS was not a lack of wrapper to run Android apps (we actually got one that worked).

Was that ever released? I saw it on Mozilla employees' dev phones, but nowhere else.

I don't think you ever saw the one I'm talking about. It was done in collaboration with a partner and was never released. Also, lawyers were involved ;)

You likely saw the other attempt using the J2ME-in-js implementation: https://github.com/mozilla/pluotsorbet

That was too slow and never shipped in commercial devices either.

This is a classic lesson. Firefox OS tried to invert it. You could run FxOS apps on Android devices. And Windows devices. And Linux devices.

MS is doing somewhat the IBM thing with their Linux for Windows. I've been curious to see if that would have the same result for them that it had for IBM.

It was also impossible for Google and Apple to compete with Blackberry and Symbian. I guess there's impossible and then there's impossibly impossible.

I agree. Although I'd still pay for a resurrection of maemo/meego and IMHO, given time and resources, that would be good enough to challenge Android / IOS.

Have you tried Jolla? I haven't kept up with it after being burned by the N900.

> given time and resources

Whose time and resources?

> that would be good enough to challenge Android / IOS

That's a big assertion. What's the basis? Like, time-and-resources went into WebOS, into Windows Phone--what makes this so special?

Russia and China have invested in Sailfish/Maemo:

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/12/07/russia_bid_mobile_s...

https://jolla.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/China_announcem...

It's completely different now, Blackberry didn't have a market place with millions of app and billions of devices.

In practice, Google and Apple had something to offer over Blackberry and Symbian. It was never obvious to me what Ubuntu Phone offered -- Android is already built on Linux and translating existing linux apps built on X (for example) directly to phones was never going to create a usable experience. Ubuntu phoned seemed only to offer a vastly inferior experience in return for more openness, and that is a hard sell.

But Google will probably phase out Android once their new OS Fuchsia comes out mainstream.... Ubuntu touch/mobile should hang out for a while longer.

Note that it took behemoths like Apple and Google to enter the cellphone market. The sheer size of those two companies, combined with the carrier lock-in landscape at the time (VZ offered GPS nav for $10 a month!), made for an opportunity.

What’s the corollary today? What need are Google and Apple underserving, and what company is large enough to mount a challenge to their duopoly?

Microsoft has been in that market for much longer and yet cannot get traction. One of the biggest things for me with both Windows Mobile and Ubuntu was the lack of actual phones I could buy through my carrier. If they're not available to me I cannot buy them, if I cannot buy them, neither can anyone else on my carrier who would love to, and I'm sure there's plenty of people frustrated with Android and iOS alike. Shame we cannot have a true Linux OS.

Edit: To be fair I saw some phones from Microsoft on my carrier, but their battery life that was advertised was terrible, and there were few of them. If there had been 2 ~ 3 phones and new ones every few months, now we're talking... Ah well. I would prefer to see a Linux phone but I wouldn't mind buying a Windows one if they didn't feel like they could be abandoned like a couple of Microsoft's products wind up.

> One of the biggest things for me with both Windows Mobile and Ubuntu was the lack of actual phones I could buy through my carrier.

I never really understood this line of reasoning. Is there a reason why people can't opt to buy an unlocked mobile device online and just put their SIM in it [1]. That's what most people do for other types of hardware like desktops, laptops, and tablets.

[1] I'm not sure how this would work for devices on Verizon or Sprint (which is why I don't do business with them a opposed to AT&T or T-mobile).

I don't believe there were unlocked options for either phone in the US, also Sprint didn't have SIM cards for the longest time.

True, but IIRC (and I may not), Microsoft didn’t try to challenge the grip the carriers had on their network and devices. Not in the same way Apple did. And by the time they finally did release a modern smartphone, the market had already been divvied up between Android and iOS.

But fair point, sheer size isn’t enough to disrupt a market, but it damn well helps. It’s also worth remembering that Apple had to grant AT&T exclusivity to get their way initially. That’s how powerful the carriers were.

I still see a lot of AT&T first phones. AT&T still seems to have some "power" to themselves. It's once you establish a specific phone's brand that you push it out to other carriers I suppose. It took Apple quite a while too as far as I knew. Never owned an iOS device and I probably never might despite enjoying macOS.

Even Microsoft could not keep a reasonable share on that market. The cost of entry is huge.

I'd say Microsoft's problem wasn't a lack of trying or funding, more so too-little-too-late. That and an awful, awful UI.

> That and an awful, awful UI.

Definitely just your opinion. Many people thought WP was a great OS.

That's ignoring the size and capabilities of Google and Apple - they're gargantuan companies outside of the mobile biz. Canonical... is not.

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