The countless commercial failures of such projects since OpenMoko proves otherwise.
1. The thing is reasonably cheap with "good enough" specs which makes it far easier to just buy it and accept that it may be just a toy in the worst case.
2. It's likely that the specs will be "good enough" for some time so the Hardware will not be terribly outdated the time the Software reaches a usable state.
3. Smartphone hardware and manufacturing matured a lot in general so it's likely easier to get sth. working with a limited budget. In comparison the Openmoko devices were reasonably advanced for their time but were also ridden by hardware bugs.
Don’t get me wrong, I really hope something like PinePhone sees enough adoption to get the apps I need a smartphone to run so I can break away from the two monopolies. I just don’t believe it will happen when Microsoft couldn’t do it.
Now an truly open system might make a difference. Not saying it will, it has it's own problems, but comparing it to Windows Phone is not really apples to apples.
If the user can't interact with their bank, whatchu YouTube, talk to their friends and parents over Snapchat or Skype, call Uber, play Spotify, etc etc etc, it doesn't matter in the least if your phone is 100% open source.
Microsoft had sunk billions into trying to get the ecosystem off the ground. What makes you think that "a truly open system" will get that ecosystem?
All it really needs to do is make calls and have good browser (Firefox would do). Signal would be a nice bonus.
This might not be enough for all (i am sure it wont), but for me and several other people I know, it would be enough, to be our main phone.
The market you're describing is minuscule.
Most of this should be available on the PinePhone at launch (albeit not as nicely as on Android).
Bank - should have a website (and if they don't have a website they most likely don't have an app anyway)
YouTube - website again (youtube.com)
Skype - has a web app and a Electron app available for Linux (web.skype.com)
Uber - has a PWA that can be used for booking rides (m.uber.com)
Spotify - has a web app and a Electron app available for Linux (open.spotify.com)
In my experience mobile banking is more often than not provided via app exclusively.
Doesn't that require Widevine DRM?
For traditional CRUD apps, PWAs are quite alright, and one avoids having to deal with Android's always changing "best practices", with a stagnant Android Java.
I had a Windows Phone. It was bad. Even Microsoft apps were subpar. Skype app was simply unusable. They weren't dogfooding.
Also Google torpedoed it.
Pretty much all the apps were bad though, I agree. Even the official OneNote app was a joke compared to the Android version.
In the first version, the default blank app from Visual Studio's "new project" wizard was slow to load. I think I measured it on the order of 500ms at the time. Not much room for third parties to add more stuff without being slow.
I personaly just need SMS, voice and a browser. The rest, I can live without it (or program it :-)
How would I get on in Denmark?
It's not super hard. Until ~3'ish years ago I did not have a smartphone here in DK. Life is just so much easier with it.
I think they got rid of the 10x Bus ticket you would buy at a kiosk, so now you have to buy a single tickets with coins inside the bus. (depends on the city) Which means you need cash. DK society is very much cashless, I mostly see older people still using it.
Is the bus late or did you just miss it? Check the app to see the bus location.
Train Ticket? Now you have to print that out or buy it at the station. It's so easy to search, buy and show the ticket via the app.
Letter from most public authorities / government? There is an app for that. Or website.
Want to give your mate some money? -> MobilePay app. Now you have to get cash somewhere and convince him to take cash. Or go to a computer and transfer it. Which requires more information then just this number and takes longer.
Crazy but it's the future. It's just a shame that it's gatekept by unaccountable duopolies such as Google...
In summary, fuck Google. This is why I want cryptocurrency to succeed. I don't want corporations deciding how I spend my own money.
And that's the problem, that it's going to be insidiously gradual. These lockouts will mostly be seen as acts of God, things that happen to the less fortunate other people and not us. As long as they're kept rare enough, people won't bother solving them, like what happens with countless other things.
But it certainly helps a lot to have a smartphone, mainly for the government messages and the nem id app.
The biggest mobile-only thing is an app called MobilePay which is used mostly for person-to-person transfers, and a lot of people don't use cash at all anymore. I am starting to see classified ads that specify "MobilePay only", although I guess you could usually convince people to accept a bank transfer instead. A lot of shops also accept it, but there is a law that shops have to accept cash, but some places don't respect it. Very few shops don't accept credit cards, but these generally also like cash...
As for digitization in general, all communication with the municipality and state and things like your bank and insurance company is digital. You're required by law to have a bank account and to have it associated with your personal ID number (all Danish residents are tagged with their birthday + 4 digit code in the Central Person Register). This all goes via a website that works with all browsers, though, but I wouldn't be surprised if down the line some features started being smartphone/app store only.
What are the permissions granted to these apps ?
Do they, as I fear, "require" full access to all contacts, all photos, location data ... ?
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/feb/03/mps-slam-an...
Through all of Windows phone 7, 8 and 8.1, the devices that were selling were low end devices -- things like the Lumia 520, especially in markets with more cost sensitivity. Because of software architecture differences, windows phone was often more responsive than android on bottom of the market phones, and that drove sales. But when it came time to release Windows Mobile 10, there were no low end phones.
Having to build out essentially three flavors of your app (one for 7, one for 8, and a 'universal' app for 10) isn't a great way to keep developers engaged either.
Not sure if that ends up being cost effective considering how cheap you can get low-end Android phones these days, and how easy it is to find Android developers, but I'm sure there are some applications along those lines that would be well suited for the equivalent of "a Raspberry Pi with a touchscreen and smaller form factor".
13k phones won't cover even the costs of production, much less R&D
Seriously, once the software is ready, 30 seconds of any popular celebrity showing one would make it sell hundreds thousands in a week. Problem is the small manufacturers couldn't either pay for that level of advertising or satisfy the demand without turning themselves into what they're fighting against now (venture capital, investors etc. don't come free), so I welcome numbers as small as 13k or even much less if that means the product isn't polluted by the typical corporate mindset (close as much as possible to protect intellectual property, make it obsolete sooner to sell newer models, etc).
Oh and by having an unusual phone I can also play the elitist bastard with friends:*)
Having never used one, I can only speculate that MS wanted to change too much too early by making an user interface very consistent with the one they introduced on PCs but hard to digest just like that one, and this could have brought users away both from the PC and mobile devices. I have always found in the past very hard to migrate non technical users from Windows to Linux, but the adoption of the new interfaces from Windows 8 onward made some people I know so furious that it became really easy to convince them to try Linux; in some cases it was them who asked me to install it. That would be unthinkable before Windows 8. In the mobile world I guess it was even harder to grow an userbase since the alternative was already mainstream.
They probably should have copied or mocked a mainstream mobile interface, that is, offer something an user from either Android or iOS would not find alien to use, then offer something more, say free Office apps, then after the userbase had grown start to build the rest.
Why would the user base grow? The main problem Windows Phone had was the dearth of apps that users actually wanted. MS had to build their own YouTube client (and IIRC got into trouble with Google).
They've sunk billions into it: enticing developers, outright paying for the development of apps, creating apps on their own, spending huge amounts of money on advertisement (I remember at one point when half of popular TV shows featured Windows Phones). The result?
It did sell ~100 million phones in about 5 years and then discontinued the entire enterprise.
So, back to the original claim:
> Give FOSS phones the same media coverage of the iPhone, possibly including its ad induced reality distortion field, and they will sell like candies.
Why would it work for a FOSS phone when it didn't for MS?
It will start as a community toy, then one day, possibly after the 2nd or 3rd model, normal phones users will start to notice that little thing that doesn't get advertising, doesn't ask for DNA when installing apps, doesn't spy what the user says, writes, buys or where he/she goes and when, consumes a fraction of their metered data plan since great part of it (ads/junk/telemetry) has been blocked or never requested/created by design, offers equivalent non spying apps etc, all at the cost of avoiding the usual social media apps (I assume FB/TW will never allow a port of their clients there, especially if sandboxed). For some people losing FB/TW or GMaps could be too much, but others wouldn't care. It will slowly but steadily gain a good mostly technical userbase. If I had a date to be concerned about, it will be the day its growing userbase size could raise a flag in some offices, so that the following day the folks that made it possible will get a huge offer to sell the entire operation. That eventuality would deem the project to become a copy of any other platform out there. There's hardware production involved; forking the blueprints wouldn't be enough.
Why? Where do these potential devs suddenly come from? Just fro the fact it's a FOSS phone? Looking at how Linux has struggled for years (and is still struggling) to get decent software, your premise seems broken.
> If ths thing turns out as interesting as it promises there would be hundreds thousands of people willing to work on various tasks to bring it on par with other platforms.
Why would they? Why would there be hundreds of thousands of such people? Especially considering that the vast majority of software is commercial software that needs users.
Users do not flock to something just because developers do.
> It will start as a community toy, then one day, possibly after the 2nd or 3rd model
And then you list dozens of things each of which has a very low probability of happening. And then those improbabilities compound.
> For some people losing FB/TW or GMaps could be too much, but others wouldn't care. It will slowly but steadily gain a good mostly technical userbase.
You underestimate the numbers in this "mostly technical userbase". It's not the first phone to cater to a "mostly technical userbase". None of these phones survived past a first iteration. Somehow, no thought is given to why these projects failed. But the new one will surely become popular, will have multiple iterations and a good user base.
Yeah, sure.
The definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results
I don't know if they were right or not.
Given that ~100% of money was going to the iOS and Android ecosystem, MS had no chance to retain even a few percent of the market: developers would not be interested in developing software for an obscure system that brings in no money, users would not be interested in a phone with little to no software.
1999 will be the year of Linux on the desktop.
I too bought it because I thought I'd hack around and "maybe contribute" which quickly turn in "why am I wasting so much time on something that will probably never work".
Netscape was a commercial failure but Mozilla is still around. Similarly Blender only went open-source after a crowdfunding campaign.
CyanogenMod is another interesting example, mostly open source and mostly successful until it started trying to commercialize the code.
I think the community ends up being a big part of it. It's not like every PinePhone shipped is going to result in another developer for the OS, but there is some critical mass point where the software goes from broken to usable and it seems PinePhone might be getting there.
The first Neo phone was released a year before the first Android smartphone even hit the market. It's a bit unfair to compare these new projects with something like OpenMoko.