We had that in the form of Windows CE based smartphones. As open as a PC, no walled garden, no app stores, just load your app and launch it. The market spoke decisively in rejecting it in favor of the iPhone and Android devices.
Sure, but did the market reject it because it was a more open platform, or because of other considerations? Given that the general public is largely unaware of DRM and the like, it was likely for lack of other features. There's no inherent reason why a more open phone OS couldn't succeed in the market. After all, Android devices are generally more open than iOS devices and they've got the vast majority of the smartphone market.
Obviously other considerations.
Where there is only a small handful of options within a class of product, any statement about "what the market wants" should be limited to very broad strokes. The consumer doesn't select from the entire possibility space, they buy from the available options.
Any "correlation is causation" statement about minor details when there are dozens of other larger distinguishing feature are the words of a lying huckster. Giving them the benefit of the doubt isn't that they're not-lying, the benefit of the doubt is that they're lying to themselves too. That's how wrong it is to make those inferences.
Rather rude, don't you think?
My point was that openness didn't outweigh other considerations in the eyes of people purchasing them.
Windows Mobile smartphones were actually dominant in the market until the iPhone was introduced. IIRC from the industry data I had access to, there were over 100 different models in a variety of form factors from a couple dozen OEMs concurrently being sold at its peak. So it was at least ahead of all the alternatives before that point, which weakens the argument that it was "other considerations" that were the main culprit.
A major factor of the iPhone's early US success was forcing a major US carrier (AT&T) to stop doing consumer hostile things and just let the device connect to the network as intended.
So, in part, it was improved openness that drove iPhone/Android's success. It just was network openness instead of device openness.
Back in 2005, an open source Linux based phone was a hippie pipe dream, and carriers were FIRMLY against allowing anything open source on their networks. Android blew all of that wide open, and now the most popular phone OS in the world is an open source Linux based OS. This is what we were all dreaming about back then. I feel like this is an incredibly underappreciated fact.
Yes, some carriers lock down their Android phones, because it's an open platform, so carriers can do what they want with it, but since the dawn of Android there have always been high end Android phones that were trivial to put into developer mode and install whatever wacky OS mods you want.
That's an interesting comment, because it really calls attention to how us nerds often perceive things differently from how the rest of the world does. I am guessing that most consumers would not recognize something that just used vanilla AOSP as an Android phone. Google's closed-source add-ons are a huge part of what people think of when they think, "Android."
The topic is the control that the user has over a phone they purchased, not source code availability for the OS, so yes, I am. Windows CE smartphones provided access about the same as Windows 98/NT in terms of the freedom to run apps and providing apps unfettered access to OS level APIs. The same can't be said for Android and Apple's sandbox + walled garden model.
The only Linux smartphone I can think of from that era that offered similar access and control was the (I think?) Nokia N900 and interest in those was IIRC negligible.
Power users and developers have always had the ability to circumvent the Android sandbox on their own devices.
Windows CE just never tried to implement security. Malicious apps had unfettered access to everything, just like in most Windows based ecosystems.
N900s were pretty rad little toys, but anything you could do with them you could also always do on Android. The base Android OS doesn't have a built in package manager, but you can easily run a more classic Linux distro in a chroot or something.
Linux Deploy has been around for almost a decade now.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ru.meefik.linu...
I'm just describing the way things happened to be back in that era.
> "Windows CE just never tried to implement security. Malicious apps had unfettered access to everything, just like in most Windows based ecosystems."
Yes, and? That's just as true of early PalmOS and the other early mobile OSes. Security against malicious apps just wasn't a consideration at that time on smartphones/PDAs precisely because there was no app store and no significant quantity of malicious apps.
Oh, and let's not forget that while Android itself is open source, the Android on your phone right now is full of binary blobs for even the basic shit. Camera driver? Image processor? Fast charging? LTE modem? Fingerprint sensor? OLED calibration? most of them are binary blobs specific either to the chip/sensor manufacturer or the OEM who designed the phone as they consider this stuff proprietary IP they wish to keep secret from the other Android OEM competitors. Move to LineageOS and you risk loosing a lot of your phone's fancy features because of that.
I love my Androids but it's still a mess and the openness is slowly going away(since Android 9 we lost call recording capability which was a huge blow for my use case). At least we still have f-droid.
The fact that it uses Linux kernel and related features is an implementation detail, only visible to Google and OEMs.
What regular developers see is a Java/Kotlin based userland, with a native layer having a set of predefined stable APIs, which includes ISO C, ISO C++ standard libraries, a POSIX subset, GL/Vulkan and a couple of Android specific ones.
Tomorrow Android can be another Fucshia subsystem, and again, only Google and OEMs will notice the change.
I don't think we ended up in a place much better off from a freedom perspective.
Android is a little better because parts of it are open. Google has been steadily moving things into play services though, which is not open. There is now an open source replacement for play services - I don't think it's very compatible yet though.
This is a good thing, they've been de-googling the base OS and making it as stripped down and bare-bones as possible.
This is a huge win for security, privacy, and freedom in general, and exactly what they should be doing. Android should be a small, secure Linux based operating system with an API that makes it easy to build services on top of it. The Google ecosystem should be completely decoupled from the OS.
It's also an effective way of building the walls around the garden.
It's such an easy way to run the mobile race compared to start ing from scratch.
The iPhone had 60 fps smooth animations, a built-in iPod, a huge capacitive touchscreen, and most importantly none of the baggage of being associated with balding managers in their 40s. It was sexy. It was a fashion statement.
There wasn’t even an AppStore on iOS initially.
Ouch, burn. Though oldschool cubicles sound better than the current open office chicken farms I've seen.
But it's ok, they give you a ping pong and foosball table. /s
While true, I wouldn't say that's a burn because it was exactly those people who could afford smartphones and justify paying the painfully high bandwidth charges of that era. Remember, those phones cost as much as a iPhone today but in 2005 dollars (ouch). The ubiquitous Blackberry, a.k.a. the "Crackberry", and Palm devices were also aimed at the same business and professional market.
These early devices paved the way to the current smartphone market.
I owned two of these devices as a personal information manager (contacts calendar ...). They were not comfortable and the data plans then were so prohibitive expensive that modern usage was far away.
Regards the argument: if you do not win this audience (predominantly female) you are doomed.
For the records: I do not want to attribute any positive or negative characteristics to any of the audiences.