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Comment by kyrra | Hacker News Reader

My take on why a third mobile OS is hard is that phones don't have a standard BIOS type system that gets all basic I/O working on it. So having an OS that can install on existing phones is a bunch of work.

And there were previously other OSes. Microsoft has windows phone with its tiles. There was WebOS. And some others. At the commercial phone OS level, it seems it's hard to be profitable unless you have tons of users.

For the Linux like phone OS, I'd love to see one, but I feel like we get back to my original point, supporting existing hardware is hard due to device specific BSPs needed.

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> My take on why a third mobile OS is hard is that phones don't have a standard BIOS type system that gets all basic I/O working on it. So having an OS that can install on existing phones is a bunch of work.

You can have AOSP-based OS (nowadays "smartphone OS" covers a whole bunch of stuff that isn't in AOSP so I don't consider that it's the same OS) that re-uses original Android OEM drivers. You can take pretty much any Android smartphone (assuming it doesn't prevent you from running your own software) and run an AOSP-based OS on it with literally 0 effort. That's called Project Treble, or GSI. You'll find dozens of ROMs (both Google Android, and Google-less) that will work on pretty much any modern (less than 4 yr old) Android smartphone.

Even better, it is possible to use those drivers meant for Android on GNU/Linux through Halium. There are even tech demos where you don't need original kernel source or anything, you just flash it, and it mostly works on any modern-ish Android smartphone that lets you flash your own software.

Really, the drivers and hardware support has no reason to be a blocker in the 2020s (I'm not saying it's totally free though) to make a new mobile OS, except that you're stuck to support a wide range of rather old vendor Linux kernels.

PS: The future is brighter, and in few years you'll probably be able to make a really brand new OS, that will run in a VM with drivers running in another VM alongside yours

> You can have AOSP-based OS

I call those Android flavours. Those are not separate OSes. Windows Mobile was a third mobile OS. /e/ OS is not.

Just like there are not tens of different browsers out there: all the Chromium-based are essentially Chrome with small changes (that people care about, but still small changes).

I don't believe that in 2023 something without:

- a SMS app - a Maps app or API - a location API - a web browser - an alarm app - Remote notification system - app store (and there are many many other examples)

can be called a smartphone OS. Yet AOSP doesn't contain (Google/)Android version of those.

So yes, I dare say AOSP-based OS can be non-Android.

So if Microsoft shipped Windows without a web browser, you would say that "Microsoft Windows is not an OS anymore"?

No offense, but you should re-think your definition of "OS"

Good to know that AOSP lets you just build ontop of it now. To me this means not really a different OS, but closer to something like a different window-manager (this is more akin to Gnome vs KDE, not Linux vs FreeBSD).

Third mobile OS is hard because people lack ideas.

Reality is, if you have some clear vision for an OS that's different to Android you can just take Android and fork it until it meets your vision. Toss out what gets in your way, keep the stuff that you don't disagree on. There's no need to build an entire new OS from scratch. You can deviate as far as you like that way.

People don't do this and Android forks are all pretty similar because, ultimately, these platforms are pretty good and Google/Apple don't miss many tricks. That's why this /e/ OS is trying to differentiate on vague promises like privacy or being European. They don't have any deep ideas for ways to make the end user's life better.

Not a criticism of them, by the way. I don't know what I'd change if I was given a big pile of money and told to make a new OS, fork of Android or not. But that's the point. Not many people do.

i loved webos and the palm pearl. perfect device for its time. i still have it somewhere.

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