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Comment by silisili | Hacker News Reader

Today sure, it just needs support from a major player. Not -that- long ago, nearly every mfg had their own OS(Blackberry, Meego/Symbian, Win Mobile, Palm, etc) and each had enough apps.

If Samsung or Huawei or probably even Motorola decided to ditch Android and go all in on Sailfish, we'd see support for apps in short order. But as a third party OS you have to install yourself, it's basically dead in the water.

What BlackBerry did before giving up was a smart approach, they basically just converted Android apps to BlackBerry ones for you. And that'd be a fast way to get bootstrapped. They just didn't have enough steam left in them, sadly.

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> each had enough apps.

They had enough apps in the same way 640k of RAM was enough for everyone.

I think it's a fantastic topic, but to be succinct: we couldn't get app makers to keep parity between iOS and android, including banks, government and transportation apps for a very long time.

Assuming it would go easier with a random 3rd OS where "I'm sued for illegal deals" Google has struggled so much doesn't sound realistic.

> They had enough apps in the same way 640k of RAM was enough for everyone.

It pretty much was, for almost everyone, for quite a few years.

BlackBerry was a huge player. They declined, as with Nokia, entirely because they didn’t use a platform

Well, their problems were manifold and I think the movie does a decent job explaining them. Highly recommend, if you haven't seen it yet.

They didn't evolve, took the iPhone as a joke, and when finally playing catch-up, the hardware was awful.

If they'd have seen the writing on the wall and responded in kind, I think we'd have all three players around today.

Nokia...I don't even want to talk about. I'm still half convinced it was a sabotage job.

There was nothing awful about hardware. But they did not run Android, and that was enough to bring the whole company down.

From Wikipedia -

The Blackberry Storm sold 500,000 units in its first month and 1 million units by January 2009.[15] However, Verizon had to replace almost all of the one million Storm smartphones sold in 2008 due to issues with the SurePress touch screen [16] and claimed $500 million in losses.

Like all “based on a true story” or whatever movies/tv shows, the BlackBerry movie has a lot of fiction:

https://www.historyvshollywood.com/reelfaces/blackberry/

There is no way for a viewer to know which parts are real or fake, so watching it is not going to help educate.

Nokia failed because Nokia was Nokia.

To elaborate - Nokia innovated a lot. But internally Nokia was chaotic. They were Google, before Google got the reputation for creating projects only to kill them when they had hardly started.

Couple this with the absolute dictatorship that the Symbian division had over what they were releasing as a cellular device, and Meego/Maemo never had a chance. Up till the N900 the Maemo division was blocked from having cellular. After the N900 it was too late really. They clambered to make the N9, but it was at the breaking point and so they did the burning memo thing. The N9 was basically the blueprint for the Windows Phone models Nokia released.

Sailfish is the successor to Nokia's Linux efforts, before they scrapped it all for Windows.

The community got fractured when the N9/950 did MeeGo Harmattan. This was a continuation of Nokia's Maemo OS that was based on Debian, but they just called it differently when they announced a collaboration. Nokia and Intel started a 'merge' called MeeGo (based on moblin and fedora). Nokia never actually used this in a device as they signed the famous partnership under Stephen Elop's guidance standing on a burning platform.

Sailfish is a successor of this actual MeeGo work that was done and therefore had an uphill battle. They never got the same traction as Maemo (or even Mer), so I never called this a successor of Nokia's work. Nokia created a community with developer conferences and handing out devices. Jolla couldn't do this ... and therefore remained niche.

My N900 with Maemo was fantastic. It's still working Just Fine, mechanically as good as when new (the Mercedes-door feeling sliding keyboard, for example), the only reason I'm not still using it is because it only supports up to 3G, and that isn't available anymore where I live. Such a nice phone. I could easily make Debian packages and install them, my minicomputer emulator for example. The MeeGo transition stopped it for me, and Stephen Elop's burning-down-the-house strategy killed everything.

I have all of the NIT devices, but found the N810 the best; great keyboard, large, thin... but unfortunately no 3G. N900 is second best; great camera and nice User Experience

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