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Comment by jpc0 | Hacker News Reader

I think the issue with these low end devices are that the duopoly on operating systems makes it impossible to develop a competing operating system that get's any traction.

I am 100% sure you, as a manufacturer, could develop a very lightweight shim over a linux or BSD kernel that has significantly better performance than Android does. It would however be a universal flop regardless of how useable it is since critical apps like WhatsApp/Telegram/banking would not get ported to that platform ever.

That effectively leaves you with needing a capable web browser and well... Even Firefox with every form of adblocker enable regularly chews up 2-3 GB of ram for me, at least on desktop. And building a competitive web browser to Chromium is an absurd endeavour for a cheap cell manufacturer.

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> I think the issue with these low end devices are that the duopoly on operating systems

Evidence going back over 30 years now points to the consumer computing market as only being able to support 2 platforms.

The dev costs otherwise are just too high. Heck as it is cross platform toolkits are a huge deal, because hiring 2 dev teams for 2 very different platforms is too much of a cost for most companies to bear.

There's a simple solution for that: Jolla's AppSupport (https://jolla.com/appsupport/). It enables a Linux device to run Android apps, and it's part of Jolla's Sailfish package.

Someone else already pointed out (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42674279) that HMD and Jolla are both spin-outs from Nokia, so it would seem to be a natural fusion...

Also, it bears repeating: Sailfish is a far better mobile OS than either Android or iOS. It's simple, consistent, and looks great.

> I am 100% sure you, as a manufacturer, could develop a very lightweight shim over a linux or BSD kernel that has significantly better performance than Android does

I’m not sure why this would be true, unless you’re willing to cut back significantly on features. Google already spends quite a bit of effort on performance improvements, and most manufacturers aren’t exactly known for being able to produce high-quality software.

There have been a couple projects that have tried to make phones based on pure Linux (Librem, Pinephone). Their performance is limited a lot by not having good CPU options, but it doesn’t seem like they’ve been able to achieve much performance improvement on the software side either.

> I’m not sure why this would be true, unless you’re willing to cut back significantly on features.

Sorry for not making it clear but I was implying exactly that. There are a ton of features that are really nice but a person spending that little on a phone probably doesn't need. I would likely even put "big touchscreen" on that list...

  Really a phone that:
  - makes phonecalls
  - has support for WhatsApp/Telegram etc even without video calls
  - has a real keyboard
  - has my banking app
  - commits to long term support and repair(5+ years preferably 10)

Would be number one on my list of things to buy because thats exactly what I want. I would absolutely still own an iPhone that I use day to day. But that cheap phone is exactly what I want when the iPhone needs to sit in a drawer for two weeks and I'm using a burner number out of town.

> Google already spends quite a bit of effort on performance improvements

They spend a lot, yes, but the results are in "useless features improvements".

They tried with Sailfish, which is the spiritual successor of the excellent N95 OS, but alas not sufficient traction.

"They" is an interesting choice here. Two companies spun out of the wreckage of Microsoft's Nokia takeover: HMD and Jolla. HMD was Nokia's old hardware division, and they're making this device. Jolla was the software division, and they're making Sailfish.

Would a project similar to wine/proton help to cover that gap?

I don’t think this would actually be too hard. Ladybird browser is making progress everyday. A browser is harder than an OS. As for market adoption, it would take someone with a ton of money to bribe device manufacturers and press the way that Microsoft used to do. So, I wouldn’t say it’s hard. Getting the right people involved would be the hard bit. How many S tier devs in the browser space are ready to gamble their futures? How many S tier OSdevs? How many completely batty billionaires are there?

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