Apple? I'd never give my money to the organization that's responsible for bringing us to this place.
And Maemo/MeeGo were basically normal Linux distributions. Right now, SailfishOS is a worthy successor. It runs on a fairly decent number of devices and is quite ready for daily usage. Following the Nokia tradition, offline maps are outstanding. There's also a proprietary Android emulation layer that works really well for most applications, in case that is needed.
SailfishOS and Jolla could challenge the duopoly if a critical mass of developers migrated to the system. Right now, there's a fairly small technical userbase that has nonetheless produced lots of great indie applications. I can't believe I had Linux in my pocket with the N770 in late 2005 and, right now, mainstream options are so locked down.
There are of course caveats, but with a larger userbase things would get ironed out. Still, in the Sailfish forum there are American users that employ their devices as daily drivers.
(Never mind clunkier but more straightforward solutions like a libre device/OS using wifi from a mifi)
Nokia was dead man walking since the first iPhone dropped and Nokia employees of that time will tell you the same as they also wrote here before.
Even before Microsoft took over, Nokia's corporate structure, culture and management was too slow, bureaucratic and cumbersome to modern SW development, to be able to turn the giant ship around and catch up with what Apple and Google have already launched, let alone overtake them. It was game over for them already, Microsoft or no Microsoft.
But the company treated it as a side project due to internal politics. They didn't want to bother Symbian.
A classic innovator's dilemma problem. Then Microsoft (Elop) came in, killed the N9, and shifted to Windows.
Says you, not the market. You are free to disagree, but history proves you wrong. If N770-N9 were such good devices for the gen-pop, they would have beaten iPhone sales to the moon and show Apple that they were wrong, but they weren't. The average user is not your tech savvy HN user who likes to tinker with mobile FOSS Linux devices, and iPhone's success proved this.
>[...] due to internal politics.
That's exactly what I said. Having better tech is useless if your corporate management, product execution and marketing is shit. That's why Apple and Google won, and Nokia, Motorola, and et-al lost on the free market.
Maemo/MeeGo could have >10% marketshare in some EU countries, just like desktop Linux does right now. The N9 was a very elegant device, ready for the masses, and good enough to become a third mobile platform.
The N9 was incredibly elegant and easy to use. The hardware was well crafted, and the card-based UI was outstanding. All applications were well integrated. For example, any messaging application would add its protocol to your contact list, instead of having everything fragmented in apps. Offline maps were second to none. It took a decade for iOS and Android to catch up.
It shipped with native support for a variety of VoIP protocols, including Google Talk (Jingle) and Skype. The OLED screen was stunning on the dark mode UI. Mozilla provided a great mobile Firefox port, and there was a native terminal just in case you wanted to ssh to machines or do something from your phone. Tethering or even using Linux running on your phone from a bigger screen worked really well, in 2011.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2011/10/22/2506376/nokia-n9-review
Who cares, is nobody bought it? You need sales to make money because you need money to pay wages and shareholders. Otherwise you're preaching to the choir. The graveyard of history if full of great products and great ideas that didn't catch on for various reasons related to sales, timing, marketing and execution.
It doesn't matter if the N9 was good or not in the minds of the tech savvy HN crowd, what matters is that the iPhone beat them on the free market.
"The market can stay irrational longer than you can remain solvent" and Steve Jobs understood this better than anyone.
The N9 was sold out in Scandinavia, and it was outselling Lumia (Windows) in Q4 '11. That's fairly good for something that had no marketing and it had already been labeled as a dead platform. Around 2 million N9 devices were sold. That's on the same order of magnitude as any Google Pixel generation.
What could have happened if the device had been phased out is something we can only hypothesize about, but I don't think it's fair to claim it was a fringe device nobody cared about.
If only Scandinavia was as relevant as the US, UK, Asia and rest of the EU for a product to stay in development and in production to remain internationally relevant and competitive to the iPhone.
>Around 2 million N9 devices were sold.
My LLM research says 1-1,5 Million MeeGo powered Nokia N9 devices were sold by 2011, versus 93 Million iPhones and 237 Million Android devices out of which Samsung had 94 million, similar to Apple at the time. The N9's 1,5 Million wasn't even close, it was orders of magnitude less than Apple or Samsung.
So the writing was on the wall by then. How can you even think that they had a chance to be competitive after the numbers of 2011? Based on those numbers they were right to pull the plug back then at the time, the finances spoke for themselves, there was no way for Nokia to turn the ship around in their favor. The line was just going down and even more down.
HP Pre 3 was a similar situation where it was pulled after it was shipped to retailers and operators, but before it went officially on sale — they still sold well even with unsupported system.
There were many rugpulls like these, and while they technically make these products flops, they were also not given a fair chance either.
Your point was that Nokia had nothing that could compete with the iPhone. You have now been shown this to be patently untrue and that Nokia was killed by an incompetent board bringing in a MS transfuge.
Stop trying to move the goal post. You are just wrong. That’s ok, you will survive. Everybody who lived through it could have told you by the way. The first iPhone was a pretty poor device and it wasn’t before the 3 that things started to improve. There was plenty of space to compete.
Yes, previous management messed up before that point too (they did not ship N700 with GSM chip and marketed it as "internet tablet" so as not to jeopardize their Symbian phone sales, only adding it to N800 and beyond, and then Apple turned their iPod Touch into iPhone and stole their lunch), but they finally figured out a great phone, and then... pivoted.
Apple didn't invent walled gardens, and walled gardens are not illegal unless you do what the EU did and change the law.
What is going to bite Google on the ass here is selling users an "open" platform and then using anticompetitive tactics to yank those supposed freedoms away.
Look at Microsoft's Xbox platform. It was created, advertised and sold to the public as a walled garden with no legal repercussions at all, because walled gardens are not illegal.
On the other hand, Microsoft created Windows as an open platform and sold it to the public as such. When Microsoft tried to use anticompetitive tactics to maintain control of the platform they sold as "open", they were found guilty of antitrust in jurisdictions around the world.
Google made the choice to sell Android as open. "Sideloading" apps was the only way to install apps at all for the first couple of years. The decision to sell Android as "open" only to yank those freedoms away will have legal consequences again here.
The problem here is that the people who announced the "open" platform option were lying to everyone in order to gain market share.
You can still lament the wider societal scale impacts of increasing controls. If both Google and Apple become walled gardens, then what exactly is left? And people need smartphones to get through daily life, interact with banks and government offices.
And I bet Windows is going to head down the same path. ID-verified-by-default, only government and corporate-approved apps installable, AI surveillance running in the background analyzing your every click (for your safety) etc. You see, we need that to catch the bad guys.
The solution is to force Google to keep the promise that they made to consumers, which is the job of the courts.
I would expect them to lose yet another antitrust case over this if they don't back down.
Does Google want to have Android and Chrome stripped from their control?
That would be amazing but it's not going to happen.
And the EU will back their sideloading validation because they want to spy on all of us anyway. This will be done with a backdoor in each chat app, meaning they want to be able to block unsanctioned apps.
Was the iPhone the first device to come with that concept?
on the original iphone the only "apps" you could have were websites, as apple hated the carrier approach
Far from it.
Before Apple, carriers and handset makers 100% controlled what you could install. "App stores" like Verizon's Get It Now, BREW, and Nokia’s operator portals existed, but they were fragmented, clunky, often exploitative, and comparatively laughable in scope and scale.
Apple did what seemed impossible at the time, which was to persuade/cajole/force carriers and handset makers to give up their roles as gatekeepers. They created a single global marketplace with mostly-predictable rules and simple discovery, which finally allowed indie developers to reach users directly just as easily as global behemoths.
Verizon wanted you to have to pay a fee every time you used their software to transfer an image from your phone to your computer, or vice versa.
I'm actually pro-app store as long as it's helping apps to be malware-free. But I'm 100% against shutting out side-loading. Side-loading was never common let alone a common vector for malware, at least not that I've ever heard. But what it is, apparently (or we would not see these Google shenanigans), is a long-term threat to Google's own app store.
Some idiot executive decided this.
Except that it isn't. Epic v Apple proved this on the Apple side.
The fact that (according to Google) only 50% of Android malware comes from sideloading should also make you question where the other 50% is coming from. (Hint: a lot of it is from the Play Store)
The only similar claim I can find is they said is you're 50x more likely to encounter malware from internet-sideloaded sources than from the Play Store, but that's rather different.