Nokia was developing an Android phone before the Microsoft purchase | Hacker News Reader

Nokia was developing an Android phone before the Microsoft purchase

forbes.com

87 pointsrukshn34 comments

Nokia was experimenting with Android, as any serious business would. You have to explore every option, so that if upper management decides to go that way, they are ready. It's completely normal. Hell, they'll probably continue experimenting, even if it's just to see how Android compares to Windows on the same hardware in terms of speed.

It may have even help leverage their negotiations with Microsoft.

That was my immediate thought. Even if they weren't planning on switching to Android in the short term Nokia could have made Microsoft's decision to buy a lot easier by hinting at the possibility.

It seems like Microsoft's decision to buy Nokia was pretty easy. If Nokia happened to experience a lot of success with Windows Phone, they'd have even more money to hedge their bets and not be dependent on MS. But if Nokia kept slipping and actually went under, MS would lose it's major Windows Phone hardware partner.

I mean, ever since Elop became CEO, the talk was "Microsoft just bought Nokia ... for nothing".

So what I'd be curious about, after all the lies and betrayals (QT, argh... grrr), did Nokia actually get any "real money" for jumping onto the failing MS Phone ship (edit: given the threat of an Android double-double cross or whatever)?

They weren't developing it, a bunch of random engineers ported it to the hardware they had. Like MacOS on x86 Intel.

I read the blog post and every blog post the blog posts pointed to. You seem to be right - some engineers ported Android to Lumia hardware. As the blog posts stated, there are surely Microsoft employees playing around with iOS 7 and Google employees playing around with Windows Phone.

This post seems more a symptom of professional bloggers needing to fill story quotas rather than being actual news.

I hate journalism so much for these types of reasons, one of my biggest pet peeves is journalism attempting to trigger an emotion or response rather than reporting the story.

I have no idea what Nokia did, but the Mac OS X statement is extremely wrong. OS X is a descendant of NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP which always ran on IA-32. From 1989. Rhapsody (the unreleased OS X precursor which added a more Mac OS interface to OPENSTEP) ran on IA-32. Even Mac OS X Server 1.0 ran on IA-32. Mac OS X 10.0-10.3 were not released for IA-32, but support was maintained internally by Apple, fact easily checked because the Darwin releases from that period worked on IA-32.

I am afraid that you are "extremely wrong"

He was referring to Mac OS, not OS X, which did have an intel port http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project

Interesting, I didn't know about this. However, the comment is still wrong, this was a joint effort between Apple and Novell, not "a bunch of random engineers".

Interestingly that is what makes it extremely wrong even though the substance of the OP is entirely correct: that Mac OS was ported to 86x

I wonder why anyone would be surprised of this. Nokia builds phones and has an R&D. It just make sense that they try different OS on their own hardware as long as they have the source and can deal with the proprietary drivers needed.

Can we let go of this post-mortem analysis of the world-that-could-have-been already? It's like the reports you get after someone dies "Oh, he was so happy... he was working on a new album!"

Nokia could've done many things, but it's hard to argue that them making an Android phone would have saved either Nokia, or improved the Android ecosystem. Nokia's failings go much deeper than the choice to go with Windows, (or the failure to go Android). And had they gone Android, they would've been yet another hardware vendor trying to differentiate themselves in a crowded Android field. HTC, Samsung, and Motorola are also capable of making good hardware, but unless there was some secret sauce about Nokia that would've solved all the existing shortcomings in that ecosystem, it's pointless to lovingly sigh and talk about what might've happened.

Nokia had massive respect in Europe, both from consumers and operators side. If they actualy released Android phone in midrange, I'am pretty sure a lot of consumers would buy simply becouse is from Nokia. This acctualy happened with Lumia phones.

I've heard this argument a lot. It was given as a reason for why Nokia went with Win Phone, even though the writing was on the wall that Win Phone is a failure and represents Nokia's suicide note.

And that's why people bring up Android into the conversation. Because Samsung, and not Apple, is the most profitable smartphone maker and because the pie is huge and still growing. I would have bought a Lumia if it came with Android. My wife and my friends too.

Looking at the last generation of non-windows Nokia phones reveals how 'bad' Android is as a phone OS.

Nokia's Asha range could go a month between charging. They had support for apps, and for instance had a spotify client. They were oriented towards open standards like email, rather than closed vendor lockin solutions like gmail. An android phone without using google service is half what it could be.

Clearly, Android gives a superior user experience, but I think by providing developers with an easy, PC like programming experience, Android made a design decision that will mean it has a fraction the battery life of an OS that makes Aps behave.

There probably wasn't a thing on earth Nokia wasn't developing before MS got involved.

And, of course, there's nothing to stop Microsoft from releasing an Android phone.

except maybe for their board of managers

Suppose that rather than making an Android phone, Microsoft were to release a Windows phone with an Android compatibility layer.

The idea would be to lower the barrier for current Android users to trying a Windows phone for their next phone, because they could keep their Android apps.

The problem is then nobody would ever write a Windows Phone app as they could just keep users happy with (and monetise) a Android app running on Windows Phone.

A Java VM for .net already exists[1] (Scala for .net leverages it). Obviously the presentation layer would need rewritten for the platform and also for XAML, but an Android app and Windows Phone 8 app can share much of their base code if done correctly. Storage mechanisms like SQLite can also run on either device.

[1] http://www.ikvm.net/

There's a vast difference between being able to share much of your code base between platforms, and simply having your existing binaries run as-is with no changes. For a lot of developers, the gulf between "do nothing to support Windows Phone" and "do anything at all, even very little, to support Windows Phone" is enough to make them not do it.

Xamian also ported Android to C# a year ago. http://blog.xamarin.com/android-in-c-sharp/

Yup, I actually have a license for it and currently using it with MonoGame. It's also quite nice for native development as well with how they tweak the APIs to be more C# like instead of Java (plus async/await).

I didn't recommend it since it isn't free, but it's well worth the money if doing cross-platform apps (they also give students a reasonable discount). If initial cost is a concern, Scala would be my alternative choice.

I wasn't referencing Mono for Android, although that is a neat product.

About a year ago, Xamarin did a direct port of the entire Android operating system to C# as a research project to improve their automated tooling. It's called [XobotOS](https://github.com/xamarin/XobotOS). It's open source, unmaintained, and entirely unsupported.

I remember XobotOS. I was kind of excited about it, but then nothing happened with it after they made a press announcement. I had some questions about it when they still had comments posted on their blog. They decided to remove the comments shortly after without answering any of them, not sure why. Can't remember what my questions were now, but I think something related to building it.

I was hoping to mess around with it and make some sort of compatibility layer for dalvik based apps to run on it and everything else to use C# that I or anyone else might do (I mod AOSP and such in my spare time).

Too bad it Xamarin has not done anything with it since the announcement, as dalvik is the bane of performance on Android.

We've seen this gameplay tried many, many times before. It NEVER works.

You need to lock developers to your platform whichever way you can if you want to survive.

Embrace. Extend. Extinguish.

That only works when you have a monopoly on a particular platform and everyone uses your 'extended' version of a standard by default. Microsoft isn't in this position in mobile, so any attempts to extend the android standard would just render their extended-android an incompatible oddity.

In theory, they could, but it would be a terrible business decision. Their whole business is software. Even if they didn't have their own mobile OS and had no plans to ever create one, creating an Android phone would make them into a hardware company, competing in hardware with a bunch of other hardware companies that have much more experience in being hardware companies than they do. Since they do have a mobile OS, I can't think of a better way to destroy any possibility of that OS ever succeeding than for the company making it to market a phone running their competitiors' OS. If even Microsoft doesn't believe in their own OS enough to make only devices using it, then why should anybody else?

To me it doesn't seem to be extremely hard to get a Android build running on a handset that uses off the shelf hardware for most parts. Especially not if you're a specialist on smartphones.

Duh! Their loyalties are (or were) to their shareholders, not to Microsoft.

But I wonder if the pulled a Motorola ("we'll sue other Android phone makers...oh, you want to buy us Google? Hmmm...let's see")

I think we need more comics of companies as characters. I read your comment in stick figures :)

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