Comment by adrusi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by adrusi | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of Nokia's attempt to make their mobile platform popular by supporting existing android apps. This backfired and lead to developers not making native apps for their platform because they could just reuse their existing android app and still reach all the users.

Mozilla is taking the opposite approach. Their platform already has reasonable support because it doesn't take too much effort to port an existing web application to their platform. By making apps for their platform compatible with android, they might get developers building for Firefox OS first and then just reusing their Firefox app for android. It sounds like a bit of a stretch, but developers already do this with tech like phonegap. This will attract the same crowd as other html5->native app development platforms do.

The advantage for Mozilla here is that if developers use their devevelopers tools to make apps, their apps will look more in place on Firefox OS and advance the platform.

As someone who worked in Nokia developer relations, I have no idea what you're talking about. Aside from the Nokia X (which is Android), no Nokia product has ever done anything to "make their mobile platform popular by supporting existing Android apps"

-Symbian didn't

-MeeGo didn't (sigh, my beautiful N9...)

-Windows Phone didn't

-S40 didn't

You might be confusing Nokia with BlackBerry, which did make Android support a feature of BB10.

Yeah, that never happened. It may be a reference to Alien Dalvik being rumored to be included w/the first actual MeeGo release (Not N9, which was branded MeeGo, but was really still Maemo.) Critics of this speculated that this would keep developers from developing native apps, and now, in the haze of ancient history and a lack of fact checking, a few people think that this actually happened and are using it as a parable to inform future strategies.

History is very slippery.

edit: Looks like there were press releases about it being available for N9 and N900. My history is slippery, too:) It never was.

It sounds like Sailfish OS, actually, which is developed by a company started by ex-Nokia employees.

Blackberry tried to make this a selling point too.

From my experience the ability to sideload android apps is a major motivator for android users wanting to make the switch over to BB10. I'm a bit of a BB nerd, but I see this conversation come up again and again in online discussions

The android compatibility (plus some nice native apps/games) and BlackBerry Bridge where why I held onto my Curve and Playbook for so long...

I thought something similar, except for OS/2's support for running Windows applications. (Showing my age, I guess...)

Didn't OS/2 run Win16 apps better than Windows, by virtualizing them essentially?

It depends how you mean "better". They could be run in their own copy of a Windows environment which meant one falling over couldn't kill the rest, and they all integrated with the same global clipboard and such so copy+paste and DDE still worked between them, but IIRC there was a massive memory overhead for this which made it impractical for smaller machines.

Same thing I thought about! Strategically it was a terrible decision. Why build a native OS/2 app when a win app will run on both.

> developers already do this with tech like phonegap

...and have their apps universally panned for being just terrible in general.

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