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I think this slightly understates the "business development" problems with developing a new OS, and a mobile OS in particular. It turns out that there are certa
by jgraham 10y ago
I think this slightly understates the "business development" problems with developing a new OS, and a mobile OS in particular. It turns out that there are certain apps that, if they are not available on your platform, are immediate deal breakers for huge numbers of consumers (to the extent that they will ask for them by name in stores and return devices that won't run them). Often these apps lack web frontends (for non-technical reasons).
Obviously there are technical workarounds that you can attempt but consumers are wary of "knock off" products. So there is a vicious cycle in which people won't produce the content that you need to get users until you already have users. Possibly one can break this by supporting Android apps, but you would have to make the experience as good as an actual android device, which seems both demanding and limiting (because of cross-app interactions via e.g. intents).
- sho_hn 10y agoYeah. I live in South Korea, which is dominated by a local instant messenging platform, KakaoTalk. Anyone who cares to be social is on KakaoTalk. Text, photo, video, files, appointments, notifications, polls, payments, booking a hairdresser ... the list of things that are done through Kakao is long. A phone without a KakaoTalk client is useless. I guess his response would be that the web-based approach changes the pitch from "make a version of KakaoTalk for our mobile OS" to "make a web version of KakaoTalk, which also runs on our mobile OS" along with "and you don't even need to talk to us for deployment".
- cpeterso 10y agoWhatsApp was the big missing app for Firefox OS. In Mozilla's target markets, WhatsApp was huge but the company didn't want to invest any engineering resources to support Firefox OS, understandably. Firefox OS was an unproven OS with no market share and no J2ME support. In response, Mozilla Research started a "j2me.js" project to try running the WhatsApp J2ME app in JavaScript, sharing some code with the Shumway project to run Flash content. If that worked well enough, maybe WhatsApp would become interested. It did actually kinda work, but the project did not proceed for a number of reasons. Also, j2me.js was renamed "PluotSorbet", due to trademark concerns: https://github.com/mozilla/pluotsorbet https://github.com/mozilla/pluotsorbet
- digi_owl 10y agoAs best i understand, Whatsapp's support for anything but iOS is "poor" to put it nicely.
- eitland 10y agoWorks really well on my Android.
- benmward 10y agoSame here!
- Razengan 10y agoYou mean iPhone, because there's no iPad version at all.
- 627467 10y agobubble-vision. Whatsapp was pretty much messaging standard in South America, non-UK Europe, Russia and non-China SE Asia and I bet those were not majority iOS markets then nor now.
- mwfunk 10y agoActually, WhatsApp runs on Symbian and Series 40. Many, possibly most, people who use WhatsApp run it on devices that arguably aren't even smartphones.
- digi_owl 10y agoMea culpa, got it confused with a certain other messaging app...
- IshKebab 10y agoWait... WhatsApp has a J2ME app? Like... a Midlet? From the 90s? For real?
- tim333 10y ago
- openfuture 10y agoThis has been the story of linux since day 0