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My Ubuntu for mobile devices post-mortem analysis

164 points by johannesburgel 9y ago

CaptSpify 9y ago
I'm truly sad this failed. The Ubuntu phone was the first phone I've had that I didn't hate. I loved the idea of the phone, and it was nice to be able to use the same scripts that I use on my laptop on my phone. I'm really sad that Canonical never gave it a good effort. I'd pay a lot of money for an actual open linux phone, but nobody wants to make one.
- walterbell 9y ago
  http://neo900.org http://neo900.org is trying to upgrade the CPU and add LTE to the Nokia n900 (Maemo) keyboard phone.
  - CaptSpify 9y ago
    The specs on that are crazy low. The pricing just now showed 0 euros, but last I heard it was also crazy expensive. I'm not saying I won't try it, but it seems to me like it has a lot going against it already. I'll wait for reviews on this one.
    - striking 9y ago
      The website doesn't make the stat easy to find. It's here http://neo900.org/estimate http://neo900.org/estimate (spoilers: it's estimated to be 990 EUR before tax, or about $1100)
      - CaptSpify 9y ago
        Thanks. That is insanely high for such low specs. Not that I won't try it, but I don't see it taking off anytime soon.
  - Mediterraneo10 9y ago
    Besides the fact that the Neo900 is still not available and might never actually end up available, its specs are way outdated. It might have served users back in 2013 when there was still hope the product will become available quickly, but at this point it’s like trying to resurrect Sharp Zaurus hardware and expecting users to not find it horribly antiquated. (For comparison, the Jolla 1 phone has equal or better specs to the Neo900, but its users have been clamoring for better hardware for years now.)
- notspanishflu 9y ago
  I'm in the same boat as you. In the meantime I'm keeping myself entertained with https://ubports.com/ https://ubports.com/
  - CaptSpify 9y ago
    Ah, I never did look into that. I never followed the Ubuntu phone development much either, though. How is that project looking?
    - notspanishflu 9y ago
      I think is looking good and gaining momentum. The acid test will be the jump from the legacy image (15.04) to the 16.04 LTS one. Fingers crossed.
  - nol13 9y ago
    2018: year of linux on the phone? Make it anything resembling viable and I'm there.
    - notspanishflu 9y ago
      As I said in another thread, keep an eye in https://ubports.com/ https://ubports.com/
    - pjmlp 9y ago
      Most likely the year Linux on the phone gets replaced by Fuchsia.
- maheart 9y ago
  There is SailfishOS[1]. It's real Linux. It has proprietary parts (e.g. Android drivers, UI widgets, core apps), but Jolla (the developer SailfishOS developer) has contributed a tonne to Linux on the mobile[2]. I use it as my daily phone, and I've developed apps for it, so feel free to ask me any questions. SailfishOS should hopefully be available for the Sony Xperia X soon (within a month according to their blog posts). [1] https://sailfishos.org/ https://sailfishos.org/ [2] https://git.merproject.org/groups/mer-core/activity https://git.merproject.org/groups/mer-core/activity
  - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    I am interested in Sailfish, but I expect to be able to buy a phone running an OS on my carrier, and it doesn't sound like that is coming with the Xperia X or anything else anytime soon. If you have to flash the OS to use it, they've already lost, and I'd argue that was one of Ubuntu Phone's biggest problems too.
  - CaptSpify 9y ago
    It looks interesting, but I'm really not a fan of all the closed source stuff they put into it. I might give it a go someday
annoy-a-tron 9y ago
Mirror?
walterbell 9y ago
Were there similar technical challenges with Jolla, or was there minimal OSS collaboration between Ubuntu and Sailfish? Sailfish still seems to be around for Sony's Open Devices, http://www.silicon.co.uk/mobility/smartphones/jolla-sailfish-xperia-206348 http://www.silicon.co.uk/mobility/smartphones/jolla-sailfish...
- flukus 9y ago
  Thanks for posting this, I think I just found my next phone. Can anyone comment on what the development story is like? It looks like it's just as complicated as android, but I want to be able to just write c++ code and a makefile in vim and not bother with QtCreator and especially all that qml rubbish.
  - johannesburgel 9y ago
    Well, technically you can also just use Vim and a Makefile to write C++ code for Android. SDL2 has backends for all the Android stuff, for example, as does Qt5.
    - pjmlp 9y ago
      With lots of fun writing JNI wrappers, and wrapping Gradle calls into that Makefile. Google is pretty clear that the NDK is only intended for writing games, high performance audio, or making native code available to Java.
  - maheart 9y ago
    > Can anyone comment on what the development story is like? I can. I've developed and released an app for SailfishOS, and am currently in the process of developing a second one. I do all my app development in emacs, and VirtualBox (running an i486 version of SailfishOS). My app's written in Python. The UI parts are written in QML (basically JS). I have a Makefile that does an assortment of things for me (setup dev env, package application, clean up stuff). My second app is going to be written in Python and Go, with the UI once again in QML. It's real Linux underneath, so you can write your application any way you like (as long as it runs on Linux/arm). However, it's easiest to write the UI in QML, as it handles all the input/widgets for you.
zzzcpan 9y ago
"People crying for a third alternative mostly didn’t do so because Android or iOS had a bad reputation, or were too limited, or gave people a bad user experience, but because they (rightfully) feared a Google monopoly." Do consumers really care about monopolies? I believe they don't and I think nowadays Android's reputation is not very good. People have a whole bunch of useless outdated android devices laying around, have some horrible experience with them and could appreciate an ungoogled/unappled linux-like distribution with more control for the user and updates.
- sidlls 9y ago
  > People have a whole bunch of useless outdated android devices laying around, have some horrible experience with them and could appreciate an ungoogled/unappled linux-like distribution with more control for the user and updates. I don't think this segment is very large. In fact I doubt most people care about the mechanisms of updates at all. The market of mobile is, as far as I can tell, basically a race to the bottom: consumers expect devices to be (relatively) disposable things, not worth expending too much effort worrying over. They want something that works well enough for their use that they can throw away and replace without being burdened by too much other context.
  - subway 9y ago
    It isn't a large segment, but it could easily be a relatively high profit margin. Look at projects like the Pyra -- it's effectively a one-man show producing an LTE connected ARM handheld while he holds a day job running a video production company. He has next to no upstream vendor support. It's been a slow road, but he's made it to the point of mass producing most of the components, and is shipping developer devices. This dude is at a major disadvantage in absolutely every single way when it comes to access to economies of scale, access to vendor documentation, and sheer manpower, but is still managing to ship a device geeks are clamoring to buy. I can't help but think one of the big players could serve those same geeks in a much more efficient (and profitable) manner, given their resources compared with what a community project can accomplish.
- s73ver 9y ago
cwyers 9y ago
Everything listed may or may not be true. But I think it elides over the biggest reason it failed: failure is easier than success. Microsoft didn't make those mistakes (it made different mistakes, to be sure) and spent a shitton of money and didn't have the sort of success Ubuntu Phone would have needed to be sustainable. So it's really hard for me to believe that these reasons are the biggest things standing between Ubuntu Phone and success. I think it's far more likely that the market doesn't need a third phone OS in and of itself, and none of these competitors offered a "killer app" that you couldn't have on iOS or Android that consumers actually wanted.
- saidajigumi 9y ago
  Another factor the article only partially addresses are "moat apps", which are really platform services. Mapping is perhaps the leader among these, and arguably the killer app during the advent of mobile. Did Ubuntu Phone have any mapping solution at all? Even if it did, the article cites "Mobile data was unreliable, [...] The location service was very unreliable." bodes extremely poorly for the device being usable for mapping services at all.
  - notspanishflu 9y ago
    Ubuntu phone had a wonderful map app[0] called uNav and it worked really well. In fact it still works well in UBports[1]. The GPS problem was with some phone models, not all. [0] https://openstore.ubports.com/app/navigator.costales https://openstore.ubports.com/app/navigator.costales [1] https://ubports.com/ https://ubports.com/
Thaxll 9y ago
The reality is it's impossible to compete vs Google or Apple on that field, I'm not sure why Mozilla / Canonical even tried.
- wmf 9y ago
  It was also impossible for Google and Apple to compete with Blackberry and Symbian. I guess there's impossible and then there's impossibly impossible.
  - devnonymous 9y ago
    I agree. Although I'd still pay for a resurrection of maemo/meego and IMHO, given time and resources, that would be good enough to challenge Android / IOS.
    - wmf 9y ago
      Have you tried Jolla? I haven't kept up with it after being burned by the N900.
    - eropple 9y ago
      > given time and resources Whose time and resources? > that would be good enough to challenge Android / IOS That's a big assertion. What's the basis? Like, time-and-resources went into WebOS, into Windows Phone--what makes this so special?
    - walterbell 9y ago
      Russia and China have invested in Sailfish/Maemo: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/12/07/russia_bid_mobile_self_sufficiency_sailfish/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/12/07/russia_bid_mobile_s... https://jolla.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/China_announcement_April5_2017_FINAL.pdf?x12599 https://jolla.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/China_announcem...
  - Thaxll 9y ago
    It's completely different now, Blackberry didn't have a market place with millions of app and billions of devices.
slitaz 9y ago
Android has sucked up all breathing space in mobile operating systems. There is no chance for something else.
- sidlls 9y ago
  iOS exists. (Note: this isn't a comment regarding quality.)
- dahoramanodoceu 9y ago
  there's a ton of room! there's a vendor stranglehold on android architecture that is stifling movement in this area. Use your imagination a bit, dude. if we had a hackable open source and libre linux phone, even if the user base were 1 percent or .5%, we would likely start to see shifts in user interface and functionality design on the mainstream platforms-- besides, it'd be super rad to be able to actually use my phone for m0re than mindlessly scrolling 'feeds' and messaging. as a cash-strapped third worlder constantly on the move in a mega-city, termux has been a huge relief for me and postmarketOS and other players looks promising. i'd seriously be interesting in commercializing such a device to the raspbi/arduino/developr/hacker crowd. it's got lots of money, lots of clout, is clearly identified, growing and diversifying, and has been proven to spend money on interesting and useful tech. Any takers ?
  - skinnymuch 9y ago
    1% market share is huge. webOS barely had 1% when they launched their third device out of an eventual total of 6. webOS was critically lauded and meant to be used and accessed as you saw fit. No blocking of the homebrew community. I know you're proposing something different, but if webOS was around 1% market share in 2011 in the middle of their device launches and when smart phones were still in their relative infancy...I don't see much chance of an OS like you describe grabbing .5%, much less 1%. The issue of apps will always be an issue. No matter what commmunity you go to, most people will probably want at least one of a number of popular apps that won't be on this OS. Some can be reverse engineered or use hidden APIs but not always. Examples being: Messenger, Whatsapp, Snapchat, most other messaging apps or video chat apps like Skype or Viber, Instagram (website doesn't have tagged photos of people or uploading), Pandora, Spotify, Netflix, Hulu, basically any tv sort of app, most dating apps like Tinder, Shazam, and any major mobile games.
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microcolonel 9y ago
If Canonical didn't spend so much time engaging in Not-Invented-Here fantasy 5D chess, and instead focused on advancing the emerging standards, then they would have had more momentum. By working against the community (e.g. Mir [especially the Wayland FUD]), they cost themselves time and enthusiasm. I think this had a lot to do with the cancelling of Unity 8 as well. Thinking back, I'm impressed with how far they got. If they had collaborated where it didn't help to compete, then I think they would've had a better chance of entering the market. I hope that this experience doesn't steel them against working on ambitious things entirely in the future.
- throw2016 9y ago
  What community? Is there really any Linux community that speaks with one voice? 'Community' seems to be a pretty nebulous ill defined term in this context used to prop up whatever argument the poster happens to be making. If Ubuntu wants to invest in Mir how is that a bad thing, if Redhat invests in Systemd inspite of a multitude of other init options how is that a bad thing? This is usually how progress happens in the diverse and uncontrolled open source ecosystem and failures are part and parcel of this. Using words like 'NIH' seems misplaced here and sounds like some people want to 'control' what other people can do. For instance who gets to decide what is NIH, given Ubuntu's Snappy is Fedora's Flatpak NIH? But there is no 'community' antagonism towards Flatpak. There appear to be some double standards at play here.
  - gcb0 9y ago
    investing in systemd or mir is one thing. what the post you replied to say is that they were buildind their alternatives from scratch, like Xservers used anywhere else but by them.
  - microcolonel 9y ago
    Snappy's Git history starts at basically the same time (literally one week apart) as Flatpak, and both of them only became viable recently. Snappy is written in three languages (Go, C, and Python) and two of those are not as popular for Linux low level infrastructure projects, Flatpak is written in one language. Flatpak was developed by an independent developer, Snappy was developed almost exclusively at Canonical it seems. Snappy is also GPLv3, where Flatpak is LGPL; while this is a minor issue for workstation and server users, on kiosk/embedded systems the anti-tivoization requirements of GPLv3 can be an issue. Snappy has higher memory requirements, takes up more disk space. Flatpak is implemented in about half as much code (granted with slightly different feature sets) despite being written in C rather than Go. And despite these signals, I don't see any broad community "antagonism" towards Snappy at the moment. You can find an angry blog post on almost any topic, doesn't mean the opinions are popular. I don't feel any particular way about it since it seems to do something at least a little different than the competition. For example, Flatpak only really tries to sandbox desktop applications, much like .app directories on OS X. It is a little suspect that Canonical always shows up with their own version of something which everyone else (SUSE, Arch, Red Hat, [Oracle/Novell]) mysteriously can't even manage to build and package successfully. In the case of Snappy, I think it's more or less a coincidence that it started within seven days of Flatpak. It might turn out to be better (or serve a completely different purpose). Another thing in favour of Snappy is that at least snapd and snap-confine (but not snapcraft!) are widely packaged for distributions other than Ubuntu. The thing is, the rest of the industry is running on independent contributors. These independents manage to widely distribute and standardize on the best. Meanwhile, Canonical consistently goes off on their own and builds something that ultimately nobody can even package (Mir, AppArmor, Unity), let alone adopt. Canonical clearly wants to differentiate, and that's entirely their right, but their differentiation factors often seem to wither and die after a couple years of bragging and some small progress.
fiatjaf 9y ago
What? There was an Ubuntu Phone and tablet?
djsumdog 9y ago
I think the biggest factor, mentioned in this article, was the (lack) of platform. Android hardware is so radically different. Only window mobile had arm+uefi (with a locked bootloader). Device trees aren't used on most mobile hardware. Mobile ARM is like the PS4 .. Intel arch chip, but totally not PC compatible. I feel like Microsoft needs to give out the keys to their phones. Their platform is standardized enough devs could buy up old hardware and make a real oss mobile operating system without having to build totally different kernels per device.
- shams93 9y ago
  What we are seeing is convergence from the android direction. Android devices continue to get more and more powerful, only thing that's painful to do on android is develop android apps but its possible with AIDE (unlike ios which requires at least a machine running in the cloud to build). Debugging on AIDE is not great at all but for more simple apps it works fine. Using termux you have the entire console gnu stack, ruby, node, gcc, python, pip, git, emacs, etc... You even have csound for doing serious academic level electronic music composition on android. Combine those kind of tools with galaxy s8's ability to turn into an android desktop with the base station and you have Shuttleworth's vision of convergence happening but from android rather than an ubuntu phone.
  - djsumdog 9y ago
    I don't see what any of that has to do with running Android itself. Linux made it big with developers and for servers because it could run on any x86/PC platform. ARM is not a platform. We can't just release a new open source operating system for ARM devices because they're all radically different and non-standard. I don't think you understood my comment.
    - incompatible 9y ago
      There are thousands of models of Android phone, probably over 10k, but to what extent are they all radically different? They all seem to end up using the same chipsets from a few manufacturers, and surely product lines within a single company reuse a lot of code.
quadrangle 9y ago
The first part says it all. The fact is that the mobile world has tons of power structures, weird issues across all the various devices, and a level of tie-in to services that no other format had or has. It's extremely hard to break into that market given the entrenchment now with all the apps and such for the two known platforms. I think this is utterly tragic for society. The only way out involves somehow coordinating enough people around rejecting the worst of this stuff (e.g. enough public will to demand that governments outlaw the worst lock-in and privacy-invasion practices etc.) I'm not hopeful.
teekert 9y ago
I'm very sad it failed. I think one thing could have made it a success: Target existing popular devices like the latest Nexus/Pixel or the OnePlus models and make it very easy to flash and restore. That way one can put their toe in the water without spending money on a non-android device and that risk is negated. I gave the OP3 dev some money I would have loved to play with Ubuntu Phone and especially with convergence, it might have stopped me from buying a laptop. But I didn't want to buy an expensive, high-end non-android device (I didn't like that high end Meizu) and I didn't want to try it on a cheap device either. I would certainly have bought a recent Nexus/Pixel to try it though, if I knew I could always go back to Android.
- maheart 9y ago
  Another real-Linux-on-the-mobile project, SailfishOS, has community ports onto popular Android devices[1]. Jolla, the main developer of SailfishOS, is set to announce an official port of SailfishOS, to the Sony Xperia Z sometime this month (according to their blog)[2]. [1] https://wiki.merproject.org/wiki/Adaptations/libhybris_reboot https://wiki.merproject.org/wiki/Adaptations/libhybris_reboo... [2] https://jolla.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Sony_Jolla_press_release_MWC2017_FINAL.pdf?x12599 https://jolla.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Sony_Jolla_pres...
  - Brakenshire 9y ago
    Just a quick correction, the model they mentioned appears to be Xperia X not Xperia Z.
captainmuon 9y ago
I think it was unrealistic to expect to have any "significant" market share compared to Android and iOS, even 1% is a huge number. What I would have done is to focus on apps first, staying on Android. Make worthy competitors for the built-in apps, like GMail. Then, make it easier to write apps. Mobile app development is a baroque hell. Most apps nowadays are just lists, or maps, with a JSON backend. I don't want to deal with Adaptors and Fragments and Providers and what not for just that, when the app could be done 90% declaratively, and styled with a bit of CSS. Why did they ditch all the work put into Maemo to make Gtk touch friendly years ago? Merge that stuff, or use modern Gtk, and let me write apps in Python+Gtk. Then, once you have kick-ass apps, make a great rooting tool. Then, make a great android distribution (don't call it a ROM!). A vanilla android + your apps + a tool to extract drivers from the backup partition, so that it works on dozens of devices. Then add debian in a sub-tree. Then add apps to tie the linux world and the android world together (e.g. a Android terminal, maybe written in your "awesome" framework). I think a piecemeal solution is the only realistic way to build an android competitor.
andreaferretti 9y ago
I think the actual reason why it failed was that it was not Ubuntu at all. When I got mine, I expected to be able to apt-get install everything. The form factor may have been wrong and uncomfortable, but from day 1 I would have access to thousands of applications I was familiar with. I also expected convergence from the start. It turned out to be a completely separate ecosystem that started from scratch. So, there would be no actual advantage in having the Ubuntu name on it. It was just a marketing move, but it had nothing in common with the Ubuntu I know from the desktop
janwillemb 9y ago
I really liked the idea and would have bought an Ubuntu phone, but I'm glad I never did. This: > The phones were slow and had to be rebooted on a regular basis. The Meizu MX4 overheated. The battery indicator tended to show bogus data. Mobile data was unreliable, (national) roaming often didn’t work at all. The location service was very unreliable. The phone didn’t always ring when called, or you couldn’t make an outgoing call because the UI hid the buttons. The alarm didn’t work reliably. Bluetooth only supported audio devices, and later input devices, but not even basic file transfer. WiFi would not connect to WPA Enterprise networks until OTA-5. I think at one point the music player even started deleting files while indexing them. Et cetera. I understand making an OS for a lot of different devices is hard. But this is just unacceptable regardless of the circumstances.
maheart 9y ago
Cross-post of what I wrote on /r/linux: I definitely think Canonical bit off more than they could chew: Mir Not making use of existing Android drivers (I think they resolved this issue later on) Building their own app deployment and isolation system (Snappy) Building their own browser (although they did wisely reuse CEF, or was it WebEngine?) Convergence I really wanted Ubuntu Touch to succeed, I even backed the Ubuntu Edge when it was first announced. However, I think Jolla/SailfishOS did a number of things better: They used Wayland. They used existing Android drivers (using libhybris). App installation/deployment is done using regular RPM. There's currently extremely minimal app isolation. This is a very hard problem. Let the Flatpak folk solve it, then adopt it. They used Nokia's browser (based on Gecko) and office suite (based on Calligra). These were used on the N9, which had a larger install base than all existing Linux-on-the-mobile projects. They used a well-tested ConnMan/ofono combo (these were used on the N9, see above).
- _Codemonkeyism 9y ago
  Developer driven development (DDD). Often leads to bad market fit if the target market is not developers. Would have dropped Android for something like Tails or OpenBSD for phones.
- subway 9y ago
  The libhybris situation is a pretty miserable compromise. You land on an old, busted Android kernel, with a userland that mostly works. It exists only because the major SoC vendors have no motivation to support a chip after they've shipped a BSP that successfully builds and makes the hardware occasionally provide the desired features. (Apologies for being a bit harsh; I've wasted a ton of time recently hacking on Allwinner and Amlogic chips)
  - maheart 9y ago
    The libhybris situation for the time being is "good enough". Sony last year announced their intention to "mainline" their Xperia devices (their main phone brand)[1]. This could eventually mean running Android on the latest mainline kernel, and perhaps even GNU/Linux[2]. [1] https://developer.sonymobile.com/2016/02/17/work-on-the-mainline-kernel-for-open-xperia-devices/ https://developer.sonymobile.com/2016/02/17/work-on-the-main... [2] Jolla (developers of SailfishOS, a real-Linux-on-mobile OS) announced in February that they are partnering with Sony to bring SailfishOS to the Xperia X (https://jolla.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Sony_Jolla_press_release_MWC2017_FINAL.pdf?x12599 https://jolla.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Sony_Jolla_pres...), which should hopefully be out this month. It's taken a long time, but real-Linux-on-the-mobile is getting closer.
f4rker 9y ago
"when Ubuntu popped up in 2004, its biggest opponent (Microsoft) was very vulnerable" this is pure fantasy. no reason to take this author seriously.
padraic7a 9y ago
This is a great write-up. As someone who bought the Ubuntu tablet I wondered what was happening at times and this gives a lot of information. Readers might be interested to know that the Ubuntu for phones [and tablets] project continues as UBports. Their wiki[1] and latest blog post[2] might also be of interest. If you check out the blog post you can see that they have been consulting with app developers and are working on a solution to the notifications issue - "To service notifications in the future while improving user privacy, we will implement “headless apps”. The OS will call these every few minutes and allow them to do some work in the background such as check for messages. This will be done with battery savings and user control in mind." There's a more detailed report on the meeting on the forum [3]. Finally HN readers might like to check out the Halium project - which aims "to standardize the middleware software used by various projects to talk with android daemons and make use of hardware". Some details on it's progress in [2]. 1. https://wiki.ubports.com/wiki/Home https://wiki.ubports.com/wiki/Home 2. https://blog.ubports.com/qanda/2017/06/14/community-update.html https://blog.ubports.com/qanda/2017/06/14/community-update.h... 3. https://forums.ubports.com/topic/273/june-1-2017-app-developer-os-developer-meeting https://forums.ubports.com/topic/273/june-1-2017-app-develop...
pawadu 9y ago
I am so sad this project is dead. At the same time, I can't be too sad since I've found Termux: https://termux.com/ https://termux.com/ Now I can finally ditch the mail app and read all my emails in Mutt ;)
z3t4 9y ago
For a platform to succeed you need developers, and developing for the Ubunto phone was hard to get into, I couldn't find any guides, couldn't order a test device, etc. If you want to make a platform, you have to start with the developer experience!

I'm truly sad this failed. The Ubuntu phone was the first phone I've had that I didn't hate. I loved the idea of the phone, and it was nice to be able to use the same scripts that I use on my laptop on my phone. I'm really sad that Canonical never gave it a good effort. I'd pay a lot of money for an actual open linux phone, but nobody wants to make one.

walterbell 9y ago
http://neo900.org http://neo900.org is trying to upgrade the CPU and add LTE to the Nokia n900 (Maemo) keyboard phone.
- CaptSpify 9y ago
  The specs on that are crazy low. The pricing just now showed 0 euros, but last I heard it was also crazy expensive. I'm not saying I won't try it, but it seems to me like it has a lot going against it already. I'll wait for reviews on this one.
  - striking 9y ago
    The website doesn't make the stat easy to find. It's here http://neo900.org/estimate http://neo900.org/estimate (spoilers: it's estimated to be 990 EUR before tax, or about $1100)
    - CaptSpify 9y ago
      Thanks. That is insanely high for such low specs. Not that I won't try it, but I don't see it taking off anytime soon.
- Mediterraneo10 9y ago
  Besides the fact that the Neo900 is still not available and might never actually end up available, its specs are way outdated. It might have served users back in 2013 when there was still hope the product will become available quickly, but at this point it’s like trying to resurrect Sharp Zaurus hardware and expecting users to not find it horribly antiquated. (For comparison, the Jolla 1 phone has equal or better specs to the Neo900, but its users have been clamoring for better hardware for years now.)
notspanishflu 9y ago
I'm in the same boat as you. In the meantime I'm keeping myself entertained with https://ubports.com/ https://ubports.com/
- CaptSpify 9y ago
  Ah, I never did look into that. I never followed the Ubuntu phone development much either, though. How is that project looking?
  - notspanishflu 9y ago
    I think is looking good and gaining momentum. The acid test will be the jump from the legacy image (15.04) to the 16.04 LTS one. Fingers crossed.
- nol13 9y ago
  2018: year of linux on the phone? Make it anything resembling viable and I'm there.
  - notspanishflu 9y ago
    As I said in another thread, keep an eye in https://ubports.com/ https://ubports.com/
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    Most likely the year Linux on the phone gets replaced by Fuchsia.
maheart 9y ago
There is SailfishOS[1]. It's real Linux. It has proprietary parts (e.g. Android drivers, UI widgets, core apps), but Jolla (the developer SailfishOS developer) has contributed a tonne to Linux on the mobile[2]. I use it as my daily phone, and I've developed apps for it, so feel free to ask me any questions. SailfishOS should hopefully be available for the Sony Xperia X soon (within a month according to their blog posts). [1] https://sailfishos.org/ https://sailfishos.org/ [2] https://git.merproject.org/groups/mer-core/activity https://git.merproject.org/groups/mer-core/activity
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  I am interested in Sailfish, but I expect to be able to buy a phone running an OS on my carrier, and it doesn't sound like that is coming with the Xperia X or anything else anytime soon. If you have to flash the OS to use it, they've already lost, and I'd argue that was one of Ubuntu Phone's biggest problems too.
- CaptSpify 9y ago
  It looks interesting, but I'm really not a fan of all the closed source stuff they put into it. I might give it a go someday

annoy-a-tron 9y ago

Mirror?

walterbell 9y ago

Were there similar technical challenges with Jolla, or was there minimal OSS collaboration between Ubuntu and Sailfish? Sailfish still seems to be around for Sony's Open Devices, http://www.silicon.co.uk/mobility/smartphones/jolla-sailfish-xperia-206348 http://www.silicon.co.uk/mobility/smartphones/jolla-sailfish...

flukus 9y ago
Thanks for posting this, I think I just found my next phone. Can anyone comment on what the development story is like? It looks like it's just as complicated as android, but I want to be able to just write c++ code and a makefile in vim and not bother with QtCreator and especially all that qml rubbish.
- johannesburgel 9y ago
  Well, technically you can also just use Vim and a Makefile to write C++ code for Android. SDL2 has backends for all the Android stuff, for example, as does Qt5.
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    With lots of fun writing JNI wrappers, and wrapping Gradle calls into that Makefile. Google is pretty clear that the NDK is only intended for writing games, high performance audio, or making native code available to Java.
- maheart 9y ago
  > Can anyone comment on what the development story is like? I can. I've developed and released an app for SailfishOS, and am currently in the process of developing a second one. I do all my app development in emacs, and VirtualBox (running an i486 version of SailfishOS). My app's written in Python. The UI parts are written in QML (basically JS). I have a Makefile that does an assortment of things for me (setup dev env, package application, clean up stuff). My second app is going to be written in Python and Go, with the UI once again in QML. It's real Linux underneath, so you can write your application any way you like (as long as it runs on Linux/arm). However, it's easiest to write the UI in QML, as it handles all the input/widgets for you.

zzzcpan 9y ago

"People crying for a third alternative mostly didn’t do so because Android or iOS had a bad reputation, or were too limited, or gave people a bad user experience, but because they (rightfully) feared a Google monopoly." Do consumers really care about monopolies? I believe they don't and I think nowadays Android's reputation is not very good. People have a whole bunch of useless outdated android devices laying around, have some horrible experience with them and could appreciate an ungoogled/unappled linux-like distribution with more control for the user and updates.

sidlls 9y ago
> People have a whole bunch of useless outdated android devices laying around, have some horrible experience with them and could appreciate an ungoogled/unappled linux-like distribution with more control for the user and updates. I don't think this segment is very large. In fact I doubt most people care about the mechanisms of updates at all. The market of mobile is, as far as I can tell, basically a race to the bottom: consumers expect devices to be (relatively) disposable things, not worth expending too much effort worrying over. They want something that works well enough for their use that they can throw away and replace without being burdened by too much other context.
- subway 9y ago
  It isn't a large segment, but it could easily be a relatively high profit margin. Look at projects like the Pyra -- it's effectively a one-man show producing an LTE connected ARM handheld while he holds a day job running a video production company. He has next to no upstream vendor support. It's been a slow road, but he's made it to the point of mass producing most of the components, and is shipping developer devices. This dude is at a major disadvantage in absolutely every single way when it comes to access to economies of scale, access to vendor documentation, and sheer manpower, but is still managing to ship a device geeks are clamoring to buy. I can't help but think one of the big players could serve those same geeks in a much more efficient (and profitable) manner, given their resources compared with what a community project can accomplish.
s73ver 9y ago

cwyers 9y ago

Everything listed may or may not be true. But I think it elides over the biggest reason it failed: failure is easier than success. Microsoft didn't make those mistakes (it made different mistakes, to be sure) and spent a shitton of money and didn't have the sort of success Ubuntu Phone would have needed to be sustainable. So it's really hard for me to believe that these reasons are the biggest things standing between Ubuntu Phone and success. I think it's far more likely that the market doesn't need a third phone OS in and of itself, and none of these competitors offered a "killer app" that you couldn't have on iOS or Android that consumers actually wanted.

saidajigumi 9y ago
Another factor the article only partially addresses are "moat apps", which are really platform services. Mapping is perhaps the leader among these, and arguably the killer app during the advent of mobile. Did Ubuntu Phone have any mapping solution at all? Even if it did, the article cites "Mobile data was unreliable, [...] The location service was very unreliable." bodes extremely poorly for the device being usable for mapping services at all.
- notspanishflu 9y ago
  Ubuntu phone had a wonderful map app[0] called uNav and it worked really well. In fact it still works well in UBports[1]. The GPS problem was with some phone models, not all. [0] https://openstore.ubports.com/app/navigator.costales https://openstore.ubports.com/app/navigator.costales [1] https://ubports.com/ https://ubports.com/

Thaxll 9y ago

The reality is it's impossible to compete vs Google or Apple on that field, I'm not sure why Mozilla / Canonical even tried.

wmf 9y ago
It was also impossible for Google and Apple to compete with Blackberry and Symbian. I guess there's impossible and then there's impossibly impossible.
- devnonymous 9y ago
  I agree. Although I'd still pay for a resurrection of maemo/meego and IMHO, given time and resources, that would be good enough to challenge Android / IOS.
  - wmf 9y ago
    Have you tried Jolla? I haven't kept up with it after being burned by the N900.
  - eropple 9y ago
    > given time and resources Whose time and resources? > that would be good enough to challenge Android / IOS That's a big assertion. What's the basis? Like, time-and-resources went into WebOS, into Windows Phone--what makes this so special?
  - walterbell 9y ago
    Russia and China have invested in Sailfish/Maemo: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/12/07/russia_bid_mobile_self_sufficiency_sailfish/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/12/07/russia_bid_mobile_s... https://jolla.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/China_announcement_April5_2017_FINAL.pdf?x12599 https://jolla.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/China_announcem...
- Thaxll 9y ago
  It's completely different now, Blackberry didn't have a market place with millions of app and billions of devices.

slitaz 9y ago

Android has sucked up all breathing space in mobile operating systems. There is no chance for something else.

sidlls 9y ago
iOS exists. (Note: this isn't a comment regarding quality.)
dahoramanodoceu 9y ago
there's a ton of room! there's a vendor stranglehold on android architecture that is stifling movement in this area. Use your imagination a bit, dude. if we had a hackable open source and libre linux phone, even if the user base were 1 percent or .5%, we would likely start to see shifts in user interface and functionality design on the mainstream platforms-- besides, it'd be super rad to be able to actually use my phone for m0re than mindlessly scrolling 'feeds' and messaging. as a cash-strapped third worlder constantly on the move in a mega-city, termux has been a huge relief for me and postmarketOS and other players looks promising. i'd seriously be interesting in commercializing such a device to the raspbi/arduino/developr/hacker crowd. it's got lots of money, lots of clout, is clearly identified, growing and diversifying, and has been proven to spend money on interesting and useful tech. Any takers ?
- skinnymuch 9y ago
  1% market share is huge. webOS barely had 1% when they launched their third device out of an eventual total of 6. webOS was critically lauded and meant to be used and accessed as you saw fit. No blocking of the homebrew community. I know you're proposing something different, but if webOS was around 1% market share in 2011 in the middle of their device launches and when smart phones were still in their relative infancy...I don't see much chance of an OS like you describe grabbing .5%, much less 1%. The issue of apps will always be an issue. No matter what commmunity you go to, most people will probably want at least one of a number of popular apps that won't be on this OS. Some can be reverse engineered or use hidden APIs but not always. Examples being: Messenger, Whatsapp, Snapchat, most other messaging apps or video chat apps like Skype or Viber, Instagram (website doesn't have tagged photos of people or uploading), Pandora, Spotify, Netflix, Hulu, basically any tv sort of app, most dating apps like Tinder, Shazam, and any major mobile games.

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microcolonel 9y ago

If Canonical didn't spend so much time engaging in Not-Invented-Here fantasy 5D chess, and instead focused on advancing the emerging standards, then they would have had more momentum. By working against the community (e.g. Mir [especially the Wayland FUD]), they cost themselves time and enthusiasm. I think this had a lot to do with the cancelling of Unity 8 as well. Thinking back, I'm impressed with how far they got. If they had collaborated where it didn't help to compete, then I think they would've had a better chance of entering the market. I hope that this experience doesn't steel them against working on ambitious things entirely in the future.

throw2016 9y ago
What community? Is there really any Linux community that speaks with one voice? 'Community' seems to be a pretty nebulous ill defined term in this context used to prop up whatever argument the poster happens to be making. If Ubuntu wants to invest in Mir how is that a bad thing, if Redhat invests in Systemd inspite of a multitude of other init options how is that a bad thing? This is usually how progress happens in the diverse and uncontrolled open source ecosystem and failures are part and parcel of this. Using words like 'NIH' seems misplaced here and sounds like some people want to 'control' what other people can do. For instance who gets to decide what is NIH, given Ubuntu's Snappy is Fedora's Flatpak NIH? But there is no 'community' antagonism towards Flatpak. There appear to be some double standards at play here.
- gcb0 9y ago
  investing in systemd or mir is one thing. what the post you replied to say is that they were buildind their alternatives from scratch, like Xservers used anywhere else but by them.
- microcolonel 9y ago
  Snappy's Git history starts at basically the same time (literally one week apart) as Flatpak, and both of them only became viable recently. Snappy is written in three languages (Go, C, and Python) and two of those are not as popular for Linux low level infrastructure projects, Flatpak is written in one language. Flatpak was developed by an independent developer, Snappy was developed almost exclusively at Canonical it seems. Snappy is also GPLv3, where Flatpak is LGPL; while this is a minor issue for workstation and server users, on kiosk/embedded systems the anti-tivoization requirements of GPLv3 can be an issue. Snappy has higher memory requirements, takes up more disk space. Flatpak is implemented in about half as much code (granted with slightly different feature sets) despite being written in C rather than Go. And despite these signals, I don't see any broad community "antagonism" towards Snappy at the moment. You can find an angry blog post on almost any topic, doesn't mean the opinions are popular. I don't feel any particular way about it since it seems to do something at least a little different than the competition. For example, Flatpak only really tries to sandbox desktop applications, much like .app directories on OS X. It is a little suspect that Canonical always shows up with their own version of something which everyone else (SUSE, Arch, Red Hat, [Oracle/Novell]) mysteriously can't even manage to build and package successfully. In the case of Snappy, I think it's more or less a coincidence that it started within seven days of Flatpak. It might turn out to be better (or serve a completely different purpose). Another thing in favour of Snappy is that at least snapd and snap-confine (but not snapcraft!) are widely packaged for distributions other than Ubuntu. The thing is, the rest of the industry is running on independent contributors. These independents manage to widely distribute and standardize on the best. Meanwhile, Canonical consistently goes off on their own and builds something that ultimately nobody can even package (Mir, AppArmor, Unity), let alone adopt. Canonical clearly wants to differentiate, and that's entirely their right, but their differentiation factors often seem to wither and die after a couple years of bragging and some small progress.

fiatjaf 9y ago

What? There was an Ubuntu Phone and tablet?

djsumdog 9y ago

I think the biggest factor, mentioned in this article, was the (lack) of platform. Android hardware is so radically different. Only window mobile had arm+uefi (with a locked bootloader). Device trees aren't used on most mobile hardware. Mobile ARM is like the PS4 .. Intel arch chip, but totally not PC compatible. I feel like Microsoft needs to give out the keys to their phones. Their platform is standardized enough devs could buy up old hardware and make a real oss mobile operating system without having to build totally different kernels per device.

shams93 9y ago
What we are seeing is convergence from the android direction. Android devices continue to get more and more powerful, only thing that's painful to do on android is develop android apps but its possible with AIDE (unlike ios which requires at least a machine running in the cloud to build). Debugging on AIDE is not great at all but for more simple apps it works fine. Using termux you have the entire console gnu stack, ruby, node, gcc, python, pip, git, emacs, etc... You even have csound for doing serious academic level electronic music composition on android. Combine those kind of tools with galaxy s8's ability to turn into an android desktop with the base station and you have Shuttleworth's vision of convergence happening but from android rather than an ubuntu phone.
- djsumdog 9y ago
  I don't see what any of that has to do with running Android itself. Linux made it big with developers and for servers because it could run on any x86/PC platform. ARM is not a platform. We can't just release a new open source operating system for ARM devices because they're all radically different and non-standard. I don't think you understood my comment.
  - incompatible 9y ago
    There are thousands of models of Android phone, probably over 10k, but to what extent are they all radically different? They all seem to end up using the same chipsets from a few manufacturers, and surely product lines within a single company reuse a lot of code.

quadrangle 9y ago

The first part says it all. The fact is that the mobile world has tons of power structures, weird issues across all the various devices, and a level of tie-in to services that no other format had or has. It's extremely hard to break into that market given the entrenchment now with all the apps and such for the two known platforms. I think this is utterly tragic for society. The only way out involves somehow coordinating enough people around rejecting the worst of this stuff (e.g. enough public will to demand that governments outlaw the worst lock-in and privacy-invasion practices etc.) I'm not hopeful.

teekert 9y ago

I'm very sad it failed. I think one thing could have made it a success: Target existing popular devices like the latest Nexus/Pixel or the OnePlus models and make it very easy to flash and restore. That way one can put their toe in the water without spending money on a non-android device and that risk is negated. I gave the OP3 dev some money I would have loved to play with Ubuntu Phone and especially with convergence, it might have stopped me from buying a laptop. But I didn't want to buy an expensive, high-end non-android device (I didn't like that high end Meizu) and I didn't want to try it on a cheap device either. I would certainly have bought a recent Nexus/Pixel to try it though, if I knew I could always go back to Android.

maheart 9y ago
Another real-Linux-on-the-mobile project, SailfishOS, has community ports onto popular Android devices[1]. Jolla, the main developer of SailfishOS, is set to announce an official port of SailfishOS, to the Sony Xperia Z sometime this month (according to their blog)[2]. [1] https://wiki.merproject.org/wiki/Adaptations/libhybris_reboot https://wiki.merproject.org/wiki/Adaptations/libhybris_reboo... [2] https://jolla.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Sony_Jolla_press_release_MWC2017_FINAL.pdf?x12599 https://jolla.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Sony_Jolla_pres...
- Brakenshire 9y ago
  Just a quick correction, the model they mentioned appears to be Xperia X not Xperia Z.

captainmuon 9y ago

I think it was unrealistic to expect to have any "significant" market share compared to Android and iOS, even 1% is a huge number. What I would have done is to focus on apps first, staying on Android. Make worthy competitors for the built-in apps, like GMail. Then, make it easier to write apps. Mobile app development is a baroque hell. Most apps nowadays are just lists, or maps, with a JSON backend. I don't want to deal with Adaptors and Fragments and Providers and what not for just that, when the app could be done 90% declaratively, and styled with a bit of CSS. Why did they ditch all the work put into Maemo to make Gtk touch friendly years ago? Merge that stuff, or use modern Gtk, and let me write apps in Python+Gtk. Then, once you have kick-ass apps, make a great rooting tool. Then, make a great android distribution (don't call it a ROM!). A vanilla android + your apps + a tool to extract drivers from the backup partition, so that it works on dozens of devices. Then add debian in a sub-tree. Then add apps to tie the linux world and the android world together (e.g. a Android terminal, maybe written in your "awesome" framework). I think a piecemeal solution is the only realistic way to build an android competitor.

andreaferretti 9y ago

I think the actual reason why it failed was that it was not Ubuntu at all. When I got mine, I expected to be able to apt-get install everything. The form factor may have been wrong and uncomfortable, but from day 1 I would have access to thousands of applications I was familiar with. I also expected convergence from the start. It turned out to be a completely separate ecosystem that started from scratch. So, there would be no actual advantage in having the Ubuntu name on it. It was just a marketing move, but it had nothing in common with the Ubuntu I know from the desktop

janwillemb 9y ago

I really liked the idea and would have bought an Ubuntu phone, but I'm glad I never did. This: > The phones were slow and had to be rebooted on a regular basis. The Meizu MX4 overheated. The battery indicator tended to show bogus data. Mobile data was unreliable, (national) roaming often didn’t work at all. The location service was very unreliable. The phone didn’t always ring when called, or you couldn’t make an outgoing call because the UI hid the buttons. The alarm didn’t work reliably. Bluetooth only supported audio devices, and later input devices, but not even basic file transfer. WiFi would not connect to WPA Enterprise networks until OTA-5. I think at one point the music player even started deleting files while indexing them. Et cetera. I understand making an OS for a lot of different devices is hard. But this is just unacceptable regardless of the circumstances.

maheart 9y ago

Cross-post of what I wrote on /r/linux: I definitely think Canonical bit off more than they could chew: Mir Not making use of existing Android drivers (I think they resolved this issue later on) Building their own app deployment and isolation system (Snappy) Building their own browser (although they did wisely reuse CEF, or was it WebEngine?) Convergence I really wanted Ubuntu Touch to succeed, I even backed the Ubuntu Edge when it was first announced. However, I think Jolla/SailfishOS did a number of things better: They used Wayland. They used existing Android drivers (using libhybris). App installation/deployment is done using regular RPM. There's currently extremely minimal app isolation. This is a very hard problem. Let the Flatpak folk solve it, then adopt it. They used Nokia's browser (based on Gecko) and office suite (based on Calligra). These were used on the N9, which had a larger install base than all existing Linux-on-the-mobile projects. They used a well-tested ConnMan/ofono combo (these were used on the N9, see above).

_Codemonkeyism 9y ago
Developer driven development (DDD). Often leads to bad market fit if the target market is not developers. Would have dropped Android for something like Tails or OpenBSD for phones.
subway 9y ago
The libhybris situation is a pretty miserable compromise. You land on an old, busted Android kernel, with a userland that mostly works. It exists only because the major SoC vendors have no motivation to support a chip after they've shipped a BSP that successfully builds and makes the hardware occasionally provide the desired features. (Apologies for being a bit harsh; I've wasted a ton of time recently hacking on Allwinner and Amlogic chips)
- maheart 9y ago
  The libhybris situation for the time being is "good enough". Sony last year announced their intention to "mainline" their Xperia devices (their main phone brand)[1]. This could eventually mean running Android on the latest mainline kernel, and perhaps even GNU/Linux[2]. [1] https://developer.sonymobile.com/2016/02/17/work-on-the-mainline-kernel-for-open-xperia-devices/ https://developer.sonymobile.com/2016/02/17/work-on-the-main... [2] Jolla (developers of SailfishOS, a real-Linux-on-mobile OS) announced in February that they are partnering with Sony to bring SailfishOS to the Xperia X (https://jolla.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Sony_Jolla_press_release_MWC2017_FINAL.pdf?x12599 https://jolla.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Sony_Jolla_pres...), which should hopefully be out this month. It's taken a long time, but real-Linux-on-the-mobile is getting closer.

f4rker 9y ago

"when Ubuntu popped up in 2004, its biggest opponent (Microsoft) was very vulnerable" this is pure fantasy. no reason to take this author seriously.

padraic7a 9y ago

This is a great write-up. As someone who bought the Ubuntu tablet I wondered what was happening at times and this gives a lot of information. Readers might be interested to know that the Ubuntu for phones [and tablets] project continues as UBports. Their wiki[1] and latest blog post[2] might also be of interest. If you check out the blog post you can see that they have been consulting with app developers and are working on a solution to the notifications issue - "To service notifications in the future while improving user privacy, we will implement “headless apps”. The OS will call these every few minutes and allow them to do some work in the background such as check for messages. This will be done with battery savings and user control in mind." There's a more detailed report on the meeting on the forum [3]. Finally HN readers might like to check out the Halium project - which aims "to standardize the middleware software used by various projects to talk with android daemons and make use of hardware". Some details on it's progress in [2]. 1. https://wiki.ubports.com/wiki/Home https://wiki.ubports.com/wiki/Home 2. https://blog.ubports.com/qanda/2017/06/14/community-update.html https://blog.ubports.com/qanda/2017/06/14/community-update.h... 3. https://forums.ubports.com/topic/273/june-1-2017-app-developer-os-developer-meeting https://forums.ubports.com/topic/273/june-1-2017-app-develop...

pawadu 9y ago

I am so sad this project is dead. At the same time, I can't be too sad since I've found Termux: https://termux.com/ https://termux.com/ Now I can finally ditch the mail app and read all my emails in Mutt ;)

z3t4 9y ago

For a platform to succeed you need developers, and developing for the Ubunto phone was hard to get into, I couldn't find any guides, couldn't order a test device, etc. If you want to make a platform, you have to start with the developer experience!