8 ms·

Development on Remix OS and related consumer products is being discontinued

84 points by Double_a_92 9y ago

franciscop 9y ago
My phone broke (only the screen) back last year and I used Remix OS as a substitute. I have to say I loved it! I could load the apps I wanted to use all from my desktop, including things that are limited by design to mobile/tablet. I am so sad to see it gone, it seemed like the main project with a future in the space.
rahimnathwani 9y ago
"we decided to focus our company efforts solely on the enterprise space moving forward." Edit: only the English page has been updated. If you're in China and get auto-redirected, click the 'English' button at the bottom-left to see the full message.
jhbadger 9y ago
Once ChromeOS started adding support for Android apps, the use case for this (Android on a laptop) became even more questionable than it was already.
jaimex2 9y ago
There's still https://maruos.com https://maruos.com
piyush_soni 9y ago
Take money from 'community', develop using that and get famous, get enterprise funding, stop community project and return the 'community money'. Good idea.
- baybal2 9y ago
  >Take money from 'community', develop using that and get famous, get enterprise funding, stop community project and return the 'community money'. Good idea. Except they took the "develop" stage out of the equation, and most likely never planned to make a functioning product except for shipping prototype grade minis. See, what they did is not much different than other Android "OS" spinoffs: take white box product, and put android with custom skin on it. All of that costs $200k at maximum in China, not $2m. What made them different thought is that they pumped so much into keep hype going. And that tactic paid them off. Corporate M&A people in the People Republic of China are known to be easily impressionable, if not worse.
- smoyer 9y ago
  I was thinking exactly the same thing ... the Kickstarter backers were essentially Angel investors or VCs who put up the money but didn't get a stake in the company. That's a pretty good deal for the founders!
  - Double_a_92 9y ago
    You never get stake in the company on kickstarter. At least they got their money back now.
    - smoyer 9y ago
      I understand how Kickstarter works ... I was more referring to the fact that those who funded their Kickstarter campaign didn't get a return on their investment (there are plenty that lose). I won't go so far to say that the campaign was set up with false pretenses - I think the business probably just moved away from the consumer market - but the reality is that the backers funded the early stage growth of this company with no return-on-investment.
      - Double_a_92 9y ago
        There is never any ROI on Kickstarter... You are always throwing your money away. If you are lucky you get some stickers or a discount on the final product.
        smoyer 9y ago
        You're still not getting my point - if the Kickstarter backers had instead written a check as an Angel investor, they might have lost their money OR they might have recognized an ROI.
        Double_a_92 9y ago
        > That's a pretty good deal for the founders! Yes, that's how kickstarter works. As an "investor" you just get screwed. There is no risk, you already know that your money is gone. It's not special for this case. Or what do you mean?
- setr 9y ago
  From my experience seeing games on kickstarter, this is pretty much what is reasonable to expect. I mean the whole model is 1. Get money from community to fund game development 2. Sell the game again after, for extra profit, because why not And somewhere along the way there's usually a total mis-estimation of funds and resources At least here something was given back to the "community"... The entire crowdfunding platform is absurdity; I'm not really sure what people are thinking when they use it. Nothing given back to community, significant risk of failure, no real quality control or even a basic measure to meet, and extremely hype-cycled. Its mostly just a platform to give away your money for empty promises...
  - majewsky 9y ago
    > The entire crowdfunding platform is absurdity The totality of this statement is what's absurd. There's some good stuff on Kickstarter etc., but Sturgeon's Law applies: 90% of everything is crap.
    - StavrosK 9y ago
      No, it's crowdfunding itself that is absurd: You are literally pre-paying full price for a small chance that a product will actually be shipped to you. Imagine Amazon, but instead of next-day delivery you get next-year delivery and there's a 90% chance your product won't be delivered at all: That's what crowdfunding is. Traditionally, when funding a product, investors got a portion of the earnings to offset their risk. Crowdfunding has managed to eschew that in favor of just getting you to give people money just in case they can come up with a product. If the bet works out, great, you get a product, but so do I, and I didn't give the creators any money in advance. If it fails, you're out your money.
      - ivanbakel 9y ago
        The assumption you make is that the product would necessarily exist otherwise without the crowdfunding, which isn't accurate in my experience. The bet is sometimes between some product and no product.
      - 9y ago
- _pmf_ 9y ago
  > Take money from 'community', develop using that and get famous, get enterprise funding, stop community project and return the 'community money'. Good idea. Well, some projects "forget" step 5, so at least there's that.
murrayb 9y ago
I have a remix mini attached to our TV. It's been a fine device for what we use it for- watching movies and TV shows from Google Play and the occasional ABC iView show. Sorry to see them exiting this space.
baybal2 9y ago
Given the background of founders, some might have thought that they only seek an interest-free loan. From the time of original kickstarter campaign, the interest from the sum would've been more than enought to sustain the company given crazy interest rates in Chinese black banks
astannard 9y ago
I have backed and received a few Jide products and love them. The ones I have received will continue to work and benefit my family. It is a shame they are moving away from the consumer space but I wish them luck. I recently ordered a pinebook and intended on installing remix OS on it. I think I will choose differently now though.
grizzles 9y ago
What is Jide's enterprise offering?
kemonocode 9y ago
So with Remix OS being effectively canned, what other alternatives do remain for Android on x86? I do know they were leveraging the efforts of the aptly-named Android-x86 project, but I don't know to which extent they did and the state of completeness of said project.
- Fnoord 9y ago
  Bluestacks. Wikipedia entry here [1]. It works but it might have too much overhead for your needs though. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlueStacks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlueStacks
  - kemonocode 9y ago
    I've used it before, along with similar "emulators" but what I was indeed looking for were for other native Android distros, one advantage being as they used to advertise it, that it was light enough for you to stick into an USB or a SSD then boot up your underpowered computer from it. I used Remix OS for my parents' computer as a no-frills alternative to a fully fledged Linux distro, and it actually worked pretty well for that.
- chaostheory 9y ago
  http://www.phoenixos.com/en_US/ http://www.phoenixos.com/en_US/
iiv 9y ago
It's like a loan with no interest! How has no one done this before?
- kogepathic 9y ago
  > How has no one done this before? Lots of crowd funding projects have done this. Just look at the Jolla Tablet [0] if you want a concrete example of a company using backer's money as an interest free loan without delivering anything. Fortunately for Jide backers, they're actually receiving a refund. Jolla has been giving their backers excuses for why they cannot return the funds for the past 2.5 years. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jolla_Tablet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jolla_Tablet
  - coldpie 9y ago
    I mean, this is how crowdfunding works. If you're not willing to risk getting nothing in return for your money, then don't crowdfund. You need to evaluate the people proposing the project before deciding to trust them with your money. There should be no expectation of a refund if the project fails.
    - Bartweiss 9y ago
      This is reasonable in general, but the expected narrative for "project fails" is something like "we can't make this" or "we needed more money than expected" or even just "we got bored, screw you". It does feel a bit different when the answer is "we took this as seed funding to go enter a totally different market, suckers!" Or in Jolla's case, "thanks for the money, asshole!" There are plenty of markets with risks to the investors that still have boundaries. If a mutual fund picks badly and loses money, that's an issue for the investors. If a mutual fund turns out to be using your money on personal bets (like the London Whale) or simply stealing the money outright, that's a legal issue.
      - kogepathic 9y ago
        > If a mutual fund turns out to be using your money on personal bets (like the London Whale) or simply stealing the money outright, that's a legal issue. Exactly, there's a difference between failure and fraud. If you're soliciting donations to advance your OS development, then pitch the project as such. If you're promising backers a physical good, and then you decide to pivot, keep the money, and not deliver the backers anything or return their money, then people will obviously feel like you've defrauded them. Unfortunately from a legal perspective, crowd funding backers have little to no legal recourse when businesses decide to use their contributions as an interest free loan for their other business operations.
Double_a_92 9y ago
Why was this thread renamed? Now people have to guess that it might be about... Edit: It's better now.
mfoy_ 9y ago
So... Android is built on the Linux kernel... and these people were making an "Android" PC OS? How is that not essentially just another Linux distro? What exactly, was the point?
- opayen 9y ago
  Access to all Android apps maybe?
  - mfoy_ 9y ago
    So it's a Linux distro that offers native Android app support, sans-emulator? Was that the whole thing? Considering how... entrenched the OS market is, it's not easy to have a solid value proposition for creating a _new_ OS.
    - NikolaeVarius 9y ago
      I mean ChromeOs is a thing right? They wanted to beat Google to the Apps on Desktop game
- roneythomas6 9y ago
  It was more of an flavour(fork) of android than a linux distro. First they made installing android on x86 easy as installing linux or windows. Second they added desktop like launcher for android. So multiple apps can be open at same time and do window resize.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  Besides the kernel, there is very little of "desktop" (or should i say GNU/Linux) present in Android. They used Busybox (switched to Toybox at some point) for the core utils for example. And the GUI stack is all custom to Android. No X11 etc (You can however install some APKs that allow you to run X11 programs locally. A reminder of the flexibiliy of X11, imo). To get Android apps running on ChromeOS (based of Gentoo, iirc), both developed by Google, they had to "containerize" the Android environment. This should be a good indication of how divergent from desktop Linux Android has become.
aruggirello 9y ago
I'm sad, I almost liked Remix OS.
jaboutboul 9y ago
They should at a minimum open source all the closed pieces.
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  Open source isn't particularly appealing to a lot of enterprises, and now that they're focusing on that market, they have little to no reason to look for 'community contributions'. Giving away their special sauce isn't in their best interest. If they were shutting down, open sourcing would be more likely.
shams93 9y ago
Samsung beat them at their own game, if you have an s8 with the desktop dock your phone can act like a remix os box.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  Android in general really. Once 7.0 was demoed with optionally floating windows, it was really game over for Remix and similar. The really sad part is that if one watch the thinking from Rubin and crew around Android 3-4, it was clear that this was their goal. But then came ChromeOS, a refocusing on that for "desktop", while Android languished in a doldrums. Only after corporations etc firmly dismissed Chromebooks did we see a renewed interest in Android as anything more than a fancy media player.
  - amiga-workbench 9y ago
    I thought that Remix was a doomed product the first time I'd laid eyes on it. We have seen similar attempts from other manufacturers in the past, be that Motorola's webtop, the mini apps lumped into several OEM ROMs that emulate floating windows or the third party app packages that do the same thing. At the end of the day, Google is the only one who can viably create new modes of interaction and the new API's to support it. OEM's can throw their own garbage together but they will typically only ever push it on a single flagship device or some quirky variant with this feature differentiating it from the horde of other models they vomit out in the space of a year. You will get the paltry in-built apps to use and perhaps the apps of one or two sponsored partners, the development community at large will not bother using the feature because they would be targeting such a tiny fraction of their users. Android OEM's should be purely hardware companies, focusing on hardware gimmicks alone, leave the software to those who can do it properly. It's not dissimilar from ISP's gagging to be anything but a dumb pipe, inserting themselves between you and your media. It's very unwelcome.
  - bitmapbrother 9y ago
    Corporations "firmly" dismissed Chromebooks? Where are you citing this from? If anything, the recent ransomware attacks, that basically require you to have a bitcoin wallet if you're running Windows, is probably the reason enterprises are flocking to them.
maelito 9y ago
Just tested android-x86 7.1 rc on Dell XPS 13, it's impressive. Everything was working properly.

84 points by Double_a_92 9y ago

My phone broke (only the screen) back last year and I used Remix OS as a substitute. I have to say I loved it! I could load the apps I wanted to use all from my desktop, including things that are limited by design to mobile/tablet. I am so sad to see it gone, it seemed like the main project with a future in the space.

rahimnathwani 9y ago

"we decided to focus our company efforts solely on the enterprise space moving forward." Edit: only the English page has been updated. If you're in China and get auto-redirected, click the 'English' button at the bottom-left to see the full message.

jhbadger 9y ago

Once ChromeOS started adding support for Android apps, the use case for this (Android on a laptop) became even more questionable than it was already.

jaimex2 9y ago

There's still https://maruos.com https://maruos.com

piyush_soni 9y ago

Take money from 'community', develop using that and get famous, get enterprise funding, stop community project and return the 'community money'. Good idea.

baybal2 9y ago
>Take money from 'community', develop using that and get famous, get enterprise funding, stop community project and return the 'community money'. Good idea. Except they took the "develop" stage out of the equation, and most likely never planned to make a functioning product except for shipping prototype grade minis. See, what they did is not much different than other Android "OS" spinoffs: take white box product, and put android with custom skin on it. All of that costs $200k at maximum in China, not $2m. What made them different thought is that they pumped so much into keep hype going. And that tactic paid them off. Corporate M&A people in the People Republic of China are known to be easily impressionable, if not worse.
smoyer 9y ago
I was thinking exactly the same thing ... the Kickstarter backers were essentially Angel investors or VCs who put up the money but didn't get a stake in the company. That's a pretty good deal for the founders!
- Double_a_92 9y ago
  You never get stake in the company on kickstarter. At least they got their money back now.
  - smoyer 9y ago
    I understand how Kickstarter works ... I was more referring to the fact that those who funded their Kickstarter campaign didn't get a return on their investment (there are plenty that lose). I won't go so far to say that the campaign was set up with false pretenses - I think the business probably just moved away from the consumer market - but the reality is that the backers funded the early stage growth of this company with no return-on-investment.
    - Double_a_92 9y ago
      There is never any ROI on Kickstarter... You are always throwing your money away. If you are lucky you get some stickers or a discount on the final product.
      - smoyer 9y ago
        You're still not getting my point - if the Kickstarter backers had instead written a check as an Angel investor, they might have lost their money OR they might have recognized an ROI.
        Double_a_92 9y ago
        > That's a pretty good deal for the founders! Yes, that's how kickstarter works. As an "investor" you just get screwed. There is no risk, you already know that your money is gone. It's not special for this case. Or what do you mean?
setr 9y ago
From my experience seeing games on kickstarter, this is pretty much what is reasonable to expect. I mean the whole model is 1. Get money from community to fund game development 2. Sell the game again after, for extra profit, because why not And somewhere along the way there's usually a total mis-estimation of funds and resources At least here something was given back to the "community"... The entire crowdfunding platform is absurdity; I'm not really sure what people are thinking when they use it. Nothing given back to community, significant risk of failure, no real quality control or even a basic measure to meet, and extremely hype-cycled. Its mostly just a platform to give away your money for empty promises...
- majewsky 9y ago
  > The entire crowdfunding platform is absurdity The totality of this statement is what's absurd. There's some good stuff on Kickstarter etc., but Sturgeon's Law applies: 90% of everything is crap.
  - StavrosK 9y ago
    No, it's crowdfunding itself that is absurd: You are literally pre-paying full price for a small chance that a product will actually be shipped to you. Imagine Amazon, but instead of next-day delivery you get next-year delivery and there's a 90% chance your product won't be delivered at all: That's what crowdfunding is. Traditionally, when funding a product, investors got a portion of the earnings to offset their risk. Crowdfunding has managed to eschew that in favor of just getting you to give people money just in case they can come up with a product. If the bet works out, great, you get a product, but so do I, and I didn't give the creators any money in advance. If it fails, you're out your money.
    - ivanbakel 9y ago
      The assumption you make is that the product would necessarily exist otherwise without the crowdfunding, which isn't accurate in my experience. The bet is sometimes between some product and no product.
    - 9y ago
_pmf_ 9y ago
> Take money from 'community', develop using that and get famous, get enterprise funding, stop community project and return the 'community money'. Good idea. Well, some projects "forget" step 5, so at least there's that.

murrayb 9y ago

I have a remix mini attached to our TV. It's been a fine device for what we use it for- watching movies and TV shows from Google Play and the occasional ABC iView show. Sorry to see them exiting this space.

baybal2 9y ago

Given the background of founders, some might have thought that they only seek an interest-free loan. From the time of original kickstarter campaign, the interest from the sum would've been more than enought to sustain the company given crazy interest rates in Chinese black banks

astannard 9y ago

I have backed and received a few Jide products and love them. The ones I have received will continue to work and benefit my family. It is a shame they are moving away from the consumer space but I wish them luck. I recently ordered a pinebook and intended on installing remix OS on it. I think I will choose differently now though.

grizzles 9y ago

What is Jide's enterprise offering?

kemonocode 9y ago

So with Remix OS being effectively canned, what other alternatives do remain for Android on x86? I do know they were leveraging the efforts of the aptly-named Android-x86 project, but I don't know to which extent they did and the state of completeness of said project.

Fnoord 9y ago
Bluestacks. Wikipedia entry here [1]. It works but it might have too much overhead for your needs though. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlueStacks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlueStacks
- kemonocode 9y ago
  I've used it before, along with similar "emulators" but what I was indeed looking for were for other native Android distros, one advantage being as they used to advertise it, that it was light enough for you to stick into an USB or a SSD then boot up your underpowered computer from it. I used Remix OS for my parents' computer as a no-frills alternative to a fully fledged Linux distro, and it actually worked pretty well for that.
chaostheory 9y ago
http://www.phoenixos.com/en_US/ http://www.phoenixos.com/en_US/

iiv 9y ago

It's like a loan with no interest! How has no one done this before?

kogepathic 9y ago
> How has no one done this before? Lots of crowd funding projects have done this. Just look at the Jolla Tablet [0] if you want a concrete example of a company using backer's money as an interest free loan without delivering anything. Fortunately for Jide backers, they're actually receiving a refund. Jolla has been giving their backers excuses for why they cannot return the funds for the past 2.5 years. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jolla_Tablet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jolla_Tablet
- coldpie 9y ago
  I mean, this is how crowdfunding works. If you're not willing to risk getting nothing in return for your money, then don't crowdfund. You need to evaluate the people proposing the project before deciding to trust them with your money. There should be no expectation of a refund if the project fails.
  - Bartweiss 9y ago
    This is reasonable in general, but the expected narrative for "project fails" is something like "we can't make this" or "we needed more money than expected" or even just "we got bored, screw you". It does feel a bit different when the answer is "we took this as seed funding to go enter a totally different market, suckers!" Or in Jolla's case, "thanks for the money, asshole!" There are plenty of markets with risks to the investors that still have boundaries. If a mutual fund picks badly and loses money, that's an issue for the investors. If a mutual fund turns out to be using your money on personal bets (like the London Whale) or simply stealing the money outright, that's a legal issue.
    - kogepathic 9y ago
      > If a mutual fund turns out to be using your money on personal bets (like the London Whale) or simply stealing the money outright, that's a legal issue. Exactly, there's a difference between failure and fraud. If you're soliciting donations to advance your OS development, then pitch the project as such. If you're promising backers a physical good, and then you decide to pivot, keep the money, and not deliver the backers anything or return their money, then people will obviously feel like you've defrauded them. Unfortunately from a legal perspective, crowd funding backers have little to no legal recourse when businesses decide to use their contributions as an interest free loan for their other business operations.

Double_a_92 9y ago

Why was this thread renamed? Now people have to guess that it might be about... Edit: It's better now.

mfoy_ 9y ago

So... Android is built on the Linux kernel... and these people were making an "Android" PC OS? How is that not essentially just another Linux distro? What exactly, was the point?

opayen 9y ago
Access to all Android apps maybe?
- mfoy_ 9y ago
  So it's a Linux distro that offers native Android app support, sans-emulator? Was that the whole thing? Considering how... entrenched the OS market is, it's not easy to have a solid value proposition for creating a _new_ OS.
  - NikolaeVarius 9y ago
    I mean ChromeOs is a thing right? They wanted to beat Google to the Apps on Desktop game
roneythomas6 9y ago
It was more of an flavour(fork) of android than a linux distro. First they made installing android on x86 easy as installing linux or windows. Second they added desktop like launcher for android. So multiple apps can be open at same time and do window resize.
digi_owl 9y ago
Besides the kernel, there is very little of "desktop" (or should i say GNU/Linux) present in Android. They used Busybox (switched to Toybox at some point) for the core utils for example. And the GUI stack is all custom to Android. No X11 etc (You can however install some APKs that allow you to run X11 programs locally. A reminder of the flexibiliy of X11, imo). To get Android apps running on ChromeOS (based of Gentoo, iirc), both developed by Google, they had to "containerize" the Android environment. This should be a good indication of how divergent from desktop Linux Android has become.

aruggirello 9y ago

I'm sad, I almost liked Remix OS.

jaboutboul 9y ago

They should at a minimum open source all the closed pieces.

ocdtrekkie 9y ago
Open source isn't particularly appealing to a lot of enterprises, and now that they're focusing on that market, they have little to no reason to look for 'community contributions'. Giving away their special sauce isn't in their best interest. If they were shutting down, open sourcing would be more likely.

shams93 9y ago

Samsung beat them at their own game, if you have an s8 with the desktop dock your phone can act like a remix os box.

digi_owl 9y ago
Android in general really. Once 7.0 was demoed with optionally floating windows, it was really game over for Remix and similar. The really sad part is that if one watch the thinking from Rubin and crew around Android 3-4, it was clear that this was their goal. But then came ChromeOS, a refocusing on that for "desktop", while Android languished in a doldrums. Only after corporations etc firmly dismissed Chromebooks did we see a renewed interest in Android as anything more than a fancy media player.
- amiga-workbench 9y ago
  I thought that Remix was a doomed product the first time I'd laid eyes on it. We have seen similar attempts from other manufacturers in the past, be that Motorola's webtop, the mini apps lumped into several OEM ROMs that emulate floating windows or the third party app packages that do the same thing. At the end of the day, Google is the only one who can viably create new modes of interaction and the new API's to support it. OEM's can throw their own garbage together but they will typically only ever push it on a single flagship device or some quirky variant with this feature differentiating it from the horde of other models they vomit out in the space of a year. You will get the paltry in-built apps to use and perhaps the apps of one or two sponsored partners, the development community at large will not bother using the feature because they would be targeting such a tiny fraction of their users. Android OEM's should be purely hardware companies, focusing on hardware gimmicks alone, leave the software to those who can do it properly. It's not dissimilar from ISP's gagging to be anything but a dumb pipe, inserting themselves between you and your media. It's very unwelcome.
- bitmapbrother 9y ago
  Corporations "firmly" dismissed Chromebooks? Where are you citing this from? If anything, the recent ransomware attacks, that basically require you to have a bitcoin wallet if you're running Windows, is probably the reason enterprises are flocking to them.

maelito 9y ago

Just tested android-x86 7.1 rc on Dell XPS 13, it's impressive. Everything was working properly.