4 ms·

Android got market share because it was free, not because it was good. If Google didn't share ad revenue with carriers and OEMs or tried to extract a license fe

by IBM 8y ago

Android got market share because it was free, not because it was good. If Google didn't share ad revenue with carriers and OEMs or tried to extract a license fee ala Windows, Google would not be sitting on 80% global market share today.

zmmmmm 8y ago
> Android got market share because it was free, not because it was good. If free was all that mattered then one of the other smattering of "free" open source mobile OSes would have taken off. You can perhaps say that free is a necessary condition but it clearly isn't sufficient. Something else matters and to a first approximation that can be thought of as "goodness".
- gkya 8y ago
  The world has changed. Today what determines the success of a mobile platform is availability if applications. If Ubuntu's thing could run WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram apps (especially the first b/c it has to be an app), it would have a completely different fate. If I was Mark Shuttleworth, I'd go to Facebook and offer porting WhatsApp for free. IDK the US, but for most of the world, it's an essential means of communication.
  - zmmmmm 8y ago
    > If I was Mark Shuttleworth, I'd go to Facebook and offer porting WhatsApp for free Microsoft tried buying app support and it didn't save their mobile platform. It generally resulted in crappy apps that were never an ongoing priority for their creators. If anything it cemented the status of the OS as a second class citizen. You can try every way you like, but nothing completes the picture than to say that there were good things about Android that made it survive as the competition to iOS where everything else failed. The OS being "good" (on a relative scale, there were obviously some bad things about it) is, like everything else, necessary but not sufficient. In my view, the real reason Android succeeded is because it was customisable by the OEMs. They were staring at a future where they were completely locked out of doing any customisation of operating system and totally at the mercy of Apple. They would do anything to prevent that future and Google gave them a lifeline to do so. That customisability was a byproduct of Android being open source, but obviously Google could have made it closed source to the public but licensed it to OEMs with a proprietary license allowing customisation too. I think the latter wasn't viable because it would have required too much trust in Google.
  - cpeterso 8y ago
    Mozilla was so eager to get WhatsApp on Firefox OS that it wrote a proof of concept J2ME.js interrupter [1] (repurposing Shumway's Flash-to-JS JIT) to run WhatsApp's Java applet. But WhatsApp was not interested. This was a big blow because lack of WhatsApp support was one of the top complaints or deal breakers for Firefox OS users in its initial markets. [1] https://github.com/mozilla/pluotsorbet https://github.com/mozilla/pluotsorbet

by IBM 8y ago

zmmmmm 8y ago

> Android got market share because it was free, not because it was good. If free was all that mattered then one of the other smattering of "free" open source mobile OSes would have taken off. You can perhaps say that free is a necessary condition but it clearly isn't sufficient. Something else matters and to a first approximation that can be thought of as "goodness".

gkya 8y ago
The world has changed. Today what determines the success of a mobile platform is availability if applications. If Ubuntu's thing could run WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram apps (especially the first b/c it has to be an app), it would have a completely different fate. If I was Mark Shuttleworth, I'd go to Facebook and offer porting WhatsApp for free. IDK the US, but for most of the world, it's an essential means of communication.
- zmmmmm 8y ago
  > If I was Mark Shuttleworth, I'd go to Facebook and offer porting WhatsApp for free Microsoft tried buying app support and it didn't save their mobile platform. It generally resulted in crappy apps that were never an ongoing priority for their creators. If anything it cemented the status of the OS as a second class citizen. You can try every way you like, but nothing completes the picture than to say that there were good things about Android that made it survive as the competition to iOS where everything else failed. The OS being "good" (on a relative scale, there were obviously some bad things about it) is, like everything else, necessary but not sufficient. In my view, the real reason Android succeeded is because it was customisable by the OEMs. They were staring at a future where they were completely locked out of doing any customisation of operating system and totally at the mercy of Apple. They would do anything to prevent that future and Google gave them a lifeline to do so. That customisability was a byproduct of Android being open source, but obviously Google could have made it closed source to the public but licensed it to OEMs with a proprietary license allowing customisation too. I think the latter wasn't viable because it would have required too much trust in Google.
- cpeterso 8y ago
  Mozilla was so eager to get WhatsApp on Firefox OS that it wrote a proof of concept J2ME.js interrupter [1] (repurposing Shumway's Flash-to-JS JIT) to run WhatsApp's Java applet. But WhatsApp was not interested. This was a big blow because lack of WhatsApp support was one of the top complaints or deal breakers for Firefox OS users in its initial markets. [1] https://github.com/mozilla/pluotsorbet https://github.com/mozilla/pluotsorbet