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He's asking for innovation in the wrong place. The OP conveniently ignores all the other mobile OSs out there such as Windows, Firefox, Ubuntu and also people l

by amirmc 12y ago

He's asking for innovation in the wrong place. The OP conveniently ignores all the other mobile OSs out there such as Windows, Firefox, Ubuntu and also people like Fairphone. It's pretty lazy to just claim we need more, when what he really wants is one more (open) winner. I say that he's looking in the wrong place because to "democratize the mobile operating system" is to ignore a critical part of what makes mobile worthwhile. All those cloud services and apps that do useful things for you. How about we democratize the cloud instead? There should be no real reason I can't point my iOS device at my own infrastructure to co-ordinate sync, backup and sharing of all my stuff (instead of iCloud). Must I sign up for yet another third-party service/app just to provide me with an incremental feature? Why can't I just install apps into my own little cloud backend that my phone can connect to and do useful things for me? Have that be open for developers to target and maybe I can pay them for their work. Then it matters less what physical hardware I happen to be using. Of course, you can only access the plethora of sensors with a native app but most services I use don't need this much context. In any case, this is a concept many people are beginning to advocate for with a variety of reasons. FWIW, some of us are taking a clean-slate approach to tackle the distributed systems issues http://amirchaudhry.com/brewing-miso-to-serve-nymote/ http://amirchaudhry.com/brewing-miso-to-serve-nymote/

zanny 12y ago
> There should be no real reason I can't point my iOS device at my own infrastructure to co-ordinate sync Well there is a real reason, you never own the iphone you have. You never have control of the device, Apple does. They have final say in what can be built to run on it, what can run on it, what you can install, what OS you can run, whether you get updates, and what the phone does. You have no control over it, at all. So don't act surprised when Apple takes advantage of absolute power to screw you over. At that, I know owncloud exists for iOS, so you could just use that, at least for the bullet points you mentioned, not so much for the sensors-aware network of devices.
bsbechtel 12y ago
>>There should be no real reason I can't point my iOS device at my own infrastructure to co-ordinate sync, backup and sharing of all my stuff (instead of iCloud). I want this as much as you and everyone else who upvoted you, but the problem is there is no obvious business model in it. Sure, techies will pay (app.net?), but the general population doesn't care enough to put out money for this.
- amirmc 12y ago
  There are plenty of ways of making money, including asking your users to pay. Take a look at the number of 'personal cloud' crowdwfunding campaigns to see how much latent demand there is for things like this. Most of those products don't even exist yet. I think it's a mistake to assume that nobody will pay for such services given the vast number of people online now. It's just a matter of appropriate market segmentation [1]. Business models emerge as people begin to use things, and we should remember that Google didn't have one for a long time (neither did Facebook). [1] The teenage version of me didn't give a damn and only used free things but the adult version of me has a much better understanding of the trade-offs I'm making (and I also have disposable income now). I don't wish to become a sysadmin, which means I have very few options.
  - bsbechtel 12y ago
    All good points. I think it's certainly feasible in the future, but not today. There are challenges besides technical and business that need to be solved too. For instance, you have a personal cloud server you set up that runs all your apps, and you have an Instagram-like app for your photos. How do others get to view your photos? There needs to be an aggregator that runs across servers to pull all the content and puts it into a newsfeed, with an easy to access URL/app for your friends to open and view your photos. How do we get this? With a centralized server?
    - amirmc 12y ago
      Isn't that just a technical challenge? In this world view, you are your own central server and everyone else is their own. Let's take your example and run with it (bear in mind I'm ignoring some rough edges here). You share your instagram-style pics into an app on your personal server to begin with and then from there they get federated out to people who've decided to 'follow' you (or those you have allowed to). Practically speaking, the pic (or rather access to it) is given to the app on the personal servers of those followers. Their server then constructs a newsfeed of all the incoming pics and presents it to their user (via an app or web-interface or whatever). This doesn't happen on the mobile device itself but on the 'personal cloud' of the user. There are many things I've glossed over but there doesn't have to be a central server in this scenario and everything can be encrypted end-to-end. That's why this is really a distributed systems problem. In order for an app-developer to build such an app, the deeper problems around deployment, sync, and identity/connectivity need to be resolved. Developers just need something to target that provides the appropriate components. That's what the toolstack I previously linked is trying to solve. Without that, we're stuck with requiring someone else to provide the central system/aggregator. Clearly this is a non-trivial problem but if it can be cracked then it'll be as impactful as the opening up of the Web was.
bcoughlan 12y ago
Are you talking about having a thin client that talks to a private cloud instead of each client's data residing on the vendor's server? One of the hurdles is that the server side of apps require more than reading and writing files. Full text search, recommender/ml jobs etc. Apps don't just need file systems, they need CPUs. If an app could be installed on a server and sandboxed (so for example multiple apps could share an ElasticSearch instance without being aware of each other) this would be a big step forward.
datashovel 12y ago
I'm only vaguely familiar with it, but Brad Fitzpatrick has a project called Camlistore [https://camlistore.org/ https://camlistore.org/]. Probably worth a look. It seems he's trying to tackle exactly these kinds of problems with that project.
dlu 12y ago
> The OP conveniently ignores all the other mobile OSs out there such as Windows, Firefox, Ubuntu and also people like Fairphone. It's pretty lazy to just claim we need more, when what he really wants is one more (open) winner. Yeah, I'm not clear how excited he'd be if Microsoft was a major player in mobile. I think if that were the case, we'd just get the same article but with 'triopoly' instead. Also, did he say custom boot animations? I don't think that's what is holding us back... better examples would strengthen his argument

by amirmc 12y ago

zanny 12y ago

> There should be no real reason I can't point my iOS device at my own infrastructure to co-ordinate sync Well there is a real reason, you never own the iphone you have. You never have control of the device, Apple does. They have final say in what can be built to run on it, what can run on it, what you can install, what OS you can run, whether you get updates, and what the phone does. You have no control over it, at all. So don't act surprised when Apple takes advantage of absolute power to screw you over. At that, I know owncloud exists for iOS, so you could just use that, at least for the bullet points you mentioned, not so much for the sensors-aware network of devices.

bsbechtel 12y ago

>>There should be no real reason I can't point my iOS device at my own infrastructure to co-ordinate sync, backup and sharing of all my stuff (instead of iCloud). I want this as much as you and everyone else who upvoted you, but the problem is there is no obvious business model in it. Sure, techies will pay (app.net?), but the general population doesn't care enough to put out money for this.

amirmc 12y ago
There are plenty of ways of making money, including asking your users to pay. Take a look at the number of 'personal cloud' crowdwfunding campaigns to see how much latent demand there is for things like this. Most of those products don't even exist yet. I think it's a mistake to assume that nobody will pay for such services given the vast number of people online now. It's just a matter of appropriate market segmentation [1]. Business models emerge as people begin to use things, and we should remember that Google didn't have one for a long time (neither did Facebook). [1] The teenage version of me didn't give a damn and only used free things but the adult version of me has a much better understanding of the trade-offs I'm making (and I also have disposable income now). I don't wish to become a sysadmin, which means I have very few options.
- bsbechtel 12y ago
  All good points. I think it's certainly feasible in the future, but not today. There are challenges besides technical and business that need to be solved too. For instance, you have a personal cloud server you set up that runs all your apps, and you have an Instagram-like app for your photos. How do others get to view your photos? There needs to be an aggregator that runs across servers to pull all the content and puts it into a newsfeed, with an easy to access URL/app for your friends to open and view your photos. How do we get this? With a centralized server?
  - amirmc 12y ago
    Isn't that just a technical challenge? In this world view, you are your own central server and everyone else is their own. Let's take your example and run with it (bear in mind I'm ignoring some rough edges here). You share your instagram-style pics into an app on your personal server to begin with and then from there they get federated out to people who've decided to 'follow' you (or those you have allowed to). Practically speaking, the pic (or rather access to it) is given to the app on the personal servers of those followers. Their server then constructs a newsfeed of all the incoming pics and presents it to their user (via an app or web-interface or whatever). This doesn't happen on the mobile device itself but on the 'personal cloud' of the user. There are many things I've glossed over but there doesn't have to be a central server in this scenario and everything can be encrypted end-to-end. That's why this is really a distributed systems problem. In order for an app-developer to build such an app, the deeper problems around deployment, sync, and identity/connectivity need to be resolved. Developers just need something to target that provides the appropriate components. That's what the toolstack I previously linked is trying to solve. Without that, we're stuck with requiring someone else to provide the central system/aggregator. Clearly this is a non-trivial problem but if it can be cracked then it'll be as impactful as the opening up of the Web was.

bcoughlan 12y ago

Are you talking about having a thin client that talks to a private cloud instead of each client's data residing on the vendor's server? One of the hurdles is that the server side of apps require more than reading and writing files. Full text search, recommender/ml jobs etc. Apps don't just need file systems, they need CPUs. If an app could be installed on a server and sandboxed (so for example multiple apps could share an ElasticSearch instance without being aware of each other) this would be a big step forward.

datashovel 12y ago

I'm only vaguely familiar with it, but Brad Fitzpatrick has a project called Camlistore [https://camlistore.org/ https://camlistore.org/]. Probably worth a look. It seems he's trying to tackle exactly these kinds of problems with that project.

dlu 12y ago

> The OP conveniently ignores all the other mobile OSs out there such as Windows, Firefox, Ubuntu and also people like Fairphone. It's pretty lazy to just claim we need more, when what he really wants is one more (open) winner. Yeah, I'm not clear how excited he'd be if Microsoft was a major player in mobile. I think if that were the case, we'd just get the same article but with 'triopoly' instead. Also, did he say custom boot animations? I don't think that's what is holding us back... better examples would strengthen his argument