
How many Ubuntu Phones there are? - reddotX
http://rpadovani.com/how-many-ubuntu-phone/
======
Orinocco
One more than there should be by rights! Mine fell in a river at night a week
ago, I thought it was gone but then I saw a light flashing from the bottom..
It was the screen flickering, coming and going for about a minute like it was
calling to me. By the time I got in it had gone out but I found it by diving
and feeling around on the bottom.

Packed it in rice and 4 days later it came back to life :) I'm very happy,
great phone and surprisingly hardy!

------
phantom_oracle
The worst thing to happen would be for early-adopters to get screwed over
if/when Canonical decides to drop support for the mobile OS.

The truth is that just like Windows, Android will dominate market-share for a
long time, but there are millions of linux users out there who will gladly
purchase a pure-linux phone if a decently-polished one with LTS can be
delivered.

It sucks that the market beyond Android and iOS consists of Windows-phone as a
distant third and everyone else scrambling for 0.1%, but Linux can grow here
too, cause Android is (just like Windows is/was) a malware breeding-ground
(and worse, considering Google is the for-profit version of the NSA).

~~~
simonh
I'm not trolling, but genuinely curious. Android runs on a Linux kernel, as
does Tizen and probably several other phone OSes. What makes the Canonical
phone more Linux than these for Linux fans? Presumably it's more like a
desktop linux distro in some ways, but if so what ways?

~~~
maheart
Android uses the Linux kernel. That's where the similarities between Android
and GNU/Linux end.

Ubuntu Touch is GNU/Linux. It is largely[1] made up of "standard" GNU/Linux
components (e.g. glibc, systemd [soon], BASH, gcc, Pulseaudio, Gstreamer,
NetworkManager, Telepathy, oFono, BlueZ, deb, apt).

This has several advantages:

1\. People familiar with GNU/Linux can re-use their existing knowledge

2\. The GNU/Linux ecosystem is developed by a lot of different parties. If you
feel you can do better you can write your own components and swap them in
(e.g. as Canonical did with Mir)

3\. A community (or business) can develop their own "spins" (distros), which
could extend the lifetime of your mobile (security fixes!)

4\. It's a real pleasure to develop software on your Linux desktop, knowing
there'll be less friction getting it to work on Linux on the mobile.

[1] The exception probably being using Mir instead of Wayland

------
bonsai80
I think they've done the right thing in catering to their existing base of
enthusiastic developers. Trying to mass market it right now would just get
them a bunch of bad reviews from consumer electronics sites that don't
understand it and don't have the time to bother (to be fair, their readers are
just more interested in the what color the next iPhone comes in). I think
they've also done the smart thing in bringing it to countries where Android
and iPhone have not already obliterated the whole market. That's a bummer for
me though as I'm a US Ubuntu user and I'd love to buy one of their phones. (I
know I can now, but 2G or wifi is not worth paying my monthly bill for). Last
I heard they're working with a manufacturer to bring a different option to the
US market. I'll be first in line to buy it and I'm excited about building
whatever applications I find that I need on it that may not already be there.
I think they could do well by really marketing to what they do and the others
can't: no questionable agreements to sign, ability to choose what to do with
your device that you bought and own, and nobody using your information. Sadly
that's a small market, but it's probably large enough for them to keep the
lights on.

------
Tepix
I'd love to use an Ubuntu phone, but the last couple of times I've tried, it
was still pretty awful to use. Currently, the only phone I could install it on
is a Galaxy Nexus and it's not surprising that the OS would be slow there.
However I've read that it's still stuttering on the Meizu MX4 (in this german
review: [http://www.golem.de/news/meizu-mx4-mit-ubuntu-im-test-
knapp-...](http://www.golem.de/news/meizu-mx4-mit-ubuntu-im-test-knapp-
daneben-ist-wieder-vorbei-1507-115243.html) ).

Also, the lack of Ubuntu Convergence (the "killer feature"), is disappointing.

~~~
vegabook
I've been running the Ubuntu Aquaris E5 since it launched. The main reason I
want to stick with it through the difficult early time (browser crashes
continuously), is that I want a proper Linux environment on which to develop
applications for phones/tablets. I hate having to be forced into Java on
Android, and IOS is too locked down and you can't use custom hardware. I hope
they stick with it (the main phone guy recently left Canonical) but I can only
agree that it is now becoming extremely urgent for Canonical to ship
convergence, as without it, this OS is a poor cousin to the competition, even
if the user interface is quite clean and fresh by comparison to the gaudy
design of Android and IOS. It definitely has potential as much more of an
open, blank slate for developers than the others, but the key word is
"potential". It's not there yet.

------
josephmx
This article makes me uncomfortable, it's pretty light on information and then
reveals the author is a contributor and expects donations - shouldn't such a
contributor have more information or at least more to say than "Canonical want
to sell x, but x could be anything, so the results could be anything"?

~~~
pavlov
Being a contributor to an open source project doesn't automatically give you
any insight into the business goals of a company sponsoring the same project.

~~~
josephmx
But yet that same contributor expects readers to pay him for a few paragraphs
of weak guesswork?

~~~
pavlov
He probably hopes people might pay him for the development work he's putting
into Ubuntu rather than the blogging.

------
fit2rule
I'd love to see the Ubuntu phone try to do things that the iPhone just can't
do - things like give developers the tools they need to write apps: onboard,
i.e. use the thing itself to build software for it.

Anyone know if thats possible, or do you still have to have an external cross-
compiler/IDE to write proper apps for it?

~~~
simonh
> ...write apps: onboard, i.e. use the thing itself to build software for it.

I do this on iOS using Pythonista. It includes a basic on-device GUI design
tool, hooks into various iOS built-in libraries and some useful third party
Python libraries. There are even a few (admittedly trivial) apps published to
the App store written in Pythonista. There's also Codea if you prefer Lua to
Python. I tend to do most work in an iPad as a phone is a bit cramped for
working on code.

------
oikos
Canonical's speculative sales numbers may be further deducted by their Edge
crowdfunding campaign that resulted 37K people participating forming only 40%
(~13M $) of their target.

~~~
lnanek2
That's in the same ballpark as the 25k number the article comes up with.

For people who don't know, these numbers are very, very small. I wrote an app
store dice puzzle game on Android no one here has heard of and it has 20x
those numbers.

As a developer, you have to decide if the decreased competition on the
platform is worth the smaller user base when you decide if you will write a
version for that platform. So platform size numbers like these are important.

~~~
vegabook
In my own case, the attraction of Ubuntu Touch is to actually ship an entire
semi-custom device with custom software for vertical use cases, mainly in B2B.
Different order of magnitude of revenue / profit margin, with much smaller
unit sales. I don't think Ubuntu Touch stands a chance with consumers at least
for the next couple of years.

------
josteink
Phoronix links to this submission, and tries to compare his visitor numbers to
that of the findings.

[http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ubuntu-
Ph...](http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ubuntu-Phone-
Estimate-25k)

Spoiler alert: Ubuntu phone can be found among the users, but it's pretty much
behind _everything_ else in terms of market-share.

------
swalsh
I'd love to see a "laptop shell" where once i slip in my ubuntu phone, it goes
from the phone os, to the regular ubuntu desktop experience. There's a lot of
advantages of only having to own one device. For instance, as long as i'm
updating my phone every 2 years... why not get a free laptop upgrade as well!.
I take the train home from work, every day I struggle with the tether from my
phone to my laptop. If it was just one device life would be a lot simpler.

~~~
vegabook
You're looking for convergence, and so far Ubuntu touch does not offer it.
It's the main selling point but we're still waiting...

