
Ask HN: How would you redesign the mobile OS? - miguelrochefort
There are and have been a lot of mobile operating systems:<p>- Android<p>- iOS<p>- Windows Phone<p>- webOS<p>- KaiOS<p>- Tizen<p>- Ubuntu Touch<p>- Firefox OS<p>- Sailfish OS<p>- Symbian<p>- Maemo<p>- Meego<p>They all pretty much look and work the same way. Windows 95 and iOS 12 are probably more alike than they are different.<p>If you were given the opportunity to reimagine and redesign the mobile operating system experience, how would it differ from what we have today? What are your most radical ideas?
======
nobody271
I half trust my computers because I installed everything myself. Well, except
my Surface which I trust the least. But I have 0 trust in my phone. It's not
open source and I cannot remove certain apps. So it's never been something
I've trusted.

For me to get excited about a phone OS it probably just wouldn't have a store.
Take out the store and users would have to install apps the old fashioned way
which I think would translate into control over the device.

------
Torwald
I would focus on killing latency in the UI. Make every button as responsive as
a hardware button. (This probably requires innovation in display technology.)

------
ethiclub
\- Ecosystem would be based around a task management 'backbone' \- the OS
would be Activity based, instead of function (app) centric. I.e. apps would be
required to 'plug in' to the backbone, and UI would be centered around the
current event being undertaken rather than an unlinked view-per-function (app
UIs would be secondary interfaces, not primary). Microsoft Sets would have
started to get us thinking along these lines.

\- Browser tabs and apps need to be synonymous. Google pulled 'merged tabs and
apps' from Chrome on Android a couple of years ago. This was arguably a
significant step backward in UX.

\- Crowd-sourced Peer review / code review system for apps. This community
would have to be carefully curated in order to prevent a 'trigger happy /
aggressive' team culture (such as Stack Exchange suffers from)

\- Privacy-first: Privacy and data handled to allow for HIPAA/GDPR/ISO:27001
considerations right from the get-go (apps to use a shared annex system for
data & data exchange that must be complied with). Blackberry corporate user
based absorbed.

\- iOS strictness of 'screen real estate zoning' system to reserve critical
areas, homogenize menu bar UI etc.

\- Docking / shared screens / OS merging has been poorly attempted in the last
10 years. Desktops should just be dumb monitors with docking pads by now.
Screen real estate zoning would be catered for at different levels from 0.Xcm
- Sports stadium boards.

\- Modular OS: More compartmentalisation and fragmentation right from the
offset. The setup of the OS should allow access to toggling of all modules and
their variables. A user could deploy a full featured OS, or a dumb 'issue
reporting screen' where they limit functionality & modules to just a single
source of traffic through a port, basic OS functionality and graphical text
representation. This would allow for more use cases being appropriately
covered by the OS. Essentially, the modularity of the 80s/90s PC market and
the user-friendliness of the iPad could have come together by now. PC
components shouldn't have exposed pins etc. by now.

\- Ideally, there would be a hardware team working closely, with similar
culture. Project Ara would have been appropriate for a corporate culture...
and if scope had been wider (swallowing the thin client market, amongst other
areas). MSPs / IT departments would have thrived on modular computing -
Efficiency of plug & play, cost savings of reusability and smaller module
scope, speed of deployment to end users, security of not having unnecessary
components active.

\- Canary-ridden & transparent documentation, code and licenses. Use OS market
share power to drive inter-OS adoption of encrypted, secure, open source
protocols. Government or third party intervention has loud triggers attached
to it.

~~~
miguelrochefort
That's exactly the kind of answer I was looking for! I'm surprised by how well
your ideas align with mine.

I don't think I've seen anyone else talk about how the UI should use task
management mechanics. I've been repeating for years that GTD is the future of
UI.

I'm also a strong advocate of dumb peripherals. Input and output devices
should not be processing devices. I also like the idea of things like external
GPUs through Thunderbolt. Regarding connectedness, modules/devices shouldn't
have to know that they're inside the computer, outside the computer, or even
in a remote cloud-like location. Edge computing should be seamless and
transparent.

It's very important that data be portable. I'm not sure privacy is as
important as we think it is (we would gain a lot by letting the world
know.more about ourselves), but the option should probably exist nonetheless.
The big problem is to have my data duplicated and out of sync in a million
different places. I'd rather update a single source of truth, than run around
and try to update all different databases (e.g., if my address or phone number
changes).

I'm mainly a UI/UX developer, and I was wondering if there would be a way to
build and bring some of these improvements (especially the task management
system workflow) to users, without building a custom OS. Perhaps as an app?

I'll now look at Microsoft Sets. Seems interesting.

