I spent years working on the Ubuntu phone. It was a fully convergent device: by default it would present a phone UI, but plugin an a keyboard and screen and it presents a full desktop UI. The UI was designed by a team of brilliant professional designers and it was a technical success.
Why isn't it around any more?
(1) The carriers. Many people get a free or heavily subsidized phone from their carrier, who makes money from the data charges. Carriers were just not interested in phones from smaller manufacturers, and it's not entirely clear that there is no backflow of cash involved at higher levels. There is also the issue of controlling access to user metadata, always a profitable exercise.
(2) The manufacturers: why would they put a third-party OS on their phone when they control the entire stack from the silicon to the end-user's metadata through their in-house Android fork? They can sell hardware at a negative margin if they can profit from selling access to metadata, or possibly data.
(3) The apps. Developers want to target the biggest, most lucrative markets so they target Android and iPhone which already have a critical mass. You could provide a container to run Android apps on Ubuntu, but then you end up with no differentiating factor except your Android apps look like crap in desktop mode. Running in a container can also restrict the kind of data collection many apps rely on for monetization.
Another problem with apps is that many web services check to see whether the device is iPhone or Android and respond accordingly. Like the browser checks of yore ("you need at least IE 6 to use this site, try updating to a newer browser!") this gives a less satisfactory experience to end users.
The same shit is happening today, except it's Chrome instead of IE6. We have an entire generation of webdevs who learned fuck-all from the previous round of the browser wars.
So what? We've had writing for thousands of years, and it's a perfect way to preserve historical lessons for the future ~losslessly.
I'm a fairly young person but I've had a bit of interest in the history of computing from Unix onwards. It's all documented and out there in public archives, accessible by anyone. It ignited an interest and let me identify more deeply with my profession, plus it highlighted just how much the history of computing is cyclical (especially the mainframe->thin client->mainf^Wcloud cycle), and therefore shown me how much of the old history we can dust off and put into good use again in the modern times.
History is context. One is doing themselves a disservice by not doing some cursory reading around it.
Not sure why your comment is being downvoted, most of my friends think I am paranoid when I say we shouldn't only support chrome. To them it's the browser that always works whereas the others are a PITA to support.
Which is why the current situation is stable and the IE6 situation got fixed. Nobody liked developing for IE6, it was a pain in the ass since it was so shit. But people are perfectly happy developing for chrome.
IE could stagnate since they bundled it with their OS, meaning people on an old OS used the old IE meaning IE6 lived on for over a decade. Chrome is dominant since people download it and people receive free updates, so the situation isn't comparable there either.
The situation when every webdev was forced to support IE6 would be like if developers today had to support Chrome from 2011.
Chrome is bundled with Android (billions of devices) and when you install a lot of software on Windows like antivirus they bundle Chrome unless you opt-out.
I do feel if canonical were to attempt another crowd-funding attempt at an Ubuntu phone, they might well be successful this time. That phone was a terrific concept. I feel the market has changed since then, with carriers accepting less control over our phones, and the fad of installing every random app has somewhat distilled itself to a smaller number that is widely used.
> Carriers were just not interested in phones from smaller manufacturers, and it's not entirely clear that there is no backflow of cash involved at higher levels.
I really doubt it’s something sinister in enterprise sized logistics. Mainly because the big guys don’t need to be al 90’ies Microsoft about it in the modern world of leaned up Enterprise. The service the big global brands come with do save the carriers a lot of money, but it’s done perfectly legal.
First there is the logistics. As a smaller carrier, you won’t really have to worry about doing BI on sales projections and what not, because Apple, Samsung and so on will simply tell you how many phones you can expect to sell, which is basically how many they’ve already produced for your region. They’ll handle everything from warehousing to shipping to your local stores pretty much without you having to do anything but sign the extremely “take it or leave it” sort of B2B contract, that also includes the big companies not charging you for products that don’t sell. What this translates to is that you can basically run your company without a logistics department or any BI related to the actual phone hardware. This saves you money both on manpower but also on not having too much inventory.
Then there the support side of things. By carrying big well known brands with a very low degree of user freedom for modifications you cut the non-carrier related support you need to offer to almost nothing. You could probably offer good money to get carriers to sell, even a well known brand like the fairphone, and they’d still turn you down because it would cost them too much money to do so.
The phones are the same price, you know. The carriers don’t literally ‘subsidise’ or give you a ‘free’ phone - it’s built into the contract price. It’s nothing to do with how wealthy you are because it’s the same price!
Yes, and wealthy people are in the position to plunk down that money up front. People who are less privileged frequently have to take advantage of that form of "financing" offered by the carrier.
Remember, by being wealthy, we frequently have to pay a lot less than people who get by month to month. There should be no shock here.
Yes, to your point I was at T Mobile a month or so ago waiting to buy a SIM card in line behind someone who was evaluating their “free” (i.e., carrier-financed) options. They had a choice of a number of Android handsets I’d never heard of.
On the other end of the scale, though, are the subsidies carriers pay to anyone who switches and trades in a quality device. When my partner joined my plan T Mobile paid a $700+ subsidy for his iPhone 11 in exchange for an iPhone 8.
So customers across the entire income scale finance. It’s just a matter of how lucrative that financing is for the customer. At the higher end of the scale where the customer has more choice it’s usually a much better deal.
It absolutely has to do with being wealthy. Where a wealthy person can afford to spend $500 on a phone, someone not as financially comfortable has no other options than to go the "financing" route. Yes, the price ends up being similar, but it is much more possible for modest people to spend $20/mo for 2 years than $500 on the first day.
This is a well studied phenomenon that wealthy people who can afford to pay everything on day 1, buy in bulk and all end up paying less than poorer people.
$500? Top of the line devices in the last few years have crept above $1,000 USD. Not trying to nitpick but the difference there is a sizable chunk of the average person’s annual income.
Chiming in as a low-income person, yes these Flagship phones have been off of our radar for a very very long time. If I wanted to, I could go into Walmart and buy a perfectly capable locked simple mobile phone for $20 or maybe a bit more than that. There is no possible way that I consider spending multiple weeks worth of paycheck on something that could be broken or stolen easily. If I was going to treat myself to a nicer phone there are tons of great options for me to choose in the 100 or $200 range.
No, not really. A reasonable phone can be had for $200 or less, if you're willing to compromise on features. Carriers haven't been carrying good value-for-money phones on good value-for-money plans for at least 10 years in my country, so cutting out the middle man by buying SIM-only with your own phone is the natural thing to do.
I think Apple is already on its way for a convergent device with the Apple silicone. They've already unveiled an iPad with an M1 chip and in the near future we would get iPhones with powerful chips which is able to act as a fully functional MacBook once the phone is connected to an external monitor/TV, of course with a bluetooth keyboard and a mouse.
I bought an ubuntu phone. The phone was nice, but it lacked apps, and the apps were pretty much all web based - so the map app wouldn't even load without an internet connection - pretty useless in a foreign country. And the version that was released to the public didn't have the option to plug in a keyboard and screen for a full desktop.
BTW, I think the convergence concept is totally valid and actually available now (although in a proprietary form) as Dex on Samsung Galaxy series devices.
Just plug the thing into a USB-C HDMI dongle and it shows a desktop interface on the display & has decent mouse and keyboard support.
Really nice for simple stuff like looking at photos you just took outside but on a big screen. And also a killer combo with the Wacom One pen display as you have your Clip Studio or Krita files all available on the big Wacom One screen yet can work on them on the regular device screen while on the go. :)
So now we just need that, but open source. :)
It could be a separate wayland session outputting to the external display with app GUI getting data from a backend via DBus. That way you could run the same up on both device and external screen at the same time while keeping the data model consistent. :)
That's the whole idea behind Librem 5 and PureOS and it already works well. All the phone apps there are just regular desktop apps made convergent to fit and work well on the phone.
From my limited perspective as a former user who still keeps up with some of it: they seem to be continuing down that path, just slower as they don't have Canonical's paid dev team to work on it.
I don't understand the desire for a Linux phone as so described in the article as a daily driver.
The Android platform represents an enormous amount of work that encompasses a more secure base kernel, an unparalleled selection of applications designed for mobile usage and written in a memory-safe language, fantastic sandboxing and user privacy features leagues ahead of any desktop operating system, and great diversity in the hardware market.
While it's apparent that Android has significant downsides - de facto proprietary drivers, an environment of mostly closed-source applications, some Big G integration, and a general lack of long-term updates occasionally countering the work put into security (thanks, chip manufacturers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26593274), these are problems that can be solved. It doesn't make sense to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Closed-source applications are more a moral problem than a security one thanks to Android's sandboxing, and a vibrant ecosystem of high-quality free-and-open-source Android applications (https://f-droid.org - Amaze, Notally, QKSMS, and Tasks are some of my favorites) makes them all but optional. Google's presence in the AOSP codebase is rather limited (mostly around notifications) and taken out altogether by custom ROMs like Lineage and GrapheneOS. Proprietary drivers remain as Android's biggest problem, perhaps alongside the manufacturers that ship locked-down phones with bloatware (looking at you, Samsung).
Why go the desktop-Linux-to-mobile route when you could fork Android, write drivers for the Pinephone / Librem 5, punch a hole to the base system for privileged applications, and have the best of both worlds with an order of magnitude less effort?
Because Android is Google's own property, it's not like a standard Linux distribution by any stretch of imagination.
I'm not even against proprietary apps (just against proprietary drivers of course), it's just that transforming Android to make it behave normally is just more and more work every year.
Some people (including myself) would prefer to have the same system they have on their desktop on their phone, with the added bonus of having convergence.
Shielding Android from the rest of the system as a "compatibility layer" just to run some apps or drivers makes tons of sens.
A compatibility layer for Android apps would really make it viable. I just don't want to fight my OS to be recognized and treated as its owner.
In that respect I really like how I can run Windows games on Linux via Proton and Steam; an otherwise good game can ship with all kinds of crap (like having their own launchers stuck in the system tray), but when I'm done the whole Wine-sandbox collapses and I'm back in a Linux desktop that does what I want. Something like that for the host of proprietary apps you are nowadays hard-pressed to avoid (I manage now, but it is not a tenable position) would be welcome. Ideally you could do all sorts of privacy preserving stuff at the sandbox layer.
>A compatibility layer for Android apps would really make it viable. I just don't want to fight my OS to be recognized and treated as its owner.
This is the real reason we need this. Without competition from free alternatives our phones will get locked down "for our benefit" harder and harder and it won't be done for our benefit.
More tracking, more of our data sold, more DRM, etc.
Sure, the stuff in the tray goes away, but Wine is not a sandbox. Software can still look into your filesystem and processes. You need Flatpak for proper sandboxing.
There is no reason to reinvent an OS. You can use desktop GNU/Linux on modern phones. You only need to tweak the UI (see Phosh). You will also have full computer in your pocket and ability to connect it to a screen and use all Linux apps.
>A mobile OS is much more usable on a smartphone than a desktop one.
The point is that there should be no difference between "mobile" and "desktop". Mobile devices are capable of (almost) everything desktop does. Just connect a screen with keyboard and you have a "desktop". Now, you have thousands of apps already written for GNU/Linux.
What matters is the interface and UI, and the power usage. The android SDK is designed so that app developers have constraints that reduce power usage.
I agree that users should have more power over their hardware, but it would be at the risk of non power users letting malware infecting their device.
But I really disagree that desktop and mobile are similar.
Saving energy on a lithium battery requires more than just better batteries, it also requires developers to make apps that are very lightweight in energy, and that's why android is how it is, to prevent developers to release apps that drains battery and ruins the android experience and the brand.
And what would be the point of having linux apps on a mobile device? That doesn't really matters for users, it's the same problem with linux desktop and the quality of FOSS. What matters is having an OS where users can do what they want, but it's more complicated on android because... batteries.
Also, security is though problem that is solved with the google play service. Yes, it's centralized and users cannot do what they want, but the upside is security.
Personally, I just want it for completeness. With phone hardware getting powerful enough to run mid-to-high end games, I want to be able to carry around a phone that I can hook up peripherals to and use it just like I would use a desktop. The Android ecosystem is pretty good in its own way, but it's qualitatively different compared to the Linux ecosystem for my use case.
Windows and several popular Linux distros are moving to ARM anyway, so I feel like this is the ideal time to attempt carving out a space for people like myself.
Exactly, I would love a smartphone-size universal computing device, to use on the go or plug into desktop/laptop docking devices when needed.
The individual parts are all there. Phones are powerful enough, we have USB-C with displayport for docking, KDE/qt has (or used to have?) an alternate small/touch GUI setup, phones can throttle their CPUs up when placed in a dock with active cooling, every individual part of the puzzle is available today in some form.
Microsoft tried it and Samsung tried it, but both were too tied to their own proprietary ecosystems. I think it could work with a det of open and freely available standards.
> Microsoft tried it and Samsung tried it, but both were too tied to their own proprietary ecosystems. I think it could work with a det of open and freely available standards.
Sorry, but in what world has a new UI paradigm or physical form factor reached mass adoption via an open source project? Not knocking open source in general, it’s just that these are not the open source communities’ strengths in general. Meanwhile, single platform monolithic companies with end-to-end control and lots of financial resources tend to do much better here. Added to the fact that this was the basic thrust of the Ubuntu phone and (iirc) the Mozilla phone projects as well, and I just don’t see it. Maybe Apple will popularize the idea with an M1 (or M2, M3, etc) based iPhone (15?) that is truly powerful enough to pull it off and can run iOS and Mac OS side by side.
The problem with Microsoft's and Samsung's approaches is that they were too closed off, you didn't have the ability to install any software you wanted, unlike on a PC.
If you want to unseat laptops, you have to provide what laptops do, a universal platform for software, not a walled garden.
> "I am curious, what do you need in terms of performance? It can play 3D games and show videos on a big screen."
Better real-world performance than my X220i, so at least able to play some games from my Steam library, play 1080p60 videos, multitasking, that sort of thing. I assume the Librem 5 can probably do all of this, although I'm highly skeptical of running the desktop version of Firefox on just 3GB RAM. As a do-it-all mobile device, I would also need better battery life than my current smartphone, so 1-2 days of normal usage.
As an aside, that X220i cost me ~$370 in 2018 and is a 2012 vintage machine, so not even close to current laptop performance. I appreciate what Purism are trying to do, but you'll certainly pay a price for being an early adopter.
You know, that's an interesting point. There's a lot to be said for using one as a desktop. I've got a Motorola Droid laptop thingie around here somewhere that turned a phone into a pc-like device and it was actually pretty cool. A few generations of speed improvements and it would be fine for most uses. It's nice to have a single non-cloud state for your stuff.
My main need is for a phone to do the following: be as private as possible, make calls, send messages, occasional browser use, hotspot. I'm tired of being dragged along with everyone else in terms of complexity.
That might be a generational thing. I can't remember the last time I ever used my phone as a phone.
Also, what you're calling complexity, I see as simplicity. In my ideal world, I wouldn't need to install three different versions of a web browser across three devices in order to get through my day.
I'm sure you're right. I pre-date cell phones and video games and never got interested in either one aside from the technology. A phone seems like a poor substitute to a fast workstation with multiple screens and a keyboard (to me), but I can see the cost in mobile connectivity. Luckily, we can all choose our poison, although my own old man phone needs are not as well supported.
The interesting thing is to consider how your personal technology stack reprograms your thinking.
Out of curiosity, if you could set up Android so that it launches Linux in a virtual machine when a monitor / keyboard is plugged in, would that meet your use case? Or are you looking for greater integration between mobile and the desktop?
Potentially, but you'd have to convince me that the performance hit and the added instability was worth it.
I actually use the opposite setup at the moment (virtualized Android apps on a Linux desktop). So I think Android would have to convince me that it's a worthy general purpose computing environment that I can supplement using the Linux ecosystem, but for the moment it's looking like the opposite is the case.
> The Android platform represents an enormous amount of work that encompasses a more secure base kernel, an unparalleled selection of applications designed for mobile usage and written in a memory-safe language, fantastic sandboxing and user privacy features leagues ahead of any desktop operating system, and great diversity in the hardware market.
but it's so freaking slow. I own a oneplus 8 pro and compared to my old Jolla it's an exercise in frustration, nothing in the UI is smooth.
> an unparalleled selection of applications
78% of which are competing chat apps (no kidding, I have to have ~8 different chat apps installed)
> designed for mobile usage and written in a memory-safe language, fantastic sandboxing and user privacy features leagues ahead of any desktop operating system,
I'll be honest I'd trade all that for "less lag" without even thinking twice about it
He compared it to a Jolla phone, which I assume runs Sailfish. If you're comparing Android to Android, you are missing the point. Slowness is from the software here.
> The Android platform represents an enormous amount of work that encompasses a more secure base kernel, an unparalleled selection of applications designed for mobile usage and written in a memory-safe language, fantastic sandboxing and user privacy features leagues ahead of any desktop operating system, and great diversity in the hardware market.
It's also all Google's. At any time, for any reason, Google can arbitrarily decide that they don't want you to run software X, Y or Z. On your device. The situation is, frankly, untenable.
(Yes, you can often work around Google's arbitrary decision at the cost of inconvenience on your part. That still doesn't cut it. My device, my rules! Just like with my PC.)
Yes, Android is mature and secure, but it's not private. No one seems to talk about this much, but there are a few Android "features" that had to be designed by sociopaths.
The main one for me is the complete lack of control of network traffic. Other than a VPN loopback app, which is pretty janky, there is no way to disable network traffic per app. Even with a VPN loopback, there is no way to only allow network traffic when then app is in the foreground. There is no way to set network traffic to block by default and ask the user for permission when network access is needed. These restrictions are ABSOLUTELY DEADLY for user privacy and I don't understand why everyone isn't screaming at the top of their lungs from rooftops about these problems.
It's quite obvious with a 2 seconds of thought that these deficiencies were intentional to maintain Google's advertising monopoly, but I don't want a crippled OS to support Google's abhorrent business model.
It's absolutely mind boggling. It almost makes me want to join the LineageOS project to close these loopholes.
> Android is mature and secure, but it's not private
Nitpick: you cannot have security-but-not-privacy.
If a system does not protect the confidentiality of your data from the eyes of the manufacturer it is breaching security.
Security is much more than being protected from attacks. A torch application that reads your contact list and location fits squarely into the definition of trojan/spyware/malware.
The only person who seems to benefit from the way the security model works on Android is App Developers/carriers/manufacturers/Google. The user abstraction on an Android device doesn't even line up with a human user of the device, but rather it lines up with applications and software on the phone. I have seen nothing that more obviously tuned fpr turnimg a general computing device into a passive scripted experience regurgitator than Android.
You do not get the ability to organize arbitrary data. You need an app. You don't have a consistent experience of a filesystem, shared across all programs. Instead, you have a myriad of apps that do everything they can to hide the implementation details from you.
This does not "help" computer literacy to be most people's first encounter with a computer.
Per app restrictions only make sense with a strong sandbox (like Android). You can otherwise trivially get around something like little snitch by asking a trusted application to do something for you.
Edit: Say you're playing around in Python repl. You enable it in your firewall. Now I just have to shell out to "python -c 'import requests; requests.post('my-innocent-app.herokuapp.com', ...)'". With a little more work I could do something like LD_PRELOAD.
By the way, my colleague has some crappy Huawei phone, which previously killed background apps [1], but this week received an update that changed the behaviour to simply disabling them from accessing the internet.
Hmm, maybe it's time for a huawei. I have a oneplus and had the hardest time unlocking my Tesla for a while because OnePlus's OxygenOS kept killing the Tesla app in the background. Really stupid.
Hope more vendors follow. Google changing permission model to allow any app internet access was the stupidest decision made by a company in this millennium
It is an idiotic idea because it makes my xmpp client unusable. It should be up to a user to decide what should work on a device and how, not forcing some undocumented behaviour upon a user 'for his own good'
I recently tried setting up an Android phone with LineageOS without any gapps. Google's integration into the Android libraries that are used to build almost all the apps out there is so deep that a lot of apps that I use regularly wouldn't even launch on the phone.
Basically, by controlling the API that apps target when they are built, Google has attacked the AOSP from 2 sides. First is from the developer side of things. App developers need to jump through many hoops to make an app that would fall back to working with Google's services running on the phone (LineageOS without Gapps and using some fake gapps implementation to keep the API from breaking).
The second attack that Google has made to the AOSP is from the end user's perspective. They have made it harder and harder to use AOSP without Google's services. Since it's so hard for user's to setup and use a phone without Google's services, they almost never take that option. (I personally, reverted to the OnePlus' Oxygen OS and ditched LineageOS). The end result being that user's just don't want to leave Google's Android garden and explore the wilderness of AOSP without Google.
A pretty mediocre OS (lots of functionality is just missing or poorly implemented.)
Uses a driver model that encourages closed drivers (this means it never gets updates after Qualcomm stops releasing updates to their BSP)
A tool used by Google to force computing to be the way they want.
Really the only nice things about Android is the sandbox (which you don't need often on Linux because all the software is community maintained anyway) and the sleep features (doze, which takes a very small amount of work to re-implement at least on OpenRC and push notifications but Firefox already has that anyway.)
Android deviated from the rest of the Linux ecosystem for reasons that are irrelevant today and never tried to close the rift when it could. So no, I'm not thrilled about Android. Give me a system that uses Wayland, not SurfaceFlinger.
Same argument applies to Windows vs Linux. Same story.
Synergy opens amazing smartphone hardware to Linux — DCI-P3 color space, high refresh rates, variable refresh rates. Sandboxing, user privacy features, we need this on desktop too.
"Just use existing Windows kernel and drivers, there are a lot of Open Source applications" etc etc.
There is nothing special about Linux distribution, same could be done on top of NT kernel. But it is not. React OS reimplements kernel and userspace, in theory userspace could be used on top of Windows. There are a lot of Windows users yet no such thing.
Somehow Linux experience is much richer and safe. Xmonad and pacman.
There is something special about Linux distributions: The Linux kernel. In lots of areas it is indeed better than NT and it's stuff that matters to userspace, too (file system performance is one example, process spawning performance another).
I'd be shocked if it took off. The FOSS development paradigm seems to be allergic to good UI design, and this is far more important for people on mobile than desktop.
It's not like the competitors are any better, in the desktop space at least.
The problem in my eyes is plateauing. Once a project moves past the first couple of iterations, it rarely interests the original authors enough to make incremental improvements. And since there is no financial incentive to continue, the project usually cools down to eventually be replaced by the following iteration. This means that you rarely get mature software.
1) The GNU utilities have pretty good CLI UI design and there are plenty of us who are perfectly happy with just that and a decent WM like FVWM even on a phone
2) It's not like closed mobile stuff has a great UI either. My favorite example is Apple's camera app. Did you know you can do manual focus with it? It's absolutely impossible to discover but I think it involves a "reverse three finger pinch." I've even had it explained twice to me (and used it) and forgotten how to do it after. I can never remember how when I need it. This garbage makes the TAR UI look like it was designed by an artist.
I mean, you say "plenty", but it's going to be only a fraction of the number of people who are perfectly happy with that sort of thing on the desktop, which already isn't very many people (even if you assumed all *nix users sans Macheads were like this, which they're not).
And while you're right to say that mobile UI design can be bad, is the solution to that really throwing out mobile UI as a concept altogether in favor of ... a window manager designed for a mouse and ketboard, running text terminals on a tiny touchscreen?
User interfaces are how you interact with a computer. That includes visual and non-visual elements. Widgets you tap on the screen, gestures you make with your fingers, hotkeys, and commands entered are all components of the UI. If you pinched your fingers together on a touch screen and the view started zooming in it would be just as bad as clicking on a magnifying glass with a '-' symbol and it zooming in, even though the former is not visible.
It turns out I was thinking of the exposure/brightness controll.
Sorry I don't use iOS very often (and very rarely use the camera app.)
I think my point still stands though. The UI is not at all discoverable (and not all that ergonomic either which is why most people might tolerate some lack of discoverability.)
When you tap on your screen, the camera focuses on the point you tapped. It also adjusts the exposure to the point you tapped. And right next to where you tapped, a simple slider with a SUN ICON appears, and you can drag that slider to adjust the exposure.
The fact you don't use iOS and the Camera app, I'm fine with that. But you're telling everyone how bad the iPhone UI is without using it and misleading people about how it works. Not quite fair.
In any case, it's easy to pile on Apple, until you try to do it yourself. Let's see this Android OS match something at least half as usable as what the iPhone UI is. It took Android a decade to get there.
> The FOSS development paradigm seems to be allergic to good UI design
I'm having a hard time understanding what it is about the development paradigm that's allergic to good UI design. In good faith I'll assume you meant that "FOSS projects seem to lack good UI design". This I'll agree with, if we're talking about GUI design (others have pointed out that the CLI interfaces are usually great). I really don't think the lacking GUI design is necessarily inherent in FOSS, but I too wonder why more people with design skills aren't attracted to working on FOSS stuff.
Also don’t know about the paradigm per se, but I suspect a lot of FOSS developers are CLI first type users. Secondly, they are mostly not working in environments where GUI UX designers are part of the process. Thirdly, good UX design doesn’t happen by committee. Pure speculation on the first two.
Good UI design usually comes from one person knowing what they are doing and the programmers willing to follow. In OSS people are often motivated by full control.
You need to redesign your code architecture to fit the UI or you wont get a world class UI. That isn't what happens though, instead they hook in UI interactions so it looks like the designs but doesn't really work as well as you'd wish. I've never seen a developer who gladly did the architectural redesigns needed to make UI truly great.
> I'm having a hard time understanding what it is about the development paradigm that's allergic to good UI design.
There may not be causation, but there is definitely a strong correlation. KDE is approximately 2x as annoying to use as an intensive daily driver compared to a Windows 10 modded with OpenShell (aka Classic Shell) and a few smaller tweaks. I know this because I run them side by side, one for work and one for personal use. Don't get me started on Gnome Shell, it's a train wreck for those familiar with/expecting a classic GUI.
Modern UI on the phones makes discovering features really hard. One often ends up with searching obscure forums just to know very useful feature like IPhone trick with holding the space bar to move cursor.
I can understand that on 4” inch phones there were no space for extra buttons, but with 6” screens this became ridiculous. So much for “good” design.
I really miss Palm's zen. Great sweet spot of discoverability with a clutter-free design that didn't sacrifice functionality. I could even make the buttons do useful things instead of just opening a Bixby TOS I've declined a dozen times.
I use an app called bxAxtions, and I'm pretty sure I didn't need to set up Bixby at all or agree to any terms of service (I can't remember for sure). I had to run some ADB commands to grant it extra permissions, and I think Bixby doesn't run at all.
I agree with you, but I think discoverability for me is a lot more critical for software I use infrequently versus something I'm glued to several hours a day.
I discovered that about a year ago. I'm sure there are some other obvious things I don't know. In general, most of us who have been using smartphones for 10 years or so are probably able to adapt to new features fairly easily (assuming we learn about them). But it's probably easy to overlook how overwhelming they might be to someone who has never touched one before.
Navigating settings on my new Android phone resembles "Where's Waldo?" more than anything else. The search bar at the top, while tantalising, doesn't actually work in finding any setting that I've tried.
The menus are inconsistent, options are divided into strange categories, there are several "rabbit hole" menus where entire trees of settings are tucked away rather than just put them at the top level. This could be partly down to having a Chinese phone, but some of those deep menus are from stock Android too.
thank-you, I didn’t know of this feature. And I am using iPhone for over a year now. It was such a pain to get cursor to correct spot up until now.
Please share if know of any catalog of such tricks.
Me too. Long time IOS user, have been continually frustrated by the somewhat recent cursor redesign (what was it, IOS 13?). Knowing this is a game changer for a lot of phone use, and it was completely unknown to me: a motivated tech-literate IOS fan. There really is something wrong with UI discovery here.
I do this one on accident frequently (e.g. when trying to pull the top bar down to respond to a notification). I’m glad I know exactly what triggers it now so that maybe I can learn to quit triggering it all the time.
Not sure if apple really can be considered modern in a space developing as fast as that. From my pov apples ui is still the dated sister everyone is trying to copy from
It's a case of developer UI. Has nothing to being "allergic" to "good UI design".
Being able to design something friendly to the average user, yet powerful enough to be friendly to power users, is a very difficult task to accomplish.
Developers understand the latter quite well, I think, as they themselves are power user-types. The former... well, that requires having dedicated designers who know how the average user thinks, as well as perhaps guinea pigs in the form of the average user. And that might require a lot more funding, perhaps.
Often it feels like "developer UI" is just "slap some buttons around and hook them to the handlers, call it a day". At least that's how Gimp feels to this day.
I have a pinephone; it is not good enough. Very unstable; everything (apps/wm) just keep crashing randomly; I send in crash reports. And I try the latest images every month.
But yes, I think it would work. I would be happy with a phone that can run Linux desktop software with HDMI. It would need to be powerful enough (which the pinephone is very much not at all), not eat so much battery when the USB dock is plugged in with HDMI and, most importantly as you say, be stable as Linux. The pinephone feels very far removed from any of this.
Personally, I don't really care about the size of the phone; I gladly give up weight for more battery life (I will have to carry a battery anyway otherwise so why not inside the phone). I guess I would rather the (6.5inch) phone have an eInk display but plug into a screen for a full Linux desktop. But sure, there is no real money in that for phone makers as only people like me would buy them. With Android they are next to useless for me though, which is annoying as there are nice Android (eInk) phones out there if they would run Linux.
Not sure about that, I just think that "design" has a lower barrier to entry.
A pure designer cannot one day find themselves writing code for a major piece of opensource software.
A pure programmer can find themselves arranging some UI and designing a logo on Inkscape, that won't look and feel great.
Put the two together and something magical can happen, though not always, as design is so easy the programmer can be overcome with hubris and discard or ignore the designer advice and do the designing himself, with obvious results.
It’s even worse, I think. Good UX design looks deceptively easy, but is actually incredibly hard. So hard that a lot of programmers don’t even recognize how terrible they are at it, or how high the skill ceiling actually is. They think UI design is pretty colors and rounded buttons.
In a functioning software company, the managers recognize this skill difference and simply order the developers to implement what the designers suggest. They grumpily do. (It’s obviously not always so stereotypical. I’m exaggerating to make a point.)
In a typical OSS project, no one can give orders. The programmers ignore any good design suggestions because they don’t recognize those, and implement their own crappy ideas instead. Sometimes while arrogantly dunking on the designer who tried to make a contribution. Consequently, UX quality is abysmal, and anyone who could fix that is driven away. I don’t see a solution to this.
I think part of the problem is also that it's sometimes more difficult to implement a nice and usable design. Instead, it may be easier to write code that does everything it needs to, but forces the user to jump through hoops to get what they want.
Sometimes making software more user-friendly may even cause the code to get more "ugly", because instead of a nice and elegant piece of software that only solves the core problem, you now have to deal with all the weirdnesses of how people perceive the problem as well. Taking away complexity on the user's side almost always adds complexity to the code. And if you're the developer, it's very easy to think that the tool you created is perfectly usable, because you understand everything about the mental model that went into it.
As a product design lead, your comment and the comment you’re replying to reflect my experiences both with open source and with commercial development. For me, part of the solution has been learning how to communicate with developers. I’ve also found it helpful to broaden the scope of UX I consider to include the developer experience, data processing workflows, and the design of CLI and API interfaces.
>In a typical OSS project, no one can give orders. The programmers ignore any good design suggestions because they don’t recognize those, and implement their own crappy ideas instead. Sometimes while arrogantly dunking on the designer who tried to make a contribution. Consequently, UX quality is abysmal, and anyone who could fix that is driven away. I don’t see a solution to this.
Generally, going into an open source project as a stranger and suggesting to make architectural changes without expectation of pushback is not a good idea. Any change there is going to trample on someone else's workflow. You have to build up trust first before people see you as an authority, that is the solution and it's often the only one. It's worked for some projects such as the recent post about Audacity, even though it's a bit of an extreme example because the person was already established as a well-known designer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26995610
I don't blame the programmer for dismissing suggestions they don't understand but it's also not cool if you were "dunked on" so I'm sorry if that was your experience. Keep in mind that's still better than some, a lot of projects will just ignore suggestions completely if they figure you're just not part of their target audience, and they don't have the budget to expand that audience.
No need to be sorry, I'm not the designer in this story -- I'm the grumpy sofware engineer, and nowadays sometimes the manager. I'm also a desktop Linux user who is regularly annoyed by the sad and confusing state of opensource UX. What makes me so pessimistic is that I know the social dynamics that typically cause this, and have seen them play out in lots and lots of mailing list discussions.
Of course that's not a logical inevitability, things can change with more understanding. Your link actually makes me very happy, I hadn't seen this. Let's hope that this works out, and becomes a model that more OSS project can follow.
Programming a complex system can be achieved from the bottom up: Volunteers keep adding and sharing stuff. Old stuff becomes obsolete. The system marches on.
UI design in contrast is a top-down effort. You can't just mix and match various works from people. It's about information flow and consistency. A unified interface has to be agreed upon, and then implemented across the board. And any part of the system that fails to meet that standard, essentially breaks the UI.
I'd say it's neither. Demoscene is a good example of when designers and programmers were working well together.
Deviantart was a huge platform where people would share art and designs/skins. To some extent that still exists for iOS views.
I think one thing that's different about the deviantart model was that back then apps used to have skinning interfaces. And then designers could focus on just skinning. You could argue that gnome themes are like that. I would disagree, but also skinning isn't quite the same as doing ux.
UI/UX on Mac is a lot easier than UI/UX on gtk applications or QT applications.
On top of that, I don't think most designers understand OSS. It's basically a different universe and these two world don't often interact.
This totally proves the point above of programmers not having the first clue about UX design, why it's hard and makes a the whole difference. It is everything BUT "skinning".
It's about the users and their ability to understand how to work with your software to address their needs and expectations... not about your code, the designer or the manager. Those people are the product, NOT the user.
If I had a dollar for every programmer and manager that thought they knew better and stubbornly cooked up a crappy MVP nobody wanted, I would be able to fund your OSS.
If there's an OSS funded by developers cooking up crappy unwanted MVPs, I want in.
Right now I have ten crappy MVPs to donate and can put down $20 to sponsor others. I could probably have another 5 MVPs out within the next week if work is slow.
Absolutely. I've mimicked subjective view of parent comment. I trade discoverability for immersion and space. Apple is famous of its discoverability issues.
Nowhere article stated it's going to be year of Linux userland on the smartphone. It states hope for existence of a niche.
Popups, weird confirmation dialogs nobody reads, configurations hidden in X different uis without console interface, the amount of screen space wasted for whatever reasons and the possibility that the wasted space contains text and icons that suddenly start to blink and move (attention seeking apps), ....
I feel distracted working on Windows or Mac. As if someone is putting stones everywhere and i have to mangle inbetween
You are likely more used to it than i am. Thing is even if i maximize my terminal on windows or mac, how much can i actually do without switching context to get some things done. Switching between software is also not what i consider distructing. Its the how, the discovery of files and software, the switching between windows, switching between possibly dozens of windows of the same kind. How many key strokes are some actions away? (Given mac is a lot better in this degree than windows).
Some approaches on linux, be it gnome or kde or tiled solutions are just so much more efficient
Ubuntu is a horrible example for well one UX or even a stable linux system. Times change, and i totally agree thats its hard to see trough as average user.
Everything that's not related to my current task. For example Windows UI constantly reminds me of
* application name
* ability to max, min, move
* list of running applications
* ability to run other applications
* content length and my progress
* actions on content
I don't need any of these. Like Amazon Echo users probably don't require ever present poster of available actions. Instead I have places — several of work places, generic browsing, messaging, media controls, services.
I’m not sure why this got downvoted - it’s a very clear expression of a real issue, and it’s definitely easier to solve it on Linux.
I choose to use Mac OS, and I celebrate each time they take a step in solving these problems - e.g. making the menu bar hidable, but I am fully aware that if I want something better in these ways I will need to use Linux and customize it to my tastes.
It seems to me that the root cause is that OSS is often developed by people already using it. They are used to weird interface and not benefiting from it being usable by newbies.
So there is much smaller motivation to improve it.
And even if someone new joins project they will be often also used to weird interface once they contribute.
I think it's simpler than that.
Unpaid developers overwhelmingly prefer to work on the intellectually "sexy" problems such as encryption or compilers, to the detriment of the boring-yet-important stuff like UI improvements and hardware compatibility (let alone proper QA).
It's even simpler than that. Who wants to work on changing a UI that they themselves are comfortable with?
It's work with - best case - no benefit in the eyes of the developer. Worse, you likely will break workflows - including your own.
Sexyness doesn't need to factor in at all.
And do note the nice uncanny valley of no change: in order to improve the UI, you need to understand the program well. In order for that to happen, you need to be proficient with it. In which case, you know how to use the UI and are more likely blind to its downsides.
One more thing: some people have no eye for aesthetics. I’ve seen (smart) people defend a piece of code, and when I show them a refactored version, they say “that’s literally the exact same thing I wrote.”
No it’s not, and yes it is, in the sense that’s a^2 + 2ab + c^2 is not the same thing as (a+b)^2, but they (should and ideally must) evaluate to the same thing. I say ideally because only in the case of using infinite precision arithmetic can you guarantee this for all values of a,b,c.
People blind to these patterns cannot see how to simplify things, whether math or code or UIs.
I think developers and most users simply don't even notice the problems.
When I say "I can't use program X because the UI/UX sucks, is there any alternative?" people come out and say "I see no problem with program X, I use it everyday and it rocks"
In my opinion, improving user experience isn’t something that is easily done piecemeal. It’s one of those things that can require architectural changes to get right, and so it’s difficult to improve on existing projects. Fixing bugs and making things faster is “easier” in a sense because the end goal is obvious and you can target specific portions of code to make immediate improvements. Improving UX can mean making many architectural changes before being able to reap any fruit from your labor. I say this as someone who has worked on a lot of apps. I can’t imagine the difficulty of making several pull requests and getting them accepted without any clear output in the product itself.
If you're suggesting that this is done out of selfishness or intellectual fervor then I don't think that's true. I wouldn't say they "prefer" it but it's certainly easier and more economical for a skilled person to contribute to those tools because the developers and the users are the same group of people.
Once you decide you need to do user testing and hardware testing, the cost shoots up. You need to start procuring hardware and finding a place for it to live so automated tests can run on it all the time. That costs money. You need to bring in a lot more testers which requires project management and/or volunteer coordinators. Usually that costs money too. Everything you do needs to go through more stages of design review which also requires extra coordination and project management. These are real things you can have but someone's got to foot the bill.
Just my experience, three people is not a big enough sample size for most projects. You will get very biased opinions if you go with that. That may be ok if you have a very niche project and you only ask some people in that niche.
Take it with pile of salt, I am not some big expert. I just did it with some projects. But it seems to me that in nearly all cases there are glaring issues that would be detected with any amount of testing at all.
Modern proprietary OS (mobile and desktop) certainly have more polish, aesthetic taste and cohesion - that last one being the most valuable when compared to much of FOSS. But in terms of usability I'm not convinced they are any better unless we are going back a good 20 years. They have improved looks at the cost of performance and significant ambiguity and thus mental overhead in learning and general operation.
Not parent poster, but the interface works as a plaster that obfuscates the stuff I need. Add to it the many mobile imports pushed onto the user (don't care about cloud? Well, W10 cares, and it will push it at every turn) and you get a product that's built to push how Microsoft thinks you should use your computer.
My aging father has used Microsoft OSes since dos, and W10 is the first product he's having real trouble moving to. The reason for that is that he's always been a pc user, and W10 is pushing mobile ux, with a very hard opt-out.
Neither of the parents' posters, but my gripes with Windows 10 come down to these:
- Unreliability of UI elements (mixed responsiveness, difficult to see what are buttons and what are labels)
- Too much wasted space in their current design language, and related to that
- Too much distraction by visual eye candy (background images behind buttons in the email client, for example)
- Somehow, despite having every advantage in manufacturer driver support, still laggy animations
- After years, search is still bad and unpredictable, to the point I have to type "updat" to go to Windows Update because "update" will take me to Bing to tell me about how to update my PC.
- Inconsistencies. Many of those are because of the decades of backwards compatibility, which I can forgive, but even the modern Windows 10 apps have inconsistent designs[1]. Icons from four Windows versions that can all be seen on the same screen if you navigate deep enough through the seconds, even though Windows uses a unified resource loading mechanism for most system resources.
None of the alternatives are perfect, of course, but some are just _less worse_ in my opinion. Compared to the W10 shell, Gnome feels much snappier to me. Also, after finally fixing the bug that made the Windows 10 start menu break, a new start menu bug has been introduced to my system that makes it impossible to use the search bar in the start menu when it's opened start button on my left screen, breaking "winkey > program name > enter" _again_.
On Linux, audio sometimes breaks, or external monitors only work after an update. When nothing breaks, the system works great.
On Windows, everything always kind of works, but not completely. Whatever I'm trying to do, something is broken in a way that's not bad enough to invest time into fixing, but still annoys me to no end.
On macOS, you need to buy the expensive Apple hardware or it won't work at all. I have no need for expertly-graded colour-accurate screens sporting extreme resolutions, but you don't get any other options if you want to experience the macOS UI. I can't say much about the most recent macOS UI because I can't even run it, which makes it impossible to compare.
Of these three, I've settled with Linux, especially Gnome, as the "least broken" UI.
In the mid to late years of Windows 7, the Windows UI greatly outperformed most alternatives. With Windows 8, the system got very usable after the 8.1 update came out. After Windows 10, with the introduction of "operating system as a service", the UI seems to be in a perpetual state of "nearly finished, just needs a few more updates" because of the constant addition of more features and integrations.
Not the parent poster, but Windows 10 is turning into a managed consumer cloud endpoint, rather than remain a power user/prosumer-friendly personal computing platform with privacy in mind.
Both big Linux Desktops(KDE/GNOME) do try to make the desktop UIs design work on a small screen. Phosh/phoc is mostly GNOME Design and Plasma mobile is KDE.
And that's the point of libhandy(for GTK/GNOME apps) and Kirigami(KDE) to take desktop Applications and make them work on smaller screens. So you can use the same applications on the phone and Linux desktop. And nice bonus is that optimizing the applications to have low CPU usage will have a positive effect on the linux desktop too.
In the case of postmarketOS to give that devices a second life(Hard work cause mainline linux support of most android Phones is bad).
Yes, bad UI design exists. On the other hand, good UI design is largely a matter of what people are familiar with. This is true of both open source and commercial software. If we see bad UI design in open source software more, it is likely a product of open source software being more accessible. (People are more likely to try something they can download for free than something they have to pay $1000, $100, or even $10 for.)
I sometimes find it hard to understand the GNOME's design rationale. When GNOME 40 moved the dock from the left side to the bottom of the screen, it created an ergonomic problem for mouse users, who now need two large mouse gestures to switch apps -- first to the upper left corner to reveal the dock, then all the way to the bottom. And in the issue thread[1], Gnome's designers seem to be carefully avoiding the obvious solution of a hot bottom edge, proposed by several commenters, which is how Mac OS has always handled an auto-hiding dock.
Of course it depends on the person, but I have never really used the dock for anything. I usually use the overview, or start typing the name of the app I want, or even more often just apt tab to it.
I hope you are joking. I have Fedora 34 with Gnome 40 right now on my gaming PC as a second system and I can barely find two windows (not even apps, just two windows) that can be defined as "nicely done". Everything else is terrible. Even worse once you start looking for apps on he net. Everything that is not Electron-base is simply ugly, constructed without any thought about UX.
Not joking. Everything Electron is actually the opposite: ugly. It doesn't blend well at all (maybe macOS Electron is a bit better). Native GTK apps are beautiful, which one you don't like? Only applications that are not on latest GTK might look out of place, but I am talking all the new stuff, from Calendar to Maps.
You might have hit on a solution here: Electron, or, ideally, a really nice mobile-first web browser with access to APIs provided by the underlying Linux OS.
I’m essentially imagining a phone OS that decouples the front-end and backend design. Implement the apps as APIs. Implement the UI using HTML5 so more designers can use their existing skills to contribute & the GUI layer can be replaced more easily. The experience would be a refinement of pulling a Docker image and opening a browser to use it on localhost.
Edit: a mobile OS also needs a really nice mobile-first shell app. People do so much with text messaging now that I think they might be open to it…
There's a prior attempt in the form of Firefox OS, which tried to push the “Web technology as driver of local UI” thing. Some cursory looking around suggests that webOS may also have done this, but I'm not as sure (it would make sense from the name).
Sorry but I can't stand these kind of generalizations... it's at the same level of "Everybody from <country> is <something>". I've seen many proprietary projects with a budget for UI development equal to zero (and yes, the UI indeed sucked).
The idea it has to “take off” is silly. It could certainly be something similar to raspberry pi. Small market but really popular. It’s already on its way there.
Openmoko failed for so much more than financial reasons. It's been a while since I've thought of that fiasco, but my memories:
* The leadership was terrible. They had no clue what it took to make a mass market product. They just assumed that they would sell hardware and a community would provide a working operating system and apps magically.
* The hardware was buggy. There was one issue that if you let the battery drain fully, you could not get the phone to recharge it and had to use an external charger. Another issue was that the GPS receiver was accidentally surrounded by metal, so barely functioned. There were all kinds of problems with the radios in the early days. Oh, and that touchscreen -- I guess it was typical of pre-capacative touchscreens, but it was hard to use without a stylus and impossible to hit widgets near the edge of the screen.
* The hardware was massively underpowered (compared to competitors) by the time the Freerunner actually shipped. Weak CPU, little RAM, 2G cellular radio in an era when 3G had become standard, so like 5kbps max data transfer.
*Because of the failure of Openmoko leadership, the community fragmented a hundred ways. This meant that there were a dozen or more "distributions" of an OS for the phone, and none could do more than one or two of the things a typical user wanted in a phone at that time. Then there was finally a big bloated distribution (SHR if memory serves) that packed in enough libraries to make a more or less "usable" device, but doing so maxed out the phone's meager storage and RAM, making it nearly impossible to do anything "smart" with it.
* Once again, in absence of strong UX leadership, the community resorted to dumping X11 apps without modification on the tiny screen. Think impossible to read fonts and dialog boxes that ran off the screen with no scroll capability. The vast majority of devs seemed to only use it by hooking it up to a computer via USB networking and SSHing into it.
As a technical user, I could live with this. Kinda. Sorta. Using it was an exercise in masochism. I was embarassed ... no ... humiliated when a nontechnical person compared their iPhone with the OpenMoko that I had talked up so much (before receiving it).
I had planned to destroy the phone in some fantastic fashion (e.g., melting it with a laser) as soon as I got a real phone. But by the time I could afford an Android, I was so done with it that I just dropped it in the trash (after wiping it, of course).
Not only were the Maemo/Meego devices based on Linux, but they embraced a lot of desktop standards. Telephony/messaging all went through Telepathy, UI was GTK under Maemo, then QT under Meego. The app store was just an apt/dpkg frontend.
I've still got an N770, N810, 3x N900s and an N950 developer device that I run battery maintenance on every 4 or 5 months.
Had a Pre 2, and still have an HP Veer. Making modifications to the system to customize or change things was so easy and straight forward, I really miss this; though building LineageOS / AOSP for supported devices kinda fills this niche for me now.
After getting rid of my Freerunner, I had one of the the first Android phones (HTC?) briefly, then got a Nokia N900. I liked the OS, although it's my memory that it wasn't as fully open sourced as the OpenMoko. I did enjoy it, even though the device always felt too thick to be comfortable in my pocket, and the touchscreen cracked badly after a minor impact. I ended up using a cheap Nokia candybar phone for a year or so, before eventually getting another Android phone.
I wish Nokia had continued developing the Maemo OS.
> They just assumed that they would sell hardware and a community would provide a working operating system and apps magically.
No, not really. They had an exact opposite problem - they made several iterations of the default operating system, starting almost from scratch at each iteration, which burned quite a lot of energy and willpower of the community, which in turn focused their efforts on alternative distros like SHR or QtMoko.
> had to use an external charger.
Fortunately, you could use a standard Nokia BL-5C battery with the Freerunner. You didn't even need to have an external charger, just a charged spare battery would suffice. Also, IIRC this was an issue only with the first batch (so a small minority of produced phones).
> Another issue was that the GPS receiver was accidentally surrounded by metal, so barely functioned
Not really. The GPS problem was because of microSD clock interference. You could solder a resistor on microSD slot pins or use a software workaround that clocked the reader down enough to not interfere.
> it was hard to use without a stylus
I have programmed quite a lot on that touchscreen with OSK without using a stylus. It worked fine, but yeah, it would be much better if the screen weren't recessed (N900 did that well, that touchscreen was excellent).
> so like 5kbps max data transfer.
More like 100kbps.
> Then there was finally a big bloated distribution (SHR if memory serves) that packed in enough libraries to make a more or less "usable" device, but doing so maxed out the phone's meager storage and RAM, making it nearly impossible to do anything "smart" with it.
Uhm, no? SHR was a light OpenEmbedded-based distro with E17-based window manager. It was one of the snappiest and most reliable distros for that device, I used it for a few years as a power user and was very happy with it. And maxing storage wouldn't be an issue anyway since you could boot from an SD card.
Eventually I've switched to a N900 because of the Freerunner's slowness. If Glamo wasn't so slow I guess I would use it for a few years more before switching. I still have it and it still works, although I don't really use it anymore.
Whoops, good call, that should have been 5kBps. GPRS had something like 85kbps theoretical maximum transfer speed, but the fastest I ever got anything to transfer over cellular was about 5kBps. Still, even in that era, that was absurdly slow, and unusable for anything web-related.
> SHR was a light OpenEmbedded-based distro
I might have been thinking of a different distribution. There was one that brought in all of the GTK, Qtopia, and Enlightenment libraries, so you could run pretty much anything that could compile on the Freerunner, but it was quite slow and consumed most of my SD card (which at the time was probably only something like 1GB).
I guess if you were a hard-core hardware and systems hacker, the OpenMoko was an acceptable platform. For anyone else, it was a terrible product and the company that made it was obviously doomed to fail.
Maybe if it had come out at least 2 years earlier, it might have had some hope of carving out a sustainable niche, but by the time it did come out, the expectations set by iPhone and Android made it impossible to find a product-market fit, even among open source lovers like me. Maemo, while if memory serves not fully open sourced, was far closer to something sustainable, but then Nokia voluntarily imploded :-(
Most of the hardware I've ever owned I still have, either in working order or as component boards decorating my walls. I recall my emotion when disposing of the Freerunner was that it didn't deserve an epic funeral (the laser) or even the honor of being properly disassembled.
The problem with throwing any kind of device that includes a lithium-ion battery in the trash is that lithium-ion batteries tend to catch fire when crushed. Like, say, in a trash truck's compactor.
Everyone: please do not do this. Dispose of your battery-powered devices somewhere that's equipped to handle them.
(Now, the Openmoko phones had a removable battery, so it's possible you didn't toss that out with it. Then it's "just" e-waste rather than explody e-waste.)
Yeah I had one and I donated it to a university computer science department in South America. I'm not sure if the students ever got much use out of it but I was happy to pass it on to someone who might have fun tinkering with it.
I've also had a Freerunner, in theory the ideal pocket computer with Linux on it.
Practically, you could barely have a phone call with all the echo going on and navigation-wise it took _ages_ to find its GPS fix (no AGPS iirc) - the shielded antenna, mentioned down-thread, probably didn't help.
And yeah, whatever you had on screen was probably way too small to be read or interacted with :(
I think i got rid of it on eBay after a few weeks...
GPS receiver being surrounded by metal without some sort of antenna just seems like some sort of crazy bad design skill that even software engineers may know is awful… so, how on earth would this thing have ever shipped at all? Weird to call that an accident?
I enjoy the Pinephone, but it certainly has its issues. I’d kill for better performance; it’s very close to usability. I also have some issues with the hardware (it seems my battery has stopped working entirely, recently.)
On the other hand, there is one confounding software issue that I think makes it the hardest as a full replacement for a modern smartphone: push notifications. An equivalent for APNS or FCM that allows for relatively low power consumption, low latency push notifications would need to be devised, financed and actually adopted. It’s nice to imagine a world where apps on phones are like how apps on desktop are and just keep, for example, active WebSocket connections at all times, but this doesn’t appear to be something practical with current technology.
Maybe federated, E2EE push notifications could come into existence? A sort of ActivityPub of pushes... It’s a pipe dream, but one can hope.
Without mass-market and the scale that comes with it (including returning income from existing users) it's near impossible to provide the same nice UX as an iPhone or a Google-riddled Android phone.
That's the whole problem with most projects and why they neither produce acceptable usability nor a an acceptable price point. It's not that it's not technically possible, it's just infeasible without becoming yet another android vendor.
Even just having an 'alternative OS' on existing hardware is a non-existent market, and those projects try very very hard. Adding the hardware problem in to the mix makes it harder, not easier.
I’m not very concerned with it competing per se; they managed to put out a fairly compelling package and sell through 30k units. Yeah, they won’t be fabbing custom ARM cores any time soon, but it ain’t nothing.
Open source software is a slow burn. It takes time, but projects can grow for a very long time even when things seem dormant, and then suddenly seemingly out of nowhere things are actually pretty good. I certainly was impressed with how well they were able to bring GNOME onto phones so far.
It’ll always work best if people don’t consider them to be on the same level as commercial software; it has a different appeal, but one that should not be discounted. Just as there have been so many “year of the Linux desktops,” so to have there been many incorrect calls about the death of it.
I keep wondering why nobody just supersets Android. Even just having an Android phone which is designed to be repairable and have drivers in the kernel tree so it isn't tied to a specific kernel version, people would pay for that.
And then on top of it you can add all of your Google-alternative libraries and services, which need not be perfect immediately to get people to use it because they can start off running Android apps and buying it for the open hardware. But as you get more users, the software improves too.
> The mass market does not care about repairable hardware or open drivers.
The evidence for this is that people didn't refuse to buy the first generation of unrepairable devices. Because nobody told them they were unrepairable until they broke, and by then they already owned it. And by then the unrepairable devices were all you could get.
How many people would buy a phone if you could honestly market it as lasting for ten years instead of three and having a lower repair cost when you drop it on the concrete?
> Using niche open SoC will make the device slower and/or more expensive. The mass market cares about price and performance.
The mass market doesn't care about performance on mobile devices. They can't even tell the difference. It's all marketing. Even the phones that are actually faster on paper aren't faster in practice when the "slower" one still does everything instantaneously.
Even on the deskstop, linux arguably has a less stable GUI. At least on the desktop you can drop into a CLI and fix things. Even if you don't know what you're doing, you can google your way to a script and copy + paste.
RAM is almost 3 times faster indeed, but it's not the only thing that matters (CPU clock and double the L2 cache, much more powerful GPU, faster eMMC, better thermals). That's not "tighter integration", that hardware is simply more powerful.
Conversations.im does jabber on Android without push notifications. It just leaves an idle TCP socket. I haven't noticed latency issues with that, but I'm not a heavy user
Part of the problem is that Linux desktop apps typically aren't designed to conserve on network usage and/or don't have mechanisms to do so without a push server.
For example, Matrix clients on Android/iOS will stay suspended entirely, then will wake up when you receive a push notification. Desktop clients, on the other hand, will stay running and receive every message, even if they're not messages that you necessarily care about/that would notify.
The protocol could in theory have an in-band way to tell the server "hey, I really only care about notifications now, could you only send me those?" but currently it doesn't. By contrast, most Android/iOS apps can rely on push notifications and suspend completely when they're not in the foreground - meaning they're not receiving anything but what's important enough to notify about.
> For example, Matrix clients on Android/iOS will stay suspended entirely, then will wake up when you receive a push notification.
Doesn't the protocol already need to do something to support that? Presumably it's an out-of-band notification, and they needed to add support for that. If they already added FCM an APNS, they'll have to add something to support a 3rd OS. It could be in-band or out-of-band, but either way sending a message on a TCP connection is really all that is needed.
As a side note, Jabber did add an in-band way as you suggest, but then also had to add OOB signalling because Apple disallows open sockets for background apps.
> Doesn't the protocol already need to do something to support that? Presumably it's an out-of-band notification, and they needed to add support for that.
Yep, it does, so you could do this; the problem for the Linux desktop is just that there isn't a standardized out-of-band push notification system yet. (I saw another commenter mention UnifiedPush, which sounds interesting - in any case it's not widely supported yet.)
> As a side note, Jabber did add an in-band way as you suggest
It's been a while since I looked into this in detail, but IIRC Jabber generally doesn't have a server-side way to determine which messages should notify? As I recall, the protocol was designed with smart clients and dumb servers in mind, though I'm sure some of that has changed over time - but that design decision doesn't lend itself as well to clients on battery-constrained devices.
Although with that said, the fact that you aren't required to be in the same set of MUCs on every device helps in battery-constrained devices; for example I only stay joined to the rooms that my friends are in from my phone, unless I need to join another one temporarily.
Client state indication helps for things like suppressing presence updates, but it doesn't go as far as to e.g. let you only be notified for messages that would highlight you in a large MUC, right? So either you're joined to the MUC and receive all messages in it, or you leave the MUC and don't get notified about any of them.
Although now that I read the spec again, it seems general enough that maybe it could be used to implement behavior like that? I don't think I've seen any servers that do, though.
Prosody has an option for filtering MUC messages with mod_csi_battery_saver (which is the currently recommended community module for CSI), I don't think ejabberd does though.
> groupchat messages must set a subject or have the user’s username or nickname mentioned in the messages (or be encrypted) to count as “important”.
You need to keep the connection alive, which means regular traffic, which means regularly sending data, which needs energy. More connections mean a) more traffic and b) unless you add some coordination mechanism, waking up the modem more often at random times, which is energy-intensive in itself.
The radio is a massive battery draw, so you want it to be off as much as possible. The built-in push notification service will batch low priority packets and send them all alongside the next high priority one it receives.
Mozilla has mobile style push notifications for Firefox and you can just leave eg a mail client running in the background using the IMAP IDLE feature for mail. As long as you restrict that sort of thing to just a couple apps it's fine.
More than push notifications the WiFi firmware needs a feature to whitelist IPs that can wake the phone from sleep so you get instant notifications from services.
This is kind of anecdotal to Meego, WebOS, FirefoxOS and all the other forms of them that happened in the past.
I don't think that people will use the phone solely because it's Linux. They'll use it if it can solve their tasks at hand.
Personally I think that Linux will never take off if we won't create financial incentives to make and deploy apps, additionally to fix the mess that's user rights/permission management in GTK and QT.
Currently there are no working native alternatives on Linux, libhandy is still a joke for simple tasks like a fading sidebar (or even swipe gestures!) and QT can't be used for anything serious due to their license.
My hope for servo, FirefoxOS and WebOS was that there will be some day an alternative to Electron that's focussed on permissions and sandboxing, and that allows to be externally configured and is more modular on the environment (VM) level. Basically like a settings app on Android that can toggle GPS, toggle Networking access, toggle Camera access etc.
Layouting-wise CSS has won the masses. Everyone that tries to reinvent it for their own opinionated views has failed and given up (including me who spent over 6 years developing an isomorphic App Engine full-time). It's time to let go. The web has won and there's no point in denying it.
React has won most of the developer crowd because of React Native and convenience of staying in the same language and more importantly, being able to reuse the same code architecture.
I think in order for Linux to succeed there has to be a compile pipeline (and runtime?) that allows to deploy those apps easily. If that's not possible (due to whatever reasons) the platform will never really take off.
Privacy and Security and Openness is just no argument for the average user that doesn't care and just wants to get their tasks done.
What is this idea that Qt can't be used? You can license with the community license under LGPL. If Qt can't be used with an open source license, then nothing LGPL can use open source commercially, but the point of LGPL is to not scare away businesses with viral copy-left code. Yes, you have to deliver your object files and a Makefile, et c. Also, you have to open source your Qt library edits, but who needs to do that for business reasons? Are Qt library edits the industrial secret of your business? Probably not. Since when is letting other people run the linking stage on your code tantamount to giving them the keys to your business?
> What is this idea that Qt can't be used? You can license with the community license under LGPL.
The Terms and Conditions on their website [1] say otherwise, especially "APPENDIX 4: SMALL BUSINESS AND STARTUP". No, sir, I'm not touching that library for anything I want to make money with.
I think you’re right. I don’t understand why more UI toolkits aren’t adopting CSS for layout, especially the newer CSS grid. It’s so much simpler than alternatives like TKinter.
I get the memory/performance issues with Electron. Those can be solved. I’m able to open large XML files in VSCode that simply crush other apps like Notepad and XMLSpy.
> I think in order for Linux to succeed there has to be a compile pipeline (and runtime?) that allows to deploy those apps easily. If that's not possible (due to whatever reasons) the platform will never really take off.
I agree. An important difference to the situation a few years ago is the availability of actually viable cross-platform development frameworks like React Native, Flutter, Capacitor,...
If all I need to do in order to support a new niche OS is configuring one additional build target, I might just go for it. Otherwise, certainly not.
And yet I am using a Linux Phone since 2014 as a daily driver :) And no, it is not for everyone, just like the Linux desktop. It would need a company like Nokia to put its weight behind it to bring it that far.
But if a smaller company like Jolla can do it, it can be sustainable. If there are users and enough money coming in, all it needs to do is exist. And maybe some day there will be a company like Nokia putting its weight behind it and it can gain marketshare in big numbers. But even without it, it is a viable platform, just with some drawbacks.
So yes, for the near future I keep on using my Sony Xperia with Sailfish OS. I also keep an eye on the Pinephone and Librem 5, but today they are not ready to be a daily driver for me.
How are you finding app availability and system stability?
About four or five years ago, I had a BQ Aquaris E4.5 which ran Ubuntu Touch and used it as my daily driver. I really struggled with the lack of app support - no Messenger, no Snapchat, no Instagram, no WhatsApp. There were also lots of little bugs that really showed the operating system hadn't had the massive amount of testing a mainstream OS would get. So I dumped it and got another Android.
App availability is good for my needs. For Android apps I only use Whatsapp and Firefox (as backup browser). I am not someone wanting to use apps for everything, I never used a banking app for example, and have no desire to use one. I am quite happy with Whisperfish as a third-party Signal client that is now in beta, though it needs a few more things to be more useful to me. I use an OSM app for maps, mpd client for remote music, and some default Jolla apps are quite okay.
System stability overall is really good, I hardly ever get into a situation that a reboot is required. Some years ago on my Jolla 1 this did happen more, often when the network would not come back. There are some issues, like power drain on 4G and other small bits. The development team is small, it's not a billion dollar company, I think it's all relative.
I have never used Ubuntu Touch and I cannot really comment on it. If you would be interested in trying that again, I think Axolotl is a Signal client for UT that is also in development. For Android apps, there is Anbox, but that is a very slow moving target with some rather big issues currently, from what I hear.
Stories about "Linux as the underdog" have confused me for several years. The truth is, Linux has won, and it's OK to recognize that.
The majority of phones sold are "Linux phones" -- it's the kernel for Android!
The top selling laptops for years provide "Linux on the desktop" -- Chromebooks run ChromeOS, which is Linux!
Nearly all host servers, at nearly every cloud provider, run Linux. The vast majority of cloud VMs run Linux.
The vast majority of set-top boxes, IP cameras, IoT controllers, and other embedded devices are Linux based.
Linux is even powering an autonomous helicopter on MARS, that has been wildly successful in its mission.
The narrative of "poor underrated Linux gets no love" was plausible until maybe around the mid-2000s. But it's long past time to drop this idea as a community.
Now, I think it IS fair to say that several forms of userspace ecosystems, based on the Linux kernel, have failed to get traction over the years. Maybe we can say "Ubuntu Touch" failed to get adoption, but that has little to do with some characteristic of Linux itself.
Google is absolutely itching to replace the last GPL component of Android – Linux – with their own software, Fuchsia. Google will then control the whole stack, with no obligation to anyone. This has been coming for a long time; IIUC, Android started with many components from the larger GNU/Linux ecosystem, but today only Linux itself remains.
Linux is pervasive because it's free (gratis) and flexible, but customers aren't necessarily seeing the core benefits of the Linux philosophy in terms of liberty and privacy. These examples of Linux succeeding are where some sort of application stack is very non-libre and often non-gratis, but maybe that's just one example of how to commercialize Linux. It's a generalized and well supported base for commercial products and services that is less restrictive and costly than other OSs, which is why we saw it replace server Unix distributions and even Windows Server in some cases. Many companies are embracing open source and extensibility more and more, though, which is definitely a good thing.
I'm interested to see a stronger focus on privacy and liberty in consumer Linux products like smart devices and IoT. Somehow iOS/MacOS, a markedly closed system, is the only one that really seems to be going in that direction right now.
A kernel that isn't exposed to userspace, POSIX and Linux syscalls are not public APIs on Android, which is composed of Java userspace and a well defined set of NDK APIs.
Any application that tries to use private APIs might be killed by Android Sandbox infrastructure.
As such Google can replace it by something else, e.g. Fuchsia, and app developers won't even notice that the kernel has changed (ART is being ported to Fuchsia).
Then on IoT space, the competition from BSD licensed POSIX clones is heating up, most OEMs don't want any GPL tainted OS on their devices, just in case.
The kernel isn't useful alone. I am 90% happy with my macOS. Its kernel is not as good as Linux, but it runs all my unix apps. I can use free, mature software solutions for most of my needs; E.g., I use mpv and a WiFi-connected HDD to listen to music. (With a much more pleasant playlist creation UI thanks to ugrep and fzf.)
Being good enough is enough. Linux on the desktop could be better, but for more than a decade it has been good enough. If linux phones became as usable as linux on the desktop, that would be good enough.
Depends what you're looking for I guess. Linux desktops can be highly configurable and give you an environment that's not attainable on any other OS. Think like tiling wms & polybar/rofi/customized terminals.
Unless you mean "how well is Linux able to create an experience like windows." Which isn't a metric I particularly care about, but probably means more to non-technical users.
> But let's start by making a short list of main reasons of failure per effort, starting with the companies involved:
> ...
> Nokia (Maemo/Meego): Change in corporate strategy (new CEO),
> ...
Nokia Linux based phones didn't fail simply because of a new CEO, but because of a partnership with Microsoft that brought a CEO and a deal with Windows Mobile on Nokia phones in exchange for phasing out of Linux and Symbian devices. If it wasn't for Microsoft, Linux on Nokia phones would have succeeded.
Remember this every time you work with WSL thinking that Microsoft loves Linux and the Open Source model; they don't. They simply aim at controlling it, this time also from the inside (see Linux Foundation Platinum membership).
If it wasn't for Microsoft, Linux on Nokia phones would have succeeded.
That seems wildly optimistic.
I owned an N900 and used an N9 for a while, and while I loved them for all their nerdy glory, they where not ready for prime time. Why do you think Nokia would have done better with Meego than they did with WP?
I can't be 100% sure, of course, however both Purism and Pine64 phones are slowly but steadily getting better every month. I can only imagine that Nokia could have allocated a lot more resources on making their Linux phone.
Nokia + Microsoft poured more resources into Windows Phone than Nokia would ever have poured into Meego. And they failed, despite both WP 8 and 10 both offering a really great mobile OS experience.
I had a Nokia Windows Phone. The core user experience of WP10 is the best I've ever experienced on any phone. What mainly let it down was first and foremost the lack of quality third party apps (and as time went on lack of support of the first party apps).
Depends what is being meant by Linux. Yes they run a variant of the Linux kernel, and there is some commonality in parts of the common libraries, but there are significant differences atop that which makes it quite different to your average desktop Linux.
The overall Android environment isn't Debian, Ubuntu, RedHat, ..., or other GNU/Linux environment.
(the downvotes you currently have there given the graying text are a bit misguided IMO, your misconception is a very common one, one that people in some circles even seen to encourage)
Android could be called Android/Linux as Google replaced most of the GNU GPL licensed stuff with BSD licensed alternatives, often self developed (bionic, surface finger, binder, stagefright, etc.) so that they (and vendors) are not bound by GPL obligations and can sit on one changes for ever if they want to.
Kernel is the major thing under GPL left and while there are some theories they might want to replace it with the Fucsia micro kernel I don't think they have a chance in hell given the ministered and number of parties involved in cooperative Linux kernel development.
The Android kernel has some changes that weren't upstreamed, has features that Linux doesn't, and is missing some features, as well. For example, SysV IPC isn't supported on Android's Linux kernel[1].
Often, for specific devices, the kernels they run are forks with changes that aren't upstreamed. Some of those changes can be significant enough that porting those changes to an updated kernel snapshot is nearly impossible, so it never happens, despite the kernel fork's source being available under the GPLv2.
Yes, my router is Linux, and my TV is also linux (containers not quite, because they don't emulate the kernel, except for Windows and macOS machines, that NEED to emulate at least one kernel instance, but whatever). And is pretty clear to me those limitations. More than my router, or my TV, or any embedded system for that matter, Android does try to follow other systems specifications, it has a own libc implementation, you can still utilize most of linux that we are used of: filesystems, syscalls, networking, even containerization (all of them limited and various levels, of course).
That is what makes a linux distribution too me in my opinion, in the same way I can run a linux with musl libc, and busybox, I can run Android
The core parts of Android that make it usable on mobile devices like power management and scheduling [1] aren't in the mainline Linux kernel last I checked. This is about getting Linux to the point where you can choose between an Arch, Ubuntu, debian, etc. distro for your phone.
I find that, when it comes to Android, people try really hard to make exceptions for what qualifies as "Linux" that do not exist as goalposts for other distributions or forms of Linux that are generally accepted under the Linux umbrella.
I'd say it's as much as Linux as anything else that uses the base kernel and is reduced (for space reasons) or modified (for hardware support)... DDWRT comes to mind.
When you have a base kernel for a device, running a "proper" distribution isn't much further behind. I was able to install Ubuntu on top of the stock kernel of one of my oldest Chromebook devices, the Acer C710. That's how I started using Linux full time. Does that not count? Because you can do that on Android devices, too.
It's Linux. Carving out exceptions and drawing arbitrary lines and qualifiers doesn't really get anyone anywhere. In the end it's a very specialized Linux kernel for that hardware running often proprietary blobs, but when it comes down to it:
Yes, you an install distros on top of the kernel on the device[1],
And yes, I'd argue Android itself is a distro.
The only thing Android really lacks is a universal installer. IMHO, we can thank Qualcomm for that situation we're in.
Termux is on the death bed, because they refuse to ackowledge Android isn't Linux and make use of Java APIs for their purposes.
So given that from Google's point of view POSIX and Linux syscalls aren't public APIs on Android, termux no longer works on latest Android versions and it will get worse, as NDK APIs keep being locked down as sandbox improvements.
I'd argue that if you were set on using something like Termux, you're already in the class of users who are most likely to be running custom Roms (eg, LineageOS) or having a modified stock image (Magisk, Root, etc)
One of the workarounds for those affected calls for making SELinux permissive.
Please provide the Android documentation how to access LinuxSE on non-rooted devices, you know those that regular consumers actually buy and app developers get their income from.
Just another example on how Linux die hards try to make juice out of lemons, to pivot Linux dominance on consumer devices.
Look, the goalposts are moving again. I wonder how that keeps happening...
I can't see what replying with "how to access LinuxSE on non-rooted devices" has ANYTHING to do with my comment that you previously replied to unless you're just trying to be disingenuous. I specifically mentioned that a typical use case of someone affected by the changes breaking Termux are users *most likely to be the type that will run a custom rom or root mode.*
"Regular consumers" don't give a flying fuck if Android is Linux or whether or not they can run Termux.
Yes, it's it is. PM is normal part of Linux since at least a decade ago, probably longer. Pinephone now has standby of around 7 days, and runtime power management is also quite good, with automatic powering off of CPU cores, when idle, and downclocking of memory controller in my 5.12 kernel branch, that many pinephone distros will migrate to soon.
So, what is a Linux phone? Does it need to use glibc or another libc still qualifies? Does it need to present a POSIX interface? Does it needs to run an X server or something compatible?
I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're refering to as Linux, is in fact, Android/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, Android plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning Android system made useful by the Android corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.
No, “GNU” is the operating system project, which includes the userland components, the kernel, and everything else. Just like “Windows” is not ntkrnl.dll, nor is “Windows” the sum of explorer.exe, cmd.exe, etc. – “Windows” is the overarching project name. “GNU” is the same.
People who think of “GNU” as userland components likely are influenced by the accident of 1990’s history that was the prevalence of SunOS (etc.) systems with added GNU command utilities. But the GNU command line utilities were originally meant to be for a (yet to be written) complete GNU operating system, including a GNU kernel, Hurd. But since the GNU operating system was to be compatible with Unix, and the command line utilities were good, people liked to run the command line utilities on proprietary Unix variants, and later the same happened when a Linux-based Unix system was cobbled together; the GNU utilities were there for the taking, and they were very useful in creating a complete Unix-based system, based on Linux. This probably created the confusion that GNU = userland utilities and Linux = operating system, even though almost the opposite being true.
If you have Linux desktop, having a GNU/Linux phone is nice too. Not having to search for apps for every stupid little thing on some cesspool of an appstore would be great too, if you can just write a little script or whatever to scratch your itch, and be able to trust it wholly.
Anyone who thinks Linux can gain a momentum on mobile should look at Samsung and Huawei efforts to get off Google. It seems almost impossible even if you already have a foothold in mobile industry.
I want a phone that's Android in the hand but when I plug it into a usb-c hub, it projects full a fat linux distro on my external monitor(s).
Though I love Linux, it's not because it's Linux - I just want to live the one device life. If IPhones could run MacOS on external monitors, I'd buy an iPhone.
Alternatively, a web-based OS (with desktop linux on a hub) would be awesome if all my apps were available as web apps - but they are not so I'd still need a mobile OS and a desktop OS for the usbc hub life.
However it seemed to not been interesting to the users because noone really used it and they cancelled the project.
Their phones (the Galaxy series) still do support projecting a desktop mode when you plug the phone into a USB-C monitor. They now run "just" Android apps though.
On the topic of Linux phones, I have expressed my desire for more powerful hardware in the past. However, when I think about it, starting with modest specs means that things would have to be made to work properly on those. That means eventually when we move to more powerful hardware, the performance would be that much more better. Atleast that is how I imagine the silver lining to be.
So how would a Linux phone possibly gain momentum?
I have no idea how it solves any job to be done for almost anyone. Does it have the apps I want, including for my bank? Does it have a great camera? Does it have fantastic battery life? Right now, the answer to all of that is definitely not, and it becomes a chicken and an egg problem, where you don’t have the investment to build all that.
And don’t give me the obvious and trite answer of “privacy”. Because we have been bombarded with ”privacy” for years, and yet Google and Facebook keep raking in the cash and the users. I see no evidence the vast majority of people care at all. (And even then: prove to a user, or me for that matter, that a cobbled together Linux stack is in fact more secure than iOS. Or, explain how Linux magically protects me from all the ad trackers on the web.)
You may have a point, but Android and Apple phones are also, quite frankly, garbage. I open the maps app on my Android phone, and I get a bunch of ads littered around, for places like 7/11, even for locations that are closed! I have a 64gb phone and the map for the city I'm in could be quite easily downloaded, but nope, it must contain Google's malware.
This is why I love the offline ad-free maps of OpenStreetMap. In underdevelop areas I may need to refer to Google to find a location, and when I get there, I upload the location with finer-grained details and now I can find the place again and help others.
I recommend Osmand and Mapy.cz as OpenStreetMap-based alternatives.
No competition for car navigation (live traffic data), likely worse for shop data, but clearly superior for basically anything else. Especially cycling/hiking.
There is also plenty of other OSM-powered navigation apps.
You can download maps in the maps app. I download a pretty large area because I drive a lot. Not that it takes away from your point, but at least there is that.
Exactly this. There are many predictable comments in this thread about why they think mass adoption of Linux phones won't happen. I even agree with them, but they are missing what I think is the point. I don't care if they take over the world; I want a means by which those of us that do care about privacy and openness and control can opt out.
Interesting situation here. Whats the name for oposite chicken-egg problem. You mention that linux phones do not support banking apps and google even being antonym for privacy, has still increasing user base. But we are in situation where you must use google to be able to use banking apps. Vicious cycle?
For banking aps to work you must install them from play store. To be able to use play store you must agree with google TOS. If google dicides your evil, you will not be able to use banking app anymore :(
The difference is that when driving a car, the risk is from the fallibility of yourself and your fellow drivers, not from a single giant megacorp that can decide to reach down and mess with you.
(But by the way, we shouldn't accept car fatalities as inevitable either! They're far more likely still than they should be. Street design and infrastructure priorities can slow traffic down and encourage people to use safer forms of transportation when feasible. Just look at the Netherlands.)
Smartphones = bunch of untrusted apps = security requirements
Is there an app store + readily available sandboxing solution that allows people to install some random guy's game on their phone without getting their credit card stolen?
I've tried and tinkered with all but the newest pinephone release. I sucks vs a similarly priced android phone but its working way more than I ever expected it to work this early on.
Hopefully we can get some solid modern hardware support in a linux handheld eventually. It would be nice if Qualcomm could open up a few things and make it easier for open source phone hobbyists to get things going.
The Pine64 community has been steadily growing and at least gives me confidence in what they can do with the older hardware the pinephone is working with.
Android apps are becoming more and more dependent on the closed source blobs that Google ships with Android devices, so some apps might not work without them. Although microG exists, it isn't perfect and some apps still won't run with it.
A Linux phone can forgo Google's userspace libraries for Android, and if they're really needed, Android can just run in a container like with Anbox. Instead, it can ship with the typical GNU, busybox or ulibc userland that most Linux users are familiar with.
Also, you can use pretty much any language or runtime to write apps for Linux, while you're stuck with the Android Runtime, Android NDK and Java compatible languages and runtimes on Android.
Your comment doesn't describe any benefit for users. Maybe a benefit for some developers who consider ideological technology choices a benefit. But users gain nothing.
> Your comment doesn't describe any benefit for users
Read the question that was asked and then look at the address bar to see where it was asked. Most people on HN are familiar with Linux or are developers themselves.
But either way, I disagree entirely. On a platform like webOS or Maemo, users benefited greatly from running traditional Linux userlands. There were millions of users who got to enjoy a plethora of apps and the benefits of extensible, hackable hardware and systems.
Preware, for example, had thousands of apps, extensions, and scripts available to millions of users. Users were able to take full advantage of what their hardware and systems were capable of, instead of being limited to whatever Apple or Google allowed them to do with their APIs.
Even LineageOS hardcodes calls to Google servers (location, network portal detection). To get around that you can install LineageOS with MicroG, or use a true Linux phone.
> What would you like for Email on your phone from the Linux world?
There seems to be an adaptive version of Geary now, which looks nice though I haven't used it yet.
> A web browser?
GNOME Web works pretty well in my experience, though it could be faster and it's still missing WebRTC support.
> Contacts app?
GNOME Contacts seems to work well enough on my Librem 5 - synced straight away with my Nextcloud instance, vs. on Android where I had to find a third-party app to do that.
The parent was saying he wants Linux (as in desktop) apps on his phone. My point exactly is that they are much worse than Android ones in mobile scenarios.
Anyone know of any good Linux phones. Mine is going to be dead soon and for a while I liked Pixel because it didn't have all the Samsung or Motorola or anytime else bloatware, but with what Google has been doing I'd prefer a full Linux phone.
I've looked a Librem but $1500 is kind of hard to justify when I have all my other expenses that come with a young family.
The idea is you buy one of the supported Xperia phones, buy a Sailfish OS license and flash it on the phone. The license you bought pays for continued software updates (new features & security fixes) as well some external software they integrate (predictive typing support & android app emulation support). Yeah, if the native Sailfish OS apps are not sufficient for you, it can also run most Android apps via an emulation layer.
So while Sailfish OS is not fully open source unfortunatelly, it's at the moment IMHO the best mobile Linux distro available on easy to get modern hardware.
Ideally over time fully open source distros and more open hardware take over but till then Sailfis OS can serve as a good "bridge", AZ it has since the Jolla company taking care of it was started by the ex N900/Maemo/MeeGO crew.
Same here. Sony Xperia 10 plus and sailfish os. Daily driver, used all the time. I also have Cosmo Communicator in a drawer - it could be useful but not having camera on phone in linux is a no go.
I am trying to get linux on my phone since HTC Blueangel (Ångström linux was the first booting from SD card) and it was always barely usable.
Sailfish works so great that it was no brainer to pay those 50 euros for license. Fingerprint reader, camera, bluetooth (as common painpoints for linux on phone) are all working flawlessly. I had to reverse 1 android application that I really need (banking app) and remove safetynet checks but beside that, zero issues. And I dont any other application from android ecosystem that I dont have here as native (and far less battery draining) version.
I hope that Jolla will continue its great work and I really hope they start supporting some other phones like Huawei. I am sick of google and its toxic, spyware driven ecosystem.
I dont have issue paying for useful application or operating system. But having operating system that is preinstalled with google spyware and than 99% of applications you try to install try to steal your data (not to mention that they all ignore GDPR) is not acceptable.
I am using Sailfish OS with Sony XA2. It's my daily driver and has been for years. Jolla still releases updates with new features and UI fixes. They also have been upgrading their Android support and most of the apps I care about work well.
Going to buy the Sony 10 II once they release support for it.
I have currently Sony XA2 with Sailfish OS. Just ordered Xperia 10 II so I have it ready when they publish the official version for it. I have been using Sailfish as my daily driver since the original Jolla phone was released in 2013.
The only issue that I might see as a blocker for some users is that the Android layer is not perfect. It does not support Bluetooth properly so pretty much any Android app that connects to some external peripheral like smart watch will not work. Additionally, you might need to install for example microG to run some apps via the Android layer.
What do you mean? I've had a couple Motorola phones from the G series (G1 and G4 and currently an AndroidOne) and AFAICT it's been pretty much stock Android apart from:
- an app for support enquiries (with diagnostic functionality for the screen, sensors etc.) which I've actually used before,
- one app you could opt-in to to get something like product newsletters from Motorola (I don't care for spam)
- and since the AndroidOne an app for audio EQ (which I don't really need/use).
All of these don't even use 80 MB of the internal storage (64 GB) so I don't really know where you get the "bloatware" from.
Those apps stay out of your way if you don't wanna use them and they barely use 0.1% of the internal storage.
I'd hardly call that bloat given the "Samsung Experience" I once had on one of those GalaxyNote 10.1 tablets.
It was slow (basically everything in any app lagged), the OS was a non-upgradable Android 4.3 or 4.4 with heaps of Samsung BS constantly running and replacing standard apps (e.g. the browser).
Also that tablet one day just would not charge anymore after ~1.5-2 years of fairly light use (reading, some video streaming, things like that).
> I've looked a Librem but $1500 is kind of hard to justify
Huh, did you accidentally look at the price of a Librem laptop? The Librem 5 phone USD$800. (But $800 is still kind of hard to justify, especially with "wait more than a year").
I would suggest an Android One or econo-level Google Phone using adb to delete google bloatware, choosing a qualcomm or something that looks not totally encumbered so it might be possible to transition to Linux when the 3 years are up.
Only options I know of are a couple crowd funding ones, and Linux is a secondary option on them (they are Android primarily). The ones from Planet Computers can run sailfish, and I've read that FXtec is coming out with a new model that supports ubuntu touch as a first class citizen.
For your use case i would recommend getting an android phone that has good support for a custom rom of your choice. IMHO all the straight-up linux phones are not capable of replacing a smartphone for everyday use.
I don't think they will stay around for the same reason Linux desktop isn't really staying around (that much). Everything that's wrong or annoying about Linux on the desktop is more pronounced on a phone (needs a good UI, can't be hacky-fixed while riding the subway, always runs on battery)
Android phones are Linux phones. The fact that Android marketing gets away with misrepresenting this fact is highly annoying, and it is one of the more ugly cases of the open source engine underneath each Android phone being used by what is essentially to all intents and purposes a closed source device.
This is precisely what the FOSS community has been advocating against and in my opinion isn't any worse or better than various router and other appliance manufacturers that appropriate open source tech for 98% of their usecases and then lock it up with a thin closed source sauce and some service that is grafted on to guarantee lock in and their business model.
Without Google, Android would never have gotten off the ground.
Imagine an alternate history where Google bought QNX instead of Android Inc. back in 2005, do you think Android would still dominate the Mobile OS market today, or do you think Google QNX would be the dominant mobile OS.
What with QnX being a much better OS for mobile than Linux it would have been a smart move, but because Android used FOSS as a base rather than to pay a license fee to QnX they stood a better chance of taking off as a relatively small entity. So Linux really did enable Android.
Without Linux Facebook wouldn’t have got off the ground either. That doesn’t mean Facebook is a Linux service, their use of Linux (like Android) is entirely an implementation detail.
They all do, through kernel patches, funding, open-source releases, talks and a lot more. Google especially has done a lot.
But that doesn’t change the fact that the operating system Facebook, Google or Android uses is an implementation detail of the main service they offer.
If Google or Facebook would have had to pay the full license fees for one of the major Unix distributions they would have simply never gotten off the ground in the first place. One of those 'uncomfortable truths' I guess that people simply don't want to acknowledge.
I’m not really sure what point you’re trying to make. For lack of a better word you seem salty about something but it’s really not clear exactly what. Do you want a 90's era “powered by Linux” image on the Google or Facebook homepage?
However the fact remains: Facebook’s use of PHP is an implementation detail, as is it’s use of Linux.
Ok time to be honest, the "change in corporate strategy" is not the real reason why they failed
They failed because they lacked focus and money
I didn't like the whole Android idea of getting out of the OpenDesktop space, "java first" but they were right to cut the whole thing off and simplify everything.
X doesn't belong on a phone. GTK doesn't belong neither (at least not how it's used by most apps)
Linux is great but the userspace not so much, and integrating all vendor drivers, etc is a PITA as well. Google was right to be hyperfocused on shipping a phone, and not putting the libraries or tech first
Is it possible to run Android apps in the Linux phone? If I could run WhatsApp and my bank’s app (which I need to in order to get into my account) I would definitely switch.
All I want is a proper modular phone that can run linux.
I dont need camera, happy with a fat phone for battery space, etc.
please let it happen one day.
One of my main issues with for example the Ubuntu Touch system is that it didn't offer disk encryption. I hope that has changed by now, or will soon...
The main reason I'd consider switching to a FOSS-ish phone (I don't care about the kernel, more about the rest of the software), is to discard all the privacy-nightmare and security risks. Not having full disk encryption sort of defeats the purpose.
Of course. The cost of developing phones has been coming down, and the number of people who want strong privacy on their phones is increasing (and/or they are willing to pay more for it). Those numbers have finally crossed, and unless something changes, I think Linux phones will always have a niche market.
What consumer problems this solves depends on who the consumer is. For me as a dev/consumer and a long time Linux user it solves a lot of usability issues. For people used to Android, who don't want to develop anything, or don't care about software licenses, or being able to debug and control their devices when issues happen, it solves little, compared to a random locked down Android phone. For people who just want to phone people/send receive SMS, it solves nothing either, because they can just use a dumbphone.
You've defined your market, it seems, as enthusiast developers who want Linux. But stock Android (without the Google services) is that already. It's FOSS, it uses the Linux kernel, and it comes with the infrastructure to run mobile apps. Even better, it's compatible with many Android apps (as long as they don't need Google Services).
So what problem would another Linux mobile OS solve?
To me GNU/Linux is the simpler more familiar ecosystem. Android is big and complicated, with different tooling, different APIs, different everything.
On GNU/Linux phone I can write apps in regular electron if I like (not some cordova mess), I can access any Linux API and don't need to split my knowledge between mobile and desktop. I can write my phone apps with LAMP or node stack if I want and it would not be some limited kludge or some custom runtime. I can run any of the many apps I've already made over the years there, with miniscule porting effort. I can run postgresql on my phone to store data locally, and not invent some special data backend just for the phone.
I don't need to package anything, just copy a file and run it.
I can probably do all that with Android too, but it just seems like it would be a horrible kludge.
So you don’t just want Linux on the phone. You want basically the desktop Linux ecosystem on the phone. That’s a no go from the start. Even Apple didn’t do that when they made iOS.
And the problem we solve with this is so you don’t have to learn something new. That’s honestly a poor problem to have.
Funny. :) I've learned much more using pinephone than I ever did using Androids or iPhones I had been lent for testing from a companies I did jobs for. Here's what I've learned for example: https://xnux.eu/devices/pine64-pinephone.html
I just don't want to learn something that will be completely useless to me, because I'm not interested in commercial mobile apps development for Android, and that's about anything that learning android development will gain me, other than hobby points.
Learning general Linux programming and system design has cross-over effects into pretty much everything I do as a hobby or for my clients.
With pinephone (or any other GNU/Linux phone, for that matter), pretty much anything I wrote is portable to all other devices I have use for, incl. my desktop and I re-use code very often. Devices like e-book reader I've reverse engineered, which is not based on Android, or other weird little devices I have and like to mess around with that don't run Android.
I can learn some obscure Android API abstraction that works only on Android, or I can learn lower level Linux API (that it's using under the wraps anyway), that is fixed in stone, and usable everywhere Linux runs. I just choose what to learn based on what I can use more widely and will stay around longer.
If anything it's people who will not consider anything else but Android, and just handwavily reject anything else like many posters in the comments under this article, who seem resistant to learning something new.
"To me GNU/Linux is the simpler more familiar ecosystem. Android is big and complicated, with different tooling, different APIs, different everything."
And now also says:
"If anything it's people who will not consider anything else but Android, and just handwavily reject anything else like many posters in the comments under this article, who seem resistant to learning something new."
Honestly it takes quite the logical contortions. I look at it like that: do you want to target a platform that has proven tools and existing audience, your options are iOS and Android.
If you think you'll shame people into using PinePhone because it's something new, most people don't just go for "something new", they go for something new that also has a purpose. I'm not sure what's the purpose of PinePhone is. It seems like a niche within a niche within a niche.
If that's all it has going for it, that it appeals to people like you, because you're familiar with Linux, it'll fail. And all your investment in it will be for nothing. I don't say this because I want to be a dick, I say this because this is my prediction of what will happen. And I don't decide what happens.
I was thinking about Plan9 lately, and Mobile is THE platform for it...i think. Since you are ~always online, how cool would it be when your phone is just the terminal, the CPU/File/Authentication-Servers sitting in the DC, is that the future?
Yeah watched that already, the phone that deletes itself when G-Force is to high. But they missed the great opportunity that inferno/plan9 could have given (phone=terminal and nothing more)
If you convince consumers to switch over to FOSS for ethical reasons like surveillance and avoiding influential algorithms then you have something compelling. But at the moment the world is glued to proprietary social media.
I'd love if users would flee Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. They are such simple concepts that can obviously be replicated, but those established companies already have the users at their control.
There needs to be focus on convincing users to move away from these services. There also needs to be more funding for social media alternatives. Rather than FOSS developer attention going into reimplementing Android apps from 2011 or God knows what these people in the Linux phone community are thinking.
Those are some pretty big steps before we even think of Linux for phones, assuming ethical reasons are the interest.
I don't understand this interest in Linux on phones. It doesn't make a difference for anyone outside of the tech hobbyist realm.
my only trouble is the HW specs, I don't want a mid-low device, I am willing to spend the same I spend for a mid-high Android phone, as long as they manage to keep the basics working , ie solid browser, capable GPS navigation, port/wrap most used IM platforms. I used a Flame phone for a while, no major problems, until most IMs stopped working... people want to stay connected to everyone else... that's what 99% of users do.
> Android isn’t the same, but even then nobody knowingly wants to run Android.
What are you smoking? Android is the most popular OS in the world. It has millions of applications in PlayStore and outside of it. It has millions of developers creating software for it, huge companies contributing to it and best in the class development tools.
I'm hoping that when we have this conversation, we understand that the business of Linux Phones is a much tougher business to be in than average, and not do the thing where we nitpick e.g. particular usability features, as if that were the thing preventing Linux Phones from being popular.
The real force against them is, of course, the most well funded businesses (perhaps monopolies) who have a vested interest (or at least, strongly believe so) in not allowing the level of freedom on your machines that a Linux Phone would provide.
So I'm an app developer, native iOS and Android. It's my passion, enough that I've decided to work in server side and data engineering instead of app dev in my day job after being a mobile dev for 7+ years. I watch all the WWDC sessions and I deeply care and believe that the mobile computing platform is the core future of computing. My only question as an App developer is why!? Why would I write apps for Linux while iOS and Android exist.
This is false. They don't allow using the Signal name in third party client names. But third party clients are absolutely possible. The first one that comes to mind is Pidgin on the Punkt phone.
Why would it have to be someone's "most important priority"? That's such needlessly superlative phrasing.
I would choose a Linux phone because I want a platform that's not controlled by a single profit-drive company which is so huge they are essentially unaccountable for any harm they do to their users, developers, or even society at large. It's not the "most important priority" in my life or anything, it's just something I'd like.
I think the analogy is a bit off. I don't expect to mess around with my car the same way I do with my phone. A messed up software setup in a car can actually kill me instead of just having to restore from recovery in a phone. Purpose of phones have expanded greatly from just making calls and receiving messages to being in the center of our digital activities which means my expectations there have greatly grown and Linux fills the gap of freedom/flexibility. However, irrespective of the software, a car's overarching purpose is still getting one from point A to B; sure, great if I can also ssh into it but that is way lower down the usual list of things you expect to do with your car.
I hope they do. I crave a high speed pocket web browser that truly belongs to me.
I hate Apple so much for the abusive relationship they have trapped me in. Their phones are amazing but it’s morally corrupt not having access to the source code. We consumers, collectively, have a right to know what these things are doing.
I’m addicted to my phone and it contains my whole life. I believe that in the future we will look back in these times with horror at the thought that the vendor didn’t give us access to the whole stack.
(My current solution is to ween off Apple. I’ve just sold my 2016 MBP — the one with both the keyboard defect and the stagelight display defect. I’m 100% Google free though, so what do I do for a phone?)
What other devices in your life do you feel this way about (car, home appliances, television, …)? Or are those in a different category because they aren’t managing your data?
Linux desktop is nowhere due to the thousands of distributions and disparity in development effort. A linux phone is simply unthinkable. Biggest strength in android/ios is the centralized leadership and vision. This enables consumers to make an easy choice, which attracts developers, who all seek predictability and maximum exposure.
But even if the linux community centralizes around a singularity, it will still be no-compete, since android/ios have superior momentum. You can't race against Bolt when you have a late start and Bolt is already 5 meters from the finishing line.
What it would take is a paradigm shift. Apple sunk Nokia (and the whole mobile world) by innovating.
Android/ios are locked down ad platforms running on superior hardware that the user merely "rents" from the supplier. A device that features an unlocked OS that doesn't limit itself to its form factor is going to drown everything else. Android already has begun to do half of that - it has initial desktop mode support. Some manufacturers like motorola and samsung have their own awesome-looking take on desktop mode. It's only a matter of time consumers embrace this and throw their useless laptops. Current phones have as much or more ram than my last office PC, so think of just this: hook an usbc cable to a random monitor, presto - desktop computer in your pocket you can do work on.
Well i'm also posting from a PC running linux desktop. But i can deal with it. The vast majority of consumers can't and will not. Also, if i had to create a desktop application, i'd target windows/macos primarily, as most other developers do.
And even though those pure linux phones exist, they're hardly usable. Sure, it's just the beginning, given time it will evolve. But the problem of effort disparity will inevitably manifest itself again, and you'll get 1000s of distros to choose from and none will stand up to to that single android device.
> It is not always necessary to win completely and crush competition to reach goal
I agree. I like to run for the fun of it and don't care for racing. But if you're going to compete directly against android phone or a windows desktop, you have to play to win.
>this is as untrue as "Year $YEAR will be year of Linux on desktop" was so far (posting from laptop running Linux)
This will be untrue when linux will have noticeable* share of installs. Not just you and some other tech guys who amount to grand total of 2-3% of desktop systems.
Who cares if its marketshare is above some arbitrary number so long as there's enough interest to keep development going? It doesn't matter to me what other people are using, I find Linux desktops to be the most comfortable thing for me, so I use them!
If other people are satisfied with Windows and everything that goes along with it (forced auto-updates, ads, etc) - fine! You do you. I'm happy with what I have though.
I haven't touched windows as a software developer since around 2008, so I don't know what's going on in there really. So long as I can launch games in my steam lib I'm fine.
My main working OS was Ubuntu (~2006-2010) and Arch(20010-2013). Then I got tired of my Android phone and switched to iPhone and mac book. (if that matters somehow)
As for you question - you were saying, quote:
>this is as untrue as "Year $YEAR will be year of Linux on desktop" was so far (posting from laptop running Linux)
when answering to
> Linux desktop is nowhere
I was merely pointing out that your preferences has nothing to do with general situation. And the general situation is that Linux is almost nonexistent on desktop. Hence no 'Year $YEAR will be year of Linux on desktop"' being not true so far. The phrase was and is about linux taking some meaningfull portion of market for itself, not about a you using it. Obviously linux was on desktop since 90s
You do you, nobody is trying to take it away from you.
> Hence no 'Year $YEAR will be year of Linux on desktop"' being not true so far. The phrase was and is about linux taking some meaningfull portion of market for itself, not about a you using it.
Eh, the phrase has always been ill-defined. It could be interpreted as talking about marketshare - but it could also be interpreted as the point where Linux is technically as or more capable than its competitors as a desktop OS. That point has come and gone.
(And really, the phrase tends to be used more as a potshot at Linux users than anything actually meaningful.)
>And in some populations (like programmers) use is much higher, 25% according to SO survey.
Sure, and if you take even smaller fraction you may find numbers like 50% or higher. But what does it have to do with general situation we are talking about?
This sounds like those weird surveys: "9 out of 10 people said that quit smoking this yeah!" but after reading more you realise they were talking to people from a hospice or tuberculosis dispensary.
>2% in total population is tiny but not "nowhere".
Okay. That's your stance, I accept it. Mine is that 2% is nowhere.
Windows' failure means that consumers don't care about running a desktop without all the software that they have.
Windows software doesn't typically provide desktop builds on ARM, whereas on Linux, there's very little software that you can't take from AMD64 to ARM, especially if all you need is in the distribution's repository.
Why isn't it around any more?
(1) The carriers. Many people get a free or heavily subsidized phone from their carrier, who makes money from the data charges. Carriers were just not interested in phones from smaller manufacturers, and it's not entirely clear that there is no backflow of cash involved at higher levels. There is also the issue of controlling access to user metadata, always a profitable exercise.
(2) The manufacturers: why would they put a third-party OS on their phone when they control the entire stack from the silicon to the end-user's metadata through their in-house Android fork? They can sell hardware at a negative margin if they can profit from selling access to metadata, or possibly data.
(3) The apps. Developers want to target the biggest, most lucrative markets so they target Android and iPhone which already have a critical mass. You could provide a container to run Android apps on Ubuntu, but then you end up with no differentiating factor except your Android apps look like crap in desktop mode. Running in a container can also restrict the kind of data collection many apps rely on for monetization.
Another problem with apps is that many web services check to see whether the device is iPhone or Android and respond accordingly. Like the browser checks of yore ("you need at least IE 6 to use this site, try updating to a newer browser!") this gives a less satisfactory experience to end users.