Comment by niutech
20 days ago
There were crowdfunding efforts like: Purism Librem, Liberux NEXX, /e/ foundation, eelo, Ubuntu Edge, Jolla phone. But none were really successful. The closest was probably Mozilla with Firefox OS, now Kai OS. I still own an Alcatel OT Fire phone, it's HTML5 all the way!
But I think Sailfish OS has a mature ecosystem, they are well recognized in the EU and based on GNU/Linux. I use it daily, after moving from UBports, and it serves me well. Hopefully SfOS gains more popularity.
You highlighted the problem I was stating: Effort is scattered among small players. I would love for SailfishOS to win, but crowdfunding is hard with random Thingamabob companies; it needs name recognition behind it.
For the new ecosystem to win, it needs to have its own user base for companies building apps to recognize it. Even with SailfishOS, the banking apps still require Android compatibility layer, which is slowly eroded with Play Services and Play integrity check disabling those one by one in the coming years.
> "banking apps still require Android compatibility layer"
I would say that this is really not the OS's problem, but the bank's problem. I find it absolutely intolerable that there are banks that force me to use a OS from one (or two) specific vendors.
Same goes for public transportation services (German Bahn Card is now only available in their app) or post mail services (German Post "Mobile Stamp" is only available in their official app).
> German Bahn Card is now only available in their app
Technically not as long as the fallback PDF version remains available.
Weren't Jolla (Sailfish OS), Canonical (Ubuntu Touch), HP/LG (webOS), Mozilla (Firefox OS), Samsung (Tizen) recognized companies? Yet they failed to break the duopoly. Even Facebook failed with their phone. Who would fight with Andoid/iOS then?
I have no answer, I'm asking the same question. Who can raise serious funds like 1 billion to do it? I'm guessing for FOSS/Linux crowd to get fully behind, it can't be a company, but a person like Linus Torvalds. Given that browsers are becoming a platform themselves for major apps, maybe it can lower the bar in the future for smaller vendors to create a feasible market.
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All of those ran really slow compared to Android versions at the time, or their dev tooling sucked. The only one I really enjoyed using was Sailfish, and even they had to implement an APK compatibility layer. So for the average consumer, what’s the benefit to using that over straight Android?
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"For the new ecosystem to win, it needs to have its own user base for companies building apps to recognize it."
…And strong and effective antitrust legislation in place to stop current monopolies like Google from crushing small startups.
Trouble is, despite governments paying lip service to wanting competition in this arena they really don't want competition at all, especially so from small startups.
Look at it this way, controlling and handling a few big companies is much easier for governments than having to deal with a plethora especially so when many are small startups; and second, it's also easier for them to extract user data from Big Tech's operations (as Big Tech is predictable and they've been doing so for a long time)—than it it would be from many small startups, especially so when the products they're planning to manufacture are aimed at improving privacy and adding encryption.
Think of the current UK and Apple debacle and governments' motives for not being proactive become abundantly clear.
> But none were really successful.
By which criterion? I'm happily using Librem 5 as a daily driver; wrote this reply from it.
By general adoption. It's great that Librem serves you well, just like SfOS for me, but sadly we're a tiny minority. I think KaiOS has the third place in popularity.
GNU/Linux is also not successful by such definition. It doesn't make it worse than Windows.
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I've been using a Librem 5 as a daily driver for years and before that I used a PinePhone for several years. It can work if you're willing to adjust to live with it's constraints (but then also enjoy the benefits).