
Major setbacks for two new smartphone OSs, Tizen and Ubuntu Touch - cpeterso
http://gigaom.com/2014/01/17/major-setbacks-for-two-new-smartphone-oss-tizen-and-ubuntu-touch/
======
mojuba
I have an impression that the goal of all these new iOS/Android challengers is
to get Linux on the mobile phone at all costs. Whereas the goal should be to
create user experience that would be at least as pleasant and smooth as that
of iOS, plus openness and transparency of the platform. At least.

That may imply Linux due to the lack of viable alternatives, but really, it
should be built with users in mind, rather than perceived as a technical
challenge of putting Touch on top of Linux.

(And please, stay away from Java in your next mobile OS. Among other things,
you will ward off those of us, developers, who let's say are not neutral wrt.
to certain programming languages. Edit: make Java optional if you wish.)

~~~
fafner
This has little to do with getting Linux on mobile. Maybe it's the motivation
for some. But not the driving aspect.

Samsung wants Tizen to gain back full control of their platform. Canonical
wants Ubuntu Touch (and Mozilla Firefox OS) because the PC is getting less
important for consumers.

> (And please, stay away from Java in your next mobile OS. Among other things,
> you will ward off those of us, developers, who let's say are not neutral
> wrt. to certain programming languages. Edit: make Java optional if you
> wish.)

Neither of them is based on Java. Tizen and FirefoxOS are (sadly) JavaScript
only. Ubuntu Touch supports JavaScript/HTML5 and Qt (JavaScript + C++).

~~~
jevinskie
Tizen has a native C++ toolchain just like the Android NDK.

~~~
pjmlp
Last time I looked it had the frankenstein Bada influence, with two level
initialization, no exceptions, handles vs pointers and so forth.

Is that still the case.

~~~
jevinskie
I'm unsure, I haven't done any app development, just toolchain work.

------
hdevalence
It's a shame the way that Canonical have isolated themselves from the rest of
the Linux ecosystem. I wonder if the future for Ubuntu Touch would be brighter
if they had more community appeal.

~~~
wtracy
How so? Android and Firefox OS can run few if any GNU/Linux applications
without major modifications. Ubuntu run every Linux app I can think of out of
the box.

~~~
hdevalence
I was referring more to isolation in two related senses:

1\. A technical sense: Canonical has a significant amount of distribution-
specific software that has very little adoption outside of the Ubuntu
ecosystem. Examples include:

* their own version control system, bzr (which I think has now been essentially abandoned in terms of development, and other than a few GNU projects never saw much uptake at all);

* their own desktop shell, Unity, which to the best of my knowledge has never been properly packaged for any non-Ubuntu distribution; their own display server, Mir, whose development is the subject of much controversy, and which has been rejected for well-founded technical reasons that have probably already been discussed at length on HN;

* their own init system, Upstart, which was initially adopted by other distributions, who then abandoned it in favour of systemd due to its fundamentally flawed design (for instance, there is no way to 100% reliably keep track of a process's children and the dependency resolution runs backwards, meaning that some configurations can cause hangs).

2\. A social sense: Canonical's relationship with the rest of the Linux
ecosystem has soured (beginning, in my opinion, around 2009-2010, but as a
gradual thing, it's hard to pin down) to the point of outright hostility. In
my opinion, most of the responsibility for this lies with Canonical's poor
communication with others. There's a very detailed history of some events from
2009-2011 that you can read here [1] detailing their relationship with GNOME.

The culmination this year has been disgraceful personal attacks by Mark
Shuttleworth on people who raise technical criticism of Canonical's software.
I expect that more will follow whatever the fallout of Debian's systemd
decision is.

The two are obviously related. The big problem is that there's (again, in my
opinion) very little community appetite for contributing to Canonical's
software. And why would there be, given that in order to submit patches for
Ubuntu Touch, I need to give Canonical permission to relicence my code under
any proprietary licence they choose? At that point, it's not a community
contribution, it's just working for Mark Shuttleworth for free.

Does Canonical have the software engineering capability to maintain a bunch of
stuff (an init system, a display server) that's really unrelated to their
problem (making awesome products for users) and still be able to take on
Android at the same time? I don't think so.

[1]: [http://bethesignal.org/blog/2011/03/12/relationship-
between-...](http://bethesignal.org/blog/2011/03/12/relationship-between-
canonical-gnome/)

~~~
jmhain
Unity has been packaged for Arch. I have absolutely no idea why, but it has.

~~~
RBerenguel
That tendency of Arch users to port everything and try everything (Arch is my
favourite Linux distribution, I quite like this style)

------
pinaceae
As long as they do not solve a problem for either the carriers or the
consumers that is not solved by iOS or Android, they have no chance.

Carriers and manufacturers love Android because they get it from Google for
free. Cosumers love it because they can get cheap, good smartphones.

Carriers love the iPhone cause it generates massive revenues for them as
customers love it. See what happened with NTT doCoMo as an example.

Tizen, ubuntuOS, firefoxOS, even Windows Phone do not solve anything between
those two. "Openess" is not a problem for the above.

~~~
lnanek2
Sometimes an extra option is desired by companies like carriers just so they
can pit all the options against each other and get better deals. Similar
happens in the OEM space. An OEM may be happy with Qualcomm, but they are
going to flirt with NVIDIA and use them occasionally just to get better deals
from Qualcomm.

~~~
rimantas
This only works with options which are also desired by customers.

------
rquirk
Regarding the first-edition Nexus 7 - Canonical will no longer produce Touch
images for it, so the author of this article is going to be even more
disappointed during 2014.

[https://lists.launchpad.net/ubuntu-
phone/msg05889.html](https://lists.launchpad.net/ubuntu-phone/msg05889.html)

------
frik
Samsung should release high-end Tizen (Bada3) smartphones in Europe. Most use
Samung devices here with Android. If Samsung keeps its Touchwiz UI and ship an
Android compatibility layer most people would buy it anyway. They buy it
because of the Samsung brand name!

Bada was successful in 2011 and 2012 (3Q/2012: 5.054.000 world wide sales,
3.0% market share). Bada sales were higher than Win7/8 smartphone sales even
back in 2012:
[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/de/e/e7/2012_11_15_Sma...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/de/e/e7/2012_11_15_Smartphones.jpg)

~~~
Oletros
Android compatibility layer doesn't include Google Services so no GMail,
Google Maps or other programs.

------
Daishiman
This was not unexpected; despite all the technical and political troubles iOS
and Android have, mobiles OSes can be considered a commodity; there is little
competitive advantage that any new contender could bring about at this point
unless something truly radical emerges.

Ubuntu's unified OS on all platforms seems like an interesting idea at first
glance, but Canonical has so far failed at providing the necessary vision for
that to come through.

~~~
argonaut
It's not so much that they're a commodity, but rather it's the fact that
Android and iOS are so entrenched. Both ecosystems are networks. In fact iOS
is a major competitive advantage for Apple, with all the apps that are iOS
first.

------
diminish
Mobile OS seen is amazingly diverse; Symbian, WebOs, Blackberry OSes, Bada,
->Tizen, Ubuntu Touch, FirefoxOS, SailfishOS and then Android/s, Windows* and
iOS. Anything else I omitted?

~~~
xamlhacker
There is also S40 platform powering Nokia Asha pseudo-smartphones. S40 is not
Symbian, it is a distinct OS.

------
programminggeek
I think at this point the smartphone OS's that are new Firefox OS, Ubuntu, and
Tizen are bascially an attempt to stay relevant in a world where the primary
computer is a phone or tablet, not a laptop or desktop.

All three of them exist more because of the companies that built them, than
because there is a big gaping hole in the market that they fill. Without a big
problem they are solving I think the market as a whole will shrug at their
arrival sort of like the Palm Pre.

~~~
jebblue
>> in a world where the primary computer is a phone or tablet, not a laptop or
desktop.

Did you write that comment on a phone or a personal computer?

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cliveowen
Major setbacks for two new smartphone OSs, Tizen and Ubuntu Touch. Namely,
people don't give a single shit about them.

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dscrd
Sailfish OS is built on all the same technologies that are upcoming in the
desktop/server linux world, namely systemd, pulseaudio, wayland. They even use
BTRFS for the root filesystem.

 _That_ is the real Linux phone.

~~~
tcfunk
Nothing that requires the end user to perform the installation of the OS is
the real anything.

