Mobile OS Alternatives

In preparation for my talk tomorrow night at the MDOT event, I looked at some mobile related notes I haven’t put on here related to alternative mobile operating systems (OS).

Apple and Google have corned the market on mobiles thanks to their early leap into it and the creation of the App Store. Their success came at the expense of previous mobile phone makers and inspired an entire new market of apps. In order to get into the mobile market to the extent they have is a near impossibility (for now) but that hasn’t stopped people from trying.

Tizen

First up there is Tizen which is yet another attempt at creating a fully open source mobile OS to compete against Android (which is less like open source every release) and Apple.

Tizen to me looks very developer focused and personally I don’t find it all that inspiring. Still, I hope that they get some traction so we can see some nifty innovations. They have some big industry players like Intel supporting them.

Tizen is an open source, standards-based software platform supported by leading mobile operators, device manufacturers, and silicon suppliers for multiple device categories, including smartphones, tablets, netbooks, in-vehicle infotainment devices, smart TVs, and more. Tizen offers an innovative operating system, applications, and a user experience that consumers can take from device to device.

Here’s a video going into some details around Tizen:

Jolla

Jolla is young company that has already created a new OS called Sailfish that I do find inspiring. They are taking a very design-centric approach to the OS and really thinking about what the user wants and what the user does.

Mashable recently covered Sailfish and they have a good summation of why Sailfish matters”

Sailfish is designed to acknowledge that most people use their phones for several things at once these days. The phone’s home screen can be filled with up to 9 concurrently running applications. (Contrast that with an iPhone, where, save for things like playing music, applications are paused when a user switches from one to another.) And they can all be controlled without even “opening” them. Rather, each “application cover— which is a large rectangle on the phone’s home screen — has its own interface.

Mashable also points out their strategy of breaking into the mobile market is to go into China first where the competition between carriers operates differently.

Here’s a presentation on their Sailfish OS, you’ll want to fast forward to like the 8 minute mark:



December 5th, 2012 by Adam

Adoption Rates, or Why iOS Over Android

When my iPhone 3G got insanely bogged down by poorly-optimized code in iOS 4 I got frustrated with Apple and decided to look into an Android phone. The results were horrendous, and I ended up getting the 4S to maintain my sanity. My temptation to go into the world of Android was dashed by Android and the mobile-makers that use it.

When I get an iPhone I know it’ll just work and I don’t need to pay attention to annoying numbers that only somebody who spends too much time with computers would know. I know what these numbers mean and I understand them, I just don’t want to deal with it – it’s a personal preference to not have to think about mHZ or cycles anymore. Android’s version naming after pastries* doesn’t help make anything clearer either. I’d rather think about what cool apps I can get instead.

Essentially I got turned off of Android because all of a sudden I went from thinking ‘phone’ to thinking ‘complex technology’ and had to pay attention to not only phone manufactures but what version of firmware that phone had on a carrier. No thanks. I know that people will think that I was lazy in my search and you know what I was.

If I saw a solution that clearly provided the most recent Android version and was a good build I would’ve got it. Instead every time I got close another ad, article, blog, would raise doubts and I suffered choice paralysis as a result.

That’s just my experience though, and a rant at that.

The reason I’m even writing this is that a recent investigation into adoption rates of new software makes Android look, well, not too good.

Essentially Apple has it’s users upgrade quickly and Android users take longer. This results in a clear OS version to build on for Apple whereas on Android you’d have to develop for multiple platforms.

This graph sums things up well:

Fortunately for us, the folks at The Next Web can summarize the findings with far less ranting than me. Their dissection of the above information can be found in their article about why developers love iOS.

They got a choice quote from a developer on why the developer dropped support for iOS 4 on the iPad.

Tapbots recently launched a new version of its popular Twitter app Tweetbot for the iPad. This was offered as a separate app from the iPhone version, allowing developer Paul Haddad to choose which
OS he would make the minimum requirement. Tweetbot for iPad launched with iOS 5 — the latest major version — required.

“iOS 5.0 works on all the iPads, there’s not much of a reason to support older iOS versions,” sayd Haddad. “There’s a few people who are still running iOS 4.3 on iPad but that number is minuscule compared to the folks who have upgraded. It makes very little sense to spend the development effort support 4.x on iPads.”

The gamble paid off too, with the app reaching #1 on Apple’s top iPad Apps chart and Haddad says that “we’ve gotten two people complaining about it, so it was a pretty big win.”

*I know it’s in alphabetical order, but that’s not very intuitive when they are listed in a seemingly random order throughout the net.



March 7th, 2012 by Adam

Mobile Stats from 2011 Show 2012 Will be Nifty

PocketGamer has a great wrap-up of key mobile industry statistics that will have an impact in the year to come:

7. RIM could lose its entire US user base by the end of 2012

What a year for RIM; at least 2012 can’t get any worse … or can it?

According to figures from comScore and analysis from asymco, if it continues losing US subscribers at the current rate of between 500,000 to 1.2 million per a month, it “could lose its entire US user base” by the end of the year.

6. Rise of iOS and Android halves Nintendo DS game revenue

Many of the headlines raised by app analytics company Flurry concerned the growth of mobile gaming versus the ‘relative decline’ of portable gaming.

Its key finding was that “…as smartphone game revenue has climbed aggressively, Nintendo DS and Sony PSP revenue has dropped precipitously”.

Of course, causality between these two trends wasn’t specifically proven in terms of user surveys etc., and the release of the PS Vita and Nintendo’s future strategy with respect to the 3DS means there’s likely to be much more to say on this subject in the coming year.



January 3rd, 2012 by Adam

GameSalad Adds Android Support

GameSalad logo Gamasutra is reporting that GameSalad is adding Andriod support to their game making software.

Austin’s Game Salad, which publishes a self-titled game creation tool for non-programmers, has added Android support to its existing iOS and HTML5-compatible tool.

The news comes following a $6.1 million round of VC earlier this year, which was also utilized for its HTML5 support.

GameSalad has no official announcement on their site at the time of posting, I hope this isn’t just a rumour.



November 11th, 2011 by Adam

Mobile Flash is Dead

This was inevitable, Flash for mobile browsers is coming to an end and Adobe will be focusing mobile efforts to HTML5. Some guy named Steve Jobs got lambasted for pretty muchpredicting this last year, looks like he was right. Here’s my favourite part:

Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.

For those of you who loved Flash on mobile don’t fret (you’ll still fret), Adobe will continue support for existing mobile Flash apps:

Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores. We will no longer continue to develop Flash Player in the browser to work with new mobile device configurations (chipset, browser, OS version, etc.) following the upcoming release of Flash Player 11.1 for Android and BlackBerry PlayBook. We will of course continue to provide critical bug fixes and security updates for existing device configurations. We will also allow our source code licensees to continue working on and release their own implementations.

Adobe’s announcement of the death of Flash on mobiles can be found on their official blog.

Still, my biggest question is what will happen to the Apple App Store when everything is HTML5 why make it an app? There are many good reasons, but I do wonder if the app store’s days of monopoly on iOS app distribution are numbered. Ugh, maybe I’ll put more thought into this another day.



November 9th, 2011 by Adam
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