Android is struggling to keep its market share in the United States, as Apple continues to take over in the market. But, despite Android as a whole losing ground, Google Pixel phones are becoming a bigger slice of the US market.
Counterpoint Research reports that, in Q2 2023, US smartphone shipments dropped by 24% year-over-year. That includes both iPhones and Android phones, and virtually every brand saw a drop in shipments. Samsung saw US shipments drop by 37% while Motorola saw a 17% drop. TCL saw the biggest decline at just shy of 70% year-over-year, and even Apple saw a 6% drop.
There needs to be a 3rd mobile platform that isn’t tied to Android. I really wish the Ubuntu phone took off, but Linux on mobile in general would be a really good thing… stock Debian or something. Then if an OEM wants to make their own distro to customize some things they can. I know this is done with Android today, but the ties to Google and the conflict of interest will also make that a weird relationship. I think the road for that will be very long without some corporate backing to fund full time developers for it.
The problem of android is that it is “fake opensource”. The OS itself is open source but google locks it down with GMS so google still controls everything.
Bingo.
AOSP is open source. Cool. In order to make AOSP useful to 99% of the population you need Google Play Services, which aren’t open source. To get Google Play Services you need to agree to install 20+ non-removable Google apps, none of which are open source.
Not only Google services. If you want to make a phone you need to buy SoC from Qualcomm or MediaTek and all the drivers for it are proprietary (often including Linux kernel modifications). Sure you can technically make your own but it’s impossible for 99% of phone makers.
There wont be a 3rd platform for the same reason that America wont have a 3rd Political Party.
You’ll never edge out the incumbents.
Mobile operating systems aren’t winner take all like a political election. The existence of a 3rd party doesn’t hand a win to one side or the other. It could also help the incumbents avoid some anti-trust issues.
Especially when the biggest current one, Google, did everything in their power to stop a fantastic 3rd platform in Windows Phone from becoming successful.
Not really sure they needed to lift a finger tbh.
They did though. Windows Phone was pretty rapidly gaining marketshare in the US and also in Europe at one point - I believe they hit 10% which is massive for a new OS.
Google’s response to this was to block any and all third party apps for their services, even when they broke no rules. Read up on the shitshow that was Youtube on Windows Phone to see just how aggressive they were in making sure Windows Phone died. They also refused to put any of their services on the platform.
Actually there’s a third platform being developed, based on Linux, by Puri.sm with their Librem 5 phone.
And they’re as likely to stay around as the Green party is.
Hello, it actually exists and they started developing it with crowdfunding (now it seems like they are self-sustaining with sales)… Do you know Puri.sm?
They started some years ago creating a new Linux phone, the Librem 5, and they are developing firmware support and a mobile GNOME interface around it that also other project, like PinePhone, is using.
Yeah, I’ve watched some videos on a few different phones and different operating systems, but they all seem very early in development and more of hobby devices rather than anything someone can use as their daily driver. At the current rate it seems like it will be decades before it’s ready for prime time.
yes, it’s true that they’re still not ready as daily driver for not-geek people
Interesting… not long after I replied to this, I saw this post on Lemmy about Purism maybe not being so pure. I don’t have time to watch it all now, but figured I’d pass it along. Either way it’s it seems like the best Linux experience is using Ubuntu touch on an old Pixel 3a, still being tied to Google at least with the hardware, and it’s an old phone.
https://lemmy.world/post/2378785
thank you for the link…it’s speaking a bit fast for me as English is not my main language but I got the point. I would be curious to ask directly to Purism people what they think about this.
Also I would consider /e/os with Murena Fairphone 4 as a good compromise and a safe choice.
Ah, yeah, New Yorkers aren’t the easiest to follow. I got a chance to watch the full video. The main points, which you may have gotten, were that Purism didn’t honor refunds, and the security/privacy which they claim is very surface level and doesn’t stand up to any scrutiny.
Yes, I watched it with subtitles and understood the 2 points explained…thank you anyway for the recap!
RIP Windows Phone
And WebOS. I know it’s still exists on LG TVs, but that shitty HP CEO killed it before it even had legs. What an idiot, he tried to shut down HP’s PC division too. He didn’t last a year in the role and WebOS was the biggest casualty. A lot of design elements from WebOS are now seen in modern phones, like the card based multitasking and swipe to close.
If you have any corporate backing wouldn’t it turn back into same situation as Android? Maintaining the app store, build tools, making new features, patching vulnerabilities e.t.c all require massive amounts of capital. Why would a company openly take initiative to do that? Meanwhile all others could free ride on it? Also any OEM’s coming in and customizing it to their liking and not following the standards because they are not bound too like in Android, wouldn’t that cause massive fragmentation. Back in the Symbian days this was the case where you need to customize your app slightly for each Symbian device, which meant you had to have the physical device. I remember back in the back in the day your office would be filled with these devices.
Major linux distributions get a lot of contributions from corporations that don’t compromise them to the whims of the company. The same model could be used. The companies contribute, because it ultimately benefits them, even if others can also benefit.
Fragmentation would likely be an issue, as we see with traditional Linux systems. However, systems like flatpak have helped standardize application distribution. Some of they fragmentation can also be seen as providing choice to users. As long as they all share the same protocols to talk to each other, which have been pretty well established by now, it shouldn’t be a huge issue.
First of all major corporations contribute to Linux kernel and there is very little contribution to a distribution. Why are they doing it? Because they benefit from their hardware being supported by Linux kernel(e.g Samsung contributing to Linux Kernel for SSD drivers) and now they can sell more, they can do this because it works with their business model. That is not the case with smartphones, in the smartphone world they are selling directly to a consumer and they need to do everything they can to differentiate themselves from other Smartphone makers. Mozilla tried the business model you mentioned but it didn’t catch on. Lastly you forget to understand the number of apps available on Google Play vs on Flathub. Google Play has ~3.5 Million Apps vs ~2000 Apps on Flathub. We are talking a different scale here
Also speaking about Flathub, Flathub solves the issue of fragmentation by building an entire OS on top of another OS just to avoid the challenges of backwards compatibility. This has implications like huge app sizes because you are basically downloading the runtime and everything it depends on for each app. It works for most people because storage is cheap and can be upgraded at least in PC world. But still you will have issues with RAM because most flatpaks don’t share the runtime and you need to need load each runtime to memory and this implications like higher memory usage, slower app start times because you need to load the entire runtime first before even you start the app.
Ideally, a standard would be made for app distribution that everyone could align to so they don’t have to resort to something with the overhead of Flatpak. In terms of the numbers of apps… I don’t think anyone really needs ~3.5m to choose from. I need 1 decent task app, not the 10,000+ that are probably out there.