Alternative history: What if Jolla never existed?
 

This is fiction.

http://www.unwiredview.com/wp-conten.../Meego-RIP.jpg

It's late 2015.

Nokia N9 had died back in 2011, suffocated in it's sleep by Nokia management before launch and no community remained around Maemo or MeeGo. No Jolla had arisen after MeeGo's death since there was a lot of unhappy customers by there being no continuation to the N900 device; and no leader types had emerged in Nokia that wanted to risk making a startup in that topic. Mer had never happened.

Ubuntu Touch had never emerged due to the inability to leverage Android hardware adaptations (never got invented, I naturally became a Visual Basic coder instead, selling myself on the street). Firefox OS didn't reach a lot of attention. WebOS ended up being a TV OS. Tizen had been mismanaged to hell and seen as an internal Samsung-only project. GNU/Linux was dead on the mobile market.

In 2015, The market has settled into a duopoly, Google with Android, holding most big vendors in a stronghold with it's Google Services; and Apple's iOS. AOSP-only devices were considered mostly useless. Any m-commerce vendor that couldn't participate in Google or Apple's m-commerce paths were losing money rapidly.

In 2015, A group of people with mobile background - with experience within Android HW adaptation, ODM relations, industrial design, sales channels, UI development and design, 3rd party app offerings and so on - everything needed to approach consumer electronics; having resigned from their companies, fired, or being disgusted with the current state of mobile phone market and their OSes, that essentially exist only to collect sell user data and exploit users for the contents of their wallets and their focus.

They think that they could together make a difference - and have the means to attract investment to do so. And believing that mobile is more than phones or tablets - it's the way that our minds digitally connect with each other. And today, it's corrupted.

What would you have them do to disrupt the mobile market? Where should they attack?

tld;r: a group of talented people get together today, in 2015; to disrupt mobile, what should they do?

Re: Alternative history: What if Jolla never existed?
 

They should do what did but they should be honest to its customers not make them believe everything is good when there is trouble.

Re: Alternative history: What if Jolla never existed?
 

Of course Dave. At that moment when you tell people, the most people will immediately stop buying things from you. That's sad but it's true.

Re: Alternative history: What if Jolla never existed?
 

Very interesting! Ah, but you'll need to define the term "corrupted" here. Lots of people seem to think of corruption in lots of different terms. Moreover, the majority of the mobile-using public don't seem to believe that there exists any corruption at all...

From my own point of view: everything is tied way, way too tightly together. (And this is where, in my own opinion, the "corruption" seeps in.) Mobile software is tied way too tightly to mobile hardware, which is controlled way too closely by mobile device manufacturers, who are pressured way too much by both cellular providers and by governments. And thus, these walled-garden "ecosystems" pop up naturally, as the only way to serve the powers that be and control the activities of users.

The most disruptive option I could think of? Jettison the entire concept of creating yet another closed ecosystem on a specific device brought out by a specific manufacturer. Instead, create a hardware-agnostic OS, capable of running on top of any piece of mobile hardware. Don't even bother trying to license it to manufacturers; instead, sell it directly to the public, as an option to increase features or maintain support for mobile devices that the original manufacturer no longer provides adequate support for.

In short, pretty much follow the path Linux has done on desktops since the 90s and beyond.

I'm not sure that this mechanism would provide a great deal of income. And yeah, you'd have to manage the rooting / jailbreaking of each device this new OS would be sitting on. But, as rooting / jailbreaking has now become something of a standard practice (as sad as that sounds), I would imagine that you could actually build a business on it. (I mean, that's pretty much what Cyanogenmod is today.) But in short, I think this is the proper way to disrupt the scheme -- work your way in from the outside, rather than trying to follow the existing paths...

Re: Alternative history: What if Jolla never existed?
 

Let's see... 4 years ago. There would be nothing else yet delivered that's still being talked about today. No Neo900 - it's still "coming". Tizen, would be still only in India and China, but on our wrists via the Samsung Galaxy Gear series but tethered mostly to Android.

Android and iOS would be the only options for the majority. The minority would have... well... nothing. Android ONE hasn't really been still a flop, but would be in the lower price sector.

But that's where I'd be disruptive; the lower price sector. I'd attempt to become a OnePlus or Xiaomi and try to deliver an unique user experience, build quality products with nearly flagship level specs and above all, tackle the ongoing issue where a minority of the people do not have an option and bring out the developers that want to deliver that experience. Developer outreach would be paramount, marketing would be savvy and precise and the tools would be friendly and the devices top notch.

Now, to sell that to the public and to the investors... that's so not my sector.

Re: Alternative history: What if Jolla never existed?
 

Two choices I see:

1. An AOSP derivative, reverse Linuxed as much as possible. Package manager, proper terminal. Maybe even a backwards hybris, allowing emulation of a full linux environment. Supported on top of cyanogen, or even installed over a rooted Android. This thing truly unlocks devices, letting them become the sort of things that we read about in news articles about N900 hackery or more recently the Raspberry Pi.

2. A feature phone powered by tears.

Re: Alternative history: What if Jolla never existed?
 

If Jolla never existed? I would never have cut my SIM card and still use it happily in my N900.

Re: Alternative history: What if Jolla never existed?
 

We are all biased here IMHO, so our responses are valid only if the target is (for starters at least) a rather small niche :o

Anyways, I guess small percentage of potential customers care about openness, developers, etc. - ie all the stuff we rant about all the time.:( They care about the price (no money there) and hw features they don't understand beyond bigger is better: Mpx, GHz, xxx core, inches (some money there). That lucrative area is for big players, leaving us in a bad place...

A couple of (biased) ideas:

• Target other abandoned platform/device users (in house versions of SFOS for N900, N9 come to mind) in hope they convert to real device at some future point or donate for porting effort (many users considered migration to SFOS, but didn't because of it's state at the time and/or missing GHz, Mpx...)
• Create alliance with other players targeting similar area in order to not duplicate efforts
• Avoiding technologies that prevent easy app migration (wayland) or may cause usability issues (btrfs) until later point in time (funny how I got used to systemd - go figure...)
• Find a "milking cow" - EU burns absurd amount of € for all kinds of stuff, I'm guessing it wouldn't be impossible to find some way of fitting this kind of project into their agenda.

On a side-note: I guess that I told you so and you should have listened to me responses aren't really helpful at this time.

Either way Jolla did make a difference, and continues to do so :)

Re: Alternative history: What if Jolla never existed?
 

Also cut down on OS development(improvements) to secure tablet delivery and then push really hard in india.

Re: Alternative history: What if Jolla never existed?
 

Well, that's the thing, though -- trying to attract users to a "real device" means, ultimately, going through all of the rigamarole of getting a real device designed and manufactured, which (in the current environment) requires a significant amount of up-front capital as well as some sort of continuing income from the users in order to end up with a profit. In short, it means doing exactly what Apple / Google do. Which is, honestly, not very disruptive...

(So yeah, I'm arguing to short-circuit the whole process, and instead sell the OS directly to the user. Let the user himself select a piece of hardware for it.)

Re: Alternative history: What if Jolla never existed?
 

Looks attractive but I wonder how many users would buy it. I have not mnanaged to persuade anyone to switch to Jolla. Anyone. Believe me, I tried hard. And that was at the time when it came with a whole phone attached. Imagine I tried persuading the same people to essentially (NB in their view, not mine) wreck the phone they already paid for and that came with all the goodies preinstalled and pay more to get an experimental OS with no goodies.

Re: Alternative history: What if Jolla never existed?
 

Mostly agree, though remember that there's plenty of ODMs out there who will happily put a AOSP fork on top of hardware designs they have if you want it. Doesn't have to be the big manufacturers. The current ODMs are starving in a more and more decreasing margin for them on HW.

Re: Alternative history: What if Jolla never existed?
 

CORRECT! There is absolutely, positively no reason why the average user would want to use anything other than iOS or Android on their phone -- you just can't compete with literally billions of dollars spent on perfecting the user experience in both operating systems.

So, you pick away at the places where Apple and Google choose not to compete. In particular, both companies drop support for older devices very, very quickly; there are certainly innumerable devices out there sitting in drawers or on shelves because they're considered out of date. Target these machines: make them useful for some other purpose, be it games, or media servers, or even just simple remote controls ;). Allow people to make use of hardware for new purposes, instead of as their phone.

I don't think you can really compete with iOS or Android by coming out with an OS that serves the same purpose as iOS or Android. Serve a different purpose, though, and folks may find an interest...

Re: Alternative history: What if Jolla never existed?
 

Armchair analyst warning!

What duopoly? I only see Android, Android and Android from here.

iOS's worldwide market share is already less than 10% in late 2015. While forecasts right now tend to say iOS will remain at this level of market share even until 2017, they seem to ignore than on 2011 most forecasts predicted that by 2015 Android and iOS would be on equal footing.

My prediction: less than 5% by 2017. In no part because Apple will stop centering on the phone market and move on something else.
My reasoning i that the smartphone market is already terribly commoditized (current market leaders basically all "cheap copycats") and Apple doesn't work well there.

It just shows how biased we are.

I don't think disrupting the market is possible, believing it to be a matter of luck and network effect more than anything else.
If you want to disrupt anything I'd aim lower. After all, I keep thinking that only plausible reason for the iPhone's early success was that it had a better web browser than the competition. Small details...

But I personally wouldn't try to disrupt anything in the first place.

Re: Alternative history: What if Jolla never existed?
 

But who would want such a device? I can get a heavily-subsidized Google Play-based Android phone from my cellular provider for practically nothing. An AOSP fork will be missing all the Google Play goodness, and I highly doubt it'd get subsidized to any extent, so as a consumer I'd have to pay more in order to get less.

Yup. I figure that the current crop of manufacturers are going to have to be pared down a bit, as margins are just too low to support everybody. Apple's bubble is eventually going to pop as well; they've managed to milk their mobile device boom quite well, but nothing lasts forever. The iPod has certainly peaked long ago, and I doubt the aWatch or the aTV are going to be anything like the iPhone in popularity. And a shrinking market is going to make it even harder for new players to enter...

In short, I don't see why the common consumer would want (or care about) a new mobile OS. Not unless it did something that the existing OSs don't do, or don't do well. And there's very, very little that the existing OSs don't do...

Re: Alternative history: What if Jolla never existed?
 

Apple may have less market share than android but profitwise they are superior.10-15% of market but 60-80 percent of the profit. Buoght an overpriced iPhone plus a week ago and it's a decent smartphone. Jolla forced me...If you can't beat them, join them ;)

Re: Alternative history: What if Jolla never existed?
 

Exactly. My point being however that it's easy to make any kind of hardware, be it phone or something mutated into a 27" double e-ink AMOLED screen, and stuff your own experience on it and get it produced in large quantities at reasonable prices. -- as long as it's derived from AOSP somehow.

What could that help with?

Re: Alternative history: What if Jolla never existed?
 

Get XWayland running, the 1 million android apps didn't write themselves, so potential market right there. Jolla (the phone) can pull this of. Wanna write your android apps on the go? Run Eclipse or whatever latest IDE on your mobile device. No other android/iOS device can do that (add to that geeks with gimp, even though screen...). Sailfish is a real computing platform, look at all the 'android studio for android' apps in google play store which have barebone features and only java and very limited in that regard. This with mass produced hwkbdOHs would be a differentiating factor (still not for tens of millions of users, but for developers, yeah)

Re: Alternative history: What if Jolla never existed?
 

Totally correct, but it still makes them more or less as irrelevant as pre-Elop Nokia for market analysis. And unlike Nokia, Apple doesn't really have much support overseas that acts as a "buffer" delaying their free fall to nonexistence.

In this alternate universe Stskeeps described, I'd most probably be an iPhone owner too.

Not sure if I'd had a goatee or not, though.

Re: Alternative history: What if Jolla never existed?
 

Well, you wrote it's fiction, so that can certainly be. :)
But, for a less fictional history, I can tell you that while Ubuntu benefited immensely from your work, we started working on a tablet and phone version of Ubuntu well before libhybris was announced. Initially, we were not planning of building on top of Android. Then some guy started working on leveraging the Android drivers (I have no idea if he succeeded or not) in summer 2012, but then when we learned of libhybris (it was actually me who suggested using it, in August 2012, as soon as I saw your G+ post about it), we decided to use it.

So, I think that, one way or another, we would have Ubuntu Touch anyway. :)

Re: Alternative history: What if Jolla never existed?
 

E.g. phones with small/portable docking stations which actually launch a full desktop when docked in.

It's a dream that has been revived many, many times.

Re: Alternative history: What if Jolla never existed?
 

Never!

10 chars ...

1. Meego is not dead. It may be crimpled, but its still alive!
2. SailfishOS can live longer (I read the IRC logs) because it has the kind of people behind it that knows why Meego is now crimpled.
If Jolla dies, as a company, I still believe it can live (yes, the Android support is problematic, but I dont want that).

I applause that a few guys had the guts and madness to try!

Why did it fail ?
As said by others, the real market for the Jolla device are developers and Geeks. Not end-users.
A 'final' product should have emerged much faster. Even being on the low-end side.
Perhaps if SailfishOS had continued (or rather started) from a known hardware, and build on that - N9 does come to mind here.

Re: Alternative history: What if Jolla never existed?
 

N900 could pull this off (QtCreator worked, not sure if anyone tried Android IDEs, probably too old libc/glibc and all the rest), but as a 'developer device' where you can write android apps on it on the bus, redeye, other long journey, or a quick fix? Jolla can do it (QtCreator works), no android phone can thanks to bionic

Re: Alternative history: What if Jolla never existed?
 

I disagree there. Almost any device can certainly run Eclipse or whatever latest IDE. ... in a chroot.

This is not a differentiating factor these days.

On the other hand -- at least for me -- a differentiating factor is that the APIs used in Sailfish were more or less tha same APIs I use on desktop linux. No useless Java layer, no ObjC layer.

So actual desktop linux programs have an higher "integration" with the rest of the phone.

This was not much the case in Sailfish, though...

Re: Alternative history: What if Jolla never existed?
 

Would love to see that, the 'mini-eclipse for your phone' apps are not only paid in google play store but have thousands of downloads (and thousands of comments that they're sh... why would people bother with that and PAY for it I wonder), quick YT search for 'eclipse on phone' has no videos that would show that actually being demonstrated, which would be strange due to bragging rights for starters

Re: Alternative history: What if Jolla never existed?
 

Yeah, I've heard my share of rumours about it: such as utilizing libmeegotouch ;). But it certainly accelerated matters: allowing Ubuntu Touch to be able to present a quite decent tech demo @ MWC that year.. and then take quite a long time to bring product to market.

Re: Alternative history: What if Jolla never existed?
 

Another thought: smartphones are dead.

Many of us have been here, on this very forum, for quite a long. Even before the iPhone was introduced.

I've been through a period where I could mention "oh, and I have a smartphone" and that would virtually guarantee me a job. Then a period where you'd say "smartphone developer" and they'd fight for your attention -- the shitton of free devices I have is from that era . Then a long period of calming down. Maturing, etc.

And today... well, the smartphone market looks like a dead sea. At least when looking back.

Tomorrow's smartphone market leader will be dictated by how cheap and mass-produced their devices are.

Trying to "disrupt" the smartphone market is equivalent to trying to disrupt the PC sound card market. It just makes no sense.

I guess that's why Stskeeps was careful in saying "the mobile market", and not the smartphone market.

Re: Alternative history: What if Jolla never existed?
 

Or a massive 10000mAh battery: http://qz.com/411330/the-mystery-of-...ng-over-ghana/

Re: Alternative history: What if Jolla never existed?
 

Hmm. Honestly, it just feels to me like this is asking the question backwards. Whenever you state that you can create mobile device X to serve purpose Y using an OS based on AOSP, I get the feeling that I could already point to an existing mobile device X serving purpose Y that runs Google Play-based Android. Or, at the very least, I could produce such a device. And in doing so, I'd avoid all the costs of creating a new OS, and still be able to sell to users who already have experience (and infrastructure!) running standard Android devices.

If, instead, what you are trying to sell is the OS itself, I think you need to look at the concept of the OS in a new way. The Solu guys are a good example here; they are (bizarrely in my opinion) still tying themselves to a specific hardware device, but their OS is instead mostly cloud-based, and allows you to perform tasks that straddle devices (and the internet itself). In short, they do something that iOS and Android don't do (or, at least, don't do well).

You can't just have a reason why the user would want to use your OS; you've gotta have a reason why the user would use your OS instead of iOS or Android. I don't think you can beat them on usability alone; they are both quite usable for the average consumer. You've gotta have a different argument -- run on older / smaller / stranger hardware than they do, work in ways they cannot, perform tasks they cannot. The privacy argument is good, but privacy isn't a task; there has to be something concrete that the user can do with the device that will cause them to feel the need to purchase it.

Anyway, apologies for the long rants here. :)

tl;dr: Competing directly OS-to-OS with iOS/Android ain't gonna work. Better to first build up an infrastructure where iOS/Android aren't competing, before trying to go mano-a-mano with them.

Re: Alternative history: What if Jolla never existed?
 

Why didn't sail and Ubuntu work together in this parallel universe of fiction?

Re: Alternative history: What if Jolla never existed?
 

I think that it'll be very long time until WiFi or 3G/4G connected slabs of different sizes go away though, but they're very rapidly reaching into very-small-$ with minimal margin. That also means they can be used in different circumstances though.

Who says they have to be our primary interaction devices, or primary center of our digital identity, though?

Re: Alternative history: What if Jolla never existed?
 

I agree there. This entire emphasis on Android, AOSP, even hybris, all look to me "I have a hammer here and everything looks a nail". Everyone can do that, and everyone will do that -- cheap.

Maybe it's not the right tool...

Re: Alternative history: What if Jolla never existed?
 

I think it's too late to do a new OS if you were starting in 2015, or at least, how you would consider a traditional OS of hardware adaptation, middleware, linux kernel, c libraries and stuff. What's left?

They are (AFAIK) a web runtime on top of a supposedly heavily modified Android.

Re: Alternative history: What if Jolla never existed?
 

Nooo, we are crazy, but this has never been an option. :) Actually, the first prototypes were using Nux (the library used in Unity7), so indeed we have been wasting some time.

Absolutely. :)

Re: Alternative history: What if Jolla never existed?
 

Ok, either YT is hiding those from me (tried quite a few searches, with android models explicitly in the search string, with chroot, no luck), or it hasn't happened (million developers (probably a few million if we assume average developers for an app is >1) did not try it, brag about it, or failed? it is a cow even on desktop so could be that it is possible but just in theory, should be quite easy on fresh libc/x setup). With hwkbds that would be quite a thing to differentiate (most developers have a few phones anyway, buying jolla for that special thing would be a no brainer, add hdmi-out and usbotg and you can plug it to your tv, plug in mouse and the dream is here)

Re: Alternative history: What if Jolla never existed?
 

I don't know (* Sail as understood as "Maemo-MeeGo people). There's surprisingily little amount of ex-Nokians that ended up at Canonical compared to elsewhere - there's some of course, but not many. Despite the Debian background of Maemo.

Perhaps people had enough of debian packaging? :p

Re: Alternative history: What if Jolla never existed?
 

What does this even mean? Even Apple has faltered in recent (enough) history. This is perhaps as inflammatory of a response as I'd ever expect from a scorned lover. Simply stated, it could have gone unsaid because it matters none.

Too bad Tizen has seen a limited release (India, China and Russia so far) and Ubuntu Touch is seen as a hard failure not even delivering an user experience that's consistent with the prior PR and whatever else Shuttleworth has stated. And Tizen would be a failure even if compared to just one of the more recent Samsung Galaxy devices.

So give me an example of a "rockstar" set of 120 or less engineers that's: 1) launched a phone, 2) created a SDK, 3) produced an OS, 4) updated their OS, 5) produced libhybris (used by: Ubuntu Touch, WebOS and others) and 6) got tablets out in the hands of core developers.

Be very specific. I'll wait.

Re: Alternative history: What if Jolla never existed?
 

You can have a "fresh libc/x" chroot on android. Just search for Debian, Ubuntu chroot, etc. If they don't specifically brag about Eclipse I'd bet it has more to do with the way Eclipse looks on a 800x480 window.

Re: Alternative history: What if Jolla never existed?
 

Thanks, but galaxies have fullHD and some even 4k screens, some with hdmi ports, so the dream of plug tv and mouse/kb should be already here, what's up with that?
edit: bit of ducking (no typo) around, looks like problem with swing and arm and java dropping arm support, so most likely won't work on jolla, wonder if iOS development would or is also x86 limited, still being able to compile/build programs for your mobile platform on the mobile platform itself is differentiating (like flashing n900 with another n900, that was awesome), but if not for the millions of already developers out there, not a big sell, shame

Re: Alternative history: What if Jolla never existed?
 

I can't help, but think of this message you left a few days ago :

Should any link be seen between them ? ;)

By the way, I wish you all the best for this new project !