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quickly; there are certainly innumerable devices out there sitting in drawers or on shelves because they're considered out of date.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. :)