But that is exactly what I said!

An "ecosystem", whatever it is, is an argument for the user to use the already existing OS. There is absolutely no logical reason for the user to use an obscure new OS and then pretend it is the old, existing one. If you want (or "need") to use OS A's ecosystem, use OS A. Simples.

The only player who might benefit is the new OS's producer, by parasiting on the old one's "ecosystem" rather than doing it properly and building its own, thus luring the users who secretly like the existing OS but outwardly act like they are "progressive" by using "an alternative".

Which, if you listened carefully, you might have noticed, was exactly my point!

It's like "rebranding"
But better!
And ..
Considering that most mobile os's now look suspiciously similar to one another...
It's like taking an orange ...and sticking a labels on it saying "New and improved" and "with additional Vitamin C!"

Little difference to the "old" orange...

"looks fly" now though...eh?
Gotta have it now!



and only the sane few do a double take ...and say "wait a sec. ..."
but the voice of reason tends to be drowned out in the rush for the cashier's till...

I am not sure there will be any big breakthrough or giant leap in the mobile tech any more..
this is just "the Age of Repackaging" ...now...
Far more profitable ...without really changing a thing...

I would not necessarily see that in itself as a bad thing. It's called convergent evolution. Dolphins look like fishes too, even though they are completely different animals.

Or, in the case of one OS emulating another, like taking an apple and injecting it full of orange juice, to appeal to those who like (or "must have") oranges but pretend that they like apples more

hahahaha
YEAH!
that is a great parallel...
injecting apples with orange juice to appeal to the "orange sector"


Hm...
I agree with you Dolphins may look like fishes even though they are completely different...
But there are many kinds of dolphins...and they all look and behave differently compared to one another...
THAT is diversity..
What we have going on with mobile os's is FAR from any form of natural or even artificial diversity...
It is more like the mono culture of a wheat field..
Nothing else thrives there...but identical stalks of wheat..
and that isn't natural ...

by that kind of artificial construct...
...all species of ...well...actually ....everything... should eventually meld into a grey goo...of convergence.
Convergence..
It's a load of crap.
It's just a good current term...for a human imposed construct that just isn't the norm in nature...
It's right up there with the 80's term "unconditional love"
(which is another load of crap...in nature there are always conditions...the mother of cubs or pups..or kittens..or whatever...kicks their progeny out when it's time...and drives them off to learn how to be an adult...sure there is love...but "unconditional love" ? ...another human construct...)

If convergence were natural ...Nature would have done so a thousand times over the last few billion years ...
I am not saying that convergence doesn't occur...
But really..
Strains of wheat aren't convergent...or there would inevitably be ...naturally ( before even the advent of humanity ...) only 1 single strain of wheat on the planet...
and likewise goes for just about everything else that grows, or gives birth.
There would be no diversity.
The platypus isn't a convergent creature...
Nothing is...
It is pure Darwinian "if gills don't work....chuck 'em and try bigger ears to hear with..or longer legs to run with..."

I used to just shake my head...
But I must admit a lot of words I hear now are creeping in to vocabulary ..that are ridiculous ...
or patently just do NOT belong...

For example...
When the Fcuk did the term "Ecosystem" infiltrate ??
How in hell did something as truly alien from nature as.. talk of mobile devices and operating systems...creep in and try to sound like it was a "natural phenomenon" ?????

Britannica :
Ecosystem: Definition:
"Ecosystem, the complex of living organisms, their physical environment, and all their interrelationships in a particular unit of space."

The only reason I can see for utilizing natural terms for something completely unnatural...is to try to give the unnatural some amount of purpose for existing side by side with what IS actually natural...
In the face of how incredibly destructive the process of making our devices are to the environment and to REAL ecosystems....
In light of that..It makes perfect sense to try to paint over the ugly process and usurp the term. Play up the importance of the artificial construct and try to diminish the scrutiny of the actual real world impact.

Ecosystem ...my eye.

rant concluded.

But convergence is natural, endso. On a very high level. Dolphins are a very good example. They are mammals that left the land and adapted to the aquatic life. A streamlined, fish-like form suits that life better than horns, four legs, hooves and an udder. So they evolved to superficially resemble fish, although under the bonnet they are wired differently.

That is very different from assuming that all living things will eventually converge into the same form. Natural history has shown that the exact opposite is the case. All it means is that different living things adapting to the same lifestyle in the same environment (e.g. chasing fast prey in water) tend to evolve forms best suitable for that lifestyle and environment, to the point that they may superficially resemble each other. Corals or anemones are animals but look more like plants due to their lifestyle adaptation.

Similarly, different OSes may have a similar UI but that is only a superficial resemblance due to adapting to the same lifestyle (common use cases) in the same environment (Joe Public's hands). How they work under the bonnet is what distinguishes one OS from another.

You may consider "app stores" and the like part of "what's under the bonnet" and I would agree with you, but even there the nature has been there before: mimicry. Consider creatures as different as bees and wasps. One, an innocent vegetarian, has evolved to mimic the other, a voracious predator, for its own benefit, namely a protection from other predators. You know what it means. Millions of bees that did not look like wasps have died, as do OSes that dare to stray away from familiar infrastructures. Of course, there are other insects that thrive even though they look nothing like wasps and this is what I expected Sailfish to be, but they have chosen the cheap and easy way out by following the familiar path.

By the way, don't get fooled with monocultures. You get them in the nature too. Isn't that what prairies are? Or birch forests? Or shoals of mackerel? The last ones may be mobile but they are still made up from individuals of the same species.

The "praries" are not a monoculture. Nor are birch forests..nor shoals of mackerel...
In nature....there are no monocultures...
We enforce monocultures upon nature...

In the praries...it isn't a wide expanse of nothing but prarie...there is diversity inside the ecosystem of the praries.
There is diversity inside the ecosystem of a stand of birch trees...
And there is diversity that the shoal of mack thrive on and in and around.

When humanity imposes ...for it's own purposes ...a monoculture...it has ramifications down the chain of diversity ...affecting the ecosystem it is impacting.

The wheat fields planted...do NOT have diversity in them...
That is what all the chemicals sprayed ...try to prevent...
Just wheat...nothing else.
No insects...pesticides take care of them.
No other plants...herbicides take care of them..
It makes for a bigger yield with less damage from insects or encroaching plants trying to fight with the wheat for nutrients and water and space......
and no need to separate the wheat from other plants...
Making the process convenient.
THAT is a monoculture.
One culture...One...not multiples...not many...

In a natural stand of birch trees...there will still be other plants..growing..other trees impinging..other animals and insects ...
That is called biodiversity ...
The same with the mack.
They couldn't survive naturally on their own...with nothing but themselves...they need an environment of biodiversity to survive.

There is no such thing in nature as a monoculture.
It is a human imposed construct.
And it has devastating results.
Look at what monocultural agricultural practices have led our species to?
We have broken the viability of ecosystems...
and the yields that could have fed so many are ruined ...possibly for good...by our over harvesting ...by our desire to control and attempt to demand more output from them...from the ideas that if we just make an area pump out a single thing...the system won't fold...
If the fields need to rest for 7 years to regain their nutrient value before farming them again...that isn't good enough...for decades we have been pouring more and more and more fertilizer into the soil and push the land til it breaks...
and if that isn't bad enough...where does all the fertilizer, herbicide and pesticide go?
All those varieties..of chemicals...that haven't really been tested for their interactions with one another ..let alone with the MILLIONS of other chemicals we dump into the environment ...
Where do they all go?
Why..
it becomes run-off...that heads straight into the swamps and marshes and bogs...the natural "liver" of ecosystems...meant to purify ...
Oh wait..cancel that...
A good few hundred years of draining and paving over as many marshes as possible has cut their number...it really is only the last couple decades that we have come to understand THAT basic function of marshes...and to slow NOT stop getting rid of the unsightly marshes...
Sooo...where do all the chemicals go?
almost straight into our drinking water...
and there is no purifier that is going to get rid of the chemicals...doesn't matter how many microns you go down to...

regardless...
It is this idea that the environment is akin to some flat picture...on a sidewalk...that irks me.
The Praries are not a monoculture.
The Praries are a biodiverse ecosystem with all kinds of species thriving inside it.
A stand of birch trees in nature...aren't a monoculture...
they are part of a biodiverse ecosystem...
and the same goes for the mack.

A monoculture is an imposed "crop" of a "resource" meant for "harvesting" for a profit.
To that end...
It is policed and any foreign impacting presence is removed.
Bug, animal "pest", or infiltrating plant ..native or not.

That depends on the level at which you are observing them. OK, a prairie may not be a good example. What to me looks like "just a grass" is probably a mixture of dozens of grass species. But there are vast forests with no trees other than birch. That is not to say that there are no other species in there, just no other trees. Similarly, a field of wheat has no other species of grass, but there are species of other things. Soil bacteria, fungi, even other plants, insects, birds, mice... Especially with organic farming, but even chemical treatment is not "perfect" and does not kill everything.

I never disputed that. We definitely do. They are many orders of magnitude more prevalent wherever humans are involved. But to say that they do not exist in nature is a bit of a stretch. There is an oxbow lake near where I live. Completely natural. I watched for the past 20 years how it was gradually losing connection to the main stream. Now it's not much more than a shallow bog, completely overtaken (choked) with water lilies. Its banks have similarly been overtaken by stinging nettle. There, two nice monocultures for you None of them are as big as a typical wheat field but they are monocultures none the less. It's just a matter of scale.

Wow man...
No....the Praries aren't even close to being called a monoculture...
They "are" an actual diverse ecosystem...
Mono means "ONE" ....not multiple.
No other plants are growing in the wheat fields here. No insects are tolerated...
THAT is a monoculture...
It is an artificially enforced unnatural construct...upon nature.
By the same reckoning you are using...
concerning the Praries...alone...
The Sahara and Gobi and Amazon Rainforest are monocultures...because they "look" like just one thing..."an endless seeming expanse of the same thing"

May as well call the oceans monocultures ...since a glance at the surface of them ...they look pretty much uniform too...

And as far as your lake drying up...
that is a natural movement to a marsh....and then ultimately...a meadow...and then most likely into a thicket...of trees..
Happens here all the time ...
Lakelets dry up...turn into swamp or marsh...
Got one occurring down at the bottom of my valley ...here...in fact...
It was...a long time ago...a very big lake...
Over the centuries it has gooten smaller...and is turning into marsh...
But that don't make the process to something monocultural...

As soon as we clear a space and plant only 1 thing...in it...and then make sure the yield and quality isn't disturbed by a foreign (to the monoculture) pest....it is a monoculture.
The biodiversity of that area is damaged.
Trying to argue the fine point and say fungi and bacteria exist ...is really stretching...
they exist as long as they have no negative impact on the crop.
The moment they do...they are considered a negative impact and are dealt with....

Organic?
There is a really questionable term...that has been warped for the use of marketing.

We will just have to agree to disagree. You see a monoculture only in a wheat field. Ergo, it is by definition exclusively a human construct. QED.

I see it everywhere where a single species manages to dominate and push out all other species. On whatever scale. A small pond overgrown with duckweed. A demijohn of wort that started off as a full ecosystem with hundreds of species of bacteria, protozoa and fungi including at least half a dozen of yeast but where a single species of yeast has taken over and choked everything else to death.

But whichever way you see it, and to bring us back at least a bit closer to the topic, neither way matches you claim in post 24 that the current mobile OS situation is a monoculture. There is diversity, with OSes coming and going all the time. Some die out young, some grow to dominate but eventually die out too, outcompeted by more successful newcomers, very much like species in the nature. If there is monoculture, it is only localised in both space and time. More akin to my duckweed overgrown pond than your wheat field.

In addition to my post 29...

If anything, I see the mobile OS landscape today more diverse than ever. Do you rremember not so long ago when there was just one mobile OS? Somehow I did not hear anyone at the time moaning how bad it was. Thank God Symbian is no longer with us, I feel absolutely no pity for it. There were others vying for its position (Blackberry, Palm, even Bada) with different levels of success. Eventually thee succeeded. One of them is already in decline, while there are others budding and hoping to take root. That is diversity. That is a dynamic landscape. The duckweed-overgrown pond has dried up and been re-colonized with hogweed. You may be moaning because you wanted it to be re-colonised with tulips instead but that is a matter of personal preference. Diversity exists, the landscape is constantly evolving.