This is fiction.



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?

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

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.

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...

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.)