alt Hacker NewsWe need a third option. Be it SalfishOS, Ubuntu Touch, Nura, or whatever picks up with a sizable community. We just need to start developing and investing in that one. It won't be perfect, but it will offer an alternative and control to the users.
We need a third option. Be it SalfishOS, Ubuntu Touch, Nura, or whatever picks up with a sizable community. We just need to start developing and investing in that one. It won't be perfect, but it will offer an alternative and control to the users.
There are plenty of alternative OS options. None are accepted by phone companies and shipped in orders of 100m devices worldwide.
Android has ~4b cumulative users, iOS 2.5b. Combined 1-2b phones are shipped annually, so phones are replaced over 3-6 years or so. Total production numbers of Sony PS2/Nintendo Switch are ~160m each, and there haven't been enough of those to be a viable alternative consumer platforms. China moves couple hundred million units per year of de-Googled phones internally(Google services are default banned in China except through Hong Kong VPN and such), and that doesn't seem to be changing situations much. Windows Phone was like few hundreds total.
The third option has to ship like 1000m - 1b units total and/or annually to be viable. Code quality... isn't going to matter, but it'll have to be literally 10-100x more popular than Nintendo. That is going to be the bar.