Fragmentation of Linux phones

Posted Aug 28, 2009 9:57 UTC (Fri) by epa (subscriber, #39769)
In reply to: Fragmentation of Linux phones by mjg59
Parent article: Gil: Here comes Maemo 5

It seems like such a massive waste of effort, when a reasonable 'Linux phone'
standard could be a worthy challenger to the iPhone and its mountain of apps.

Fragmentation of Linux phones

Posted Aug 28, 2009 12:01 UTC (Fri) by nhippi (subscriber, #34640) [Link] (2 responses)

Umm, I kinda agree, but 2 counterpoints:

1) Phones evolve faster than standards are written. The user interface of a motorola linux phone application would pixel-by-pixel tuned for 320x200 displays and stylus they had. Such application UI would simply not be usable on the high-dpi (260+) 800x480 thumb-oriented display of N900.

2) iPhone is proof that you don't need to be compatible with any standard at all to be able to gather a mountain of applications.

Still, the api/abi compatability story with nokia internet tablets has been an epic fail. Hopefully with Qt the track record will get better. The Trolls have so far managed to follow the amazingly simple rule of "if you brake the abi, you bumb the soversion".

Fragmentation of Linux phones

Posted Aug 28, 2009 19:42 UTC (Fri) by louie (guest, #3285) [Link]

Not that GNOME's API/ABI track record is perfect, but I don't think GTK/GNOME are at fault for maemo's various API breakages- they are often at very low levels (well below where GNOME/GTK tread). So the switch to QT probably won't solve those.

Fragmentation of Linux phones

Posted Sep 8, 2009 10:26 UTC (Tue) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link]

The iPhone is compatible with one standard: itself. You can write an iPhone app and it will work on any iPhone. You can't do that with 'Linux phones' taken as a group - there are several incompatible systems, each of which by itself has tiny market share. So while 'Linux' may have a substantial and increasing share of the mobile phone market, we don't get many network effect benefits from that because 'Linux' is not even compatible with 'Linux'.

Fragmentation of Linux phones

Posted Aug 28, 2009 20:02 UTC (Fri) by endecotp (guest, #36428) [Link] (3 responses)

My feeling is that OpenGL is the best common API between the various phones, and if I wanted to write a cross-device app that's what I'd use. Has anyone tried to build GUI components on top of OpenGL? I bet they have...

Fragmentation of Linux phones

Posted Aug 29, 2009 19:41 UTC (Sat) by eean (subscriber, #50420) [Link]

OpenGL is a bit low-level to just start writing apps with. Thats why we have GUI toolkits in the first place.

Fragmentation of Linux phones

Posted Sep 8, 2009 10:27 UTC (Tue) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link] (1 responses)

OpenGL is just a graphics library, not a framework for writing applications.
It does nothing to define network access or user input or persistent storage
or any of the other essentials.

Fragmentation of Linux phones

Posted Sep 10, 2009 9:43 UTC (Thu) by endecotp (guest, #36428) [Link]

POSIX defines most of the things that you mention.

Getting user input events is the one thing that's left over, and would probably need to be done in platform-specific ways.

Fragmentation of Linux phones

Posted Aug 29, 2009 23:04 UTC (Sat) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link]

OTOH, this is pretty standard in FOSS generally -- an area opens up, a bunch of different groups try to build what they think the best solution is ("let a thousand flowers bloom"), and then after a bit there's a die-back and people consolidate around one or a few projects. (Or, often, a second generation project comes along that cherry-picks the best parts from all the earlier innovator's experience, and ends up wiping them off the map.)

Very roughly, it's a process that tends to optimizes for the total quality of the final product, rather than time to market or efficient resource use along the way.