Raffeiner: My Ubuntu for mobile devices post mortem analysis

[Posted June 20, 2017 by corbet]

Simon Raffeiner describes in detail the reasons he sees for the failure of the Ubuntu phone project. "I understand there weren’t enough developers to fix everything at once, but instead of deciding to either make a good phone OR a good tablet with Convergence, we had devices which couldn’t really do anything right. The whole project also always always had this 'these are developer devices, it’s not important to do it fast, we will win in the long run' air around it – until the management quite obviously realised that this was all way too expensive and too much time had already been lost."

Raffeiner: My Ubuntu for mobile devices post mortem analysis

Posted Jun 21, 2017 6:28 UTC (Wed) by oever (guest, #987) [Link]

My Ubuntu Phone still works fine and I do not intend to stop using it for a while. The functionality I need (phone, messages, browser, camera) works very well. Making the phone a hotspot is a bit buggy. It's very impressive how far the team got.

It was non-trivial to buy a device. I bought two second-hand devices. Both are still in use. The life of an app developer was indeed preceded by a hurdle. I think that limited adoption. The audience that buys an Ubuntu Phone wants to contribute to help fix issues and write apps. But it's something that was not very easy.

My opinion is a bit skewed because I use NixOS where it's often clumsy to run applications that have not yet been packaged. From an Ubuntu VM, the development was much easier, but not so much so that I managed to contribute fixed in the time that I'd allowed myself for it.

A truly free phone operating system is essential for keeping our society healthy. I applaud all the people that contributed to Ubuntu Phone.

Raffeiner: My Ubuntu for mobile devices post mortem analysis

Posted Jun 21, 2017 6:32 UTC (Wed) by tajyrink (subscriber, #2750) [Link]

As the post misses the latest devices, it is useful to note that the poorly available Meizu Pro 5 Ubuntu Edition was a terrific product, as was Bq Aquaris M10 tablet for its price about two months after its release. But Pro 5 was available just for the initial batch that quickly sold out, and M10 released with poor performance and bad reviews, which was another in a series of many unfortunate problems. In the end M10 provided smooth performance and a very advanced convergence platform with LibreOffice, Firefox etc desktop apps shipping by default.

I think the post is good but misses some parts of the big picture which is of course even more complex and evolved after he left. The migrations click -> snap, armhf -> arm64, vivid -> xenial appeared as goals in addition to all the other complexities he mentions.

I bought my first mainstream OS smartphone in February 2017. I used Neo FreeRunner 2008-2011, Nokia N9 2011-2013, Jolla 2013-2015, Bq Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition 2015-2016, Meizu Pro 5 Ubuntu Edition 2016-2017. Good times!

Raffeiner: My Ubuntu for mobile devices post mortem analysis

Posted Jun 21, 2017 14:22 UTC (Wed) by karim (subscriber, #114) [Link] (3 responses)

Go-to-market has little to with technology and a lot to do with timing. The market already had a dominant player (Android) when Ubuntu mobile was proposed. Technology being almost exclusively a winner-takes-all game, this effort could not have resulted in anything but a niche offering at the time it was introduced, and in mobile that's a problem because of the feature-set expected by users, even the geekiest (me included).

P.S.: I don't mean to belittle anyone's contributions to this project nor anyone's desire to see a rich set of choices for mobile OSes -- I'm all for the latter myself.

Raffeiner: My Ubuntu for mobile devices post mortem analysis

Posted Jun 23, 2017 8:56 UTC (Fri) by mjthayer (guest, #39183) [Link] (2 responses)

I wonder whether Ubuntu phone could not at least have run Android apps. ChromeOS seems to be able to. It would not have solved the "have to be much better for people to switch" problem, but at least it would have addressed one of the issues. Would probably not have helped Canonical make money from an AppStore though.

Raffeiner: My Ubuntu for mobile devices post mortem analysis

Posted Jun 23, 2017 11:19 UTC (Fri) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (1 responses)

Sailfish OS on the Jolla phone can run Android apps (many of them anyway). This is apparently based on compatibility code that the Jolla people have licensed somewhere, rather than something they wrote themselves, and as such ought to have been available to Canonical, too.

Raffeiner: My Ubuntu for mobile devices post mortem analysis

Posted Jun 23, 2017 16:19 UTC (Fri) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link]

We actually spent quite a bit of time and effort on a free and open source android runtime for Plasma Phone, which was based on Ubuntu Phone. I have no idea where that project is now -- my last involvement was in 2015, when it was still active. It was called -- project shaslick, but I never was sure of the spelling.