Apple hits “all-time high” smartphone market share, takes #1 spot for 2023::Apple beat all the Android OEMs while selling dramatically more expensive phones.
Apple hits “all-time high” smartphone market share, takes #1 spot for 2023::Apple beat all the Android OEMs while selling dramatically more expensive phones.
Really wish we had a third viable option from a company who wasn’t evil. Year of the Linux phone anyone? 😇
It is almost impossible to penetrate the smartphone market at the moment, as both iOS and Android have the robust app ecosystem and polished OS experience and this is an extremely high bar to cross.
Just see what happened with Windows mobile or even Nokia, and mind you that was years ago. Now it should be even harder. I presume there is still a market for niche products based on Linux for example but nothing really competitive on the global scale.
Developing for iOS and Android is expensive and painful. Adding a third ecosystem to that would be more expensive and more painful.
We could probably come up with something Android adjacent that was able to run APKs. Hell I guess Amazon kind of tried that already.
Nobody wants to reinvent the wheel for free.
It’s already there. Jolla’s SailfishOS can run Android apps using their AlienDalvik compatibility layer. PostmarketOS can also run Android apps using Waydroid.
I had mentioned Firefox OS, now Capyloon. It’s basically PWAs, which would be so easy to make because they just use web technologies
I think the only one who could have actually competed was BlackBerry—properly managed. They already had the business market. If they had just kept pace with Android, they could have had a really solid footing.
Also, and to a far lesser extent, FirefoxOS. I could go on and on about how much better PWAs are for most apps. And because they’re so easy to make, they really could have grabbed a lot of the hobby market.
I really tried to make Linux phone work for me, but ultimately couldn’t do it. There are just too many small annoyances currently to make it a viable replacement. For me the two biggest deal breakers were a total lack of any kind of NFC payment system, and even worse, horrendous battery life due to the phone not being able to enter low power state without disabling the ability to receive calls. The later is being worked on at least, but I know of absolutely no solutions to the former.