[OT] mobile rising

[Joakim]

On Tuesday, 7 November 2017 at 15:09:05 UTC, codephantom wrote:
> On Tuesday, 7 November 2017 at 14:33:28 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>> Hopefully that means we'll see more competition in
>> mobile than just android/iOS in the future.
>
> Watch out for the MINIX3/NetBSD combo...a microkernel coupled 
> with a BSD-unix that can run on pretty much anything.
>
> It may well be the future of the consumer mobile platforms, as 
> well as server/cloud platforms.
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oS4UWgHtRDw

That'd be great but given how long MINIX has languished, I'm 
doubtful.  Maybe Fuchsia, a google skunkworks OS with a new 
microkernel called Magenta, has a better shot:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/05/googles-fuchsia-smartphone-os-dumps-linux-has-a-wild-new-ui/

Whatever it is, I don't think the current mobile OS duopoly is as 
unassailable as people seem to think.  You'll need some unique 
angle though to cover up for the lack of apps initially, as Jolla 
found.

On Tuesday, 7 November 2017 at 15:21:20 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad 
wrote:
> On Tuesday, 7 November 2017 at 14:33:28 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>> similarity of APIs between macOS and iOS, but obviously there 
>> are significant developer and IDE differences in targeting a 
>> mobile OS versus a desktop OS, even if iOS was initially 
>> forked from macOS.
>
> Not in my experience… There are some things programmers have to 
> be aware of, because some features are not available on iOS, 
> but overall the same deal. Not too surprising as the iOS 
> simulator compiles to X86, so by keeping the code bases similar 
> they make it easier to simulate it on the Mac. So yeah, you 
> kinda run iOS apps on your mac natively. (Not emulated as 
> such.) Only when you go low level (ARM intrinsics) will this be 
> a real problem.
>
> So it goes without saying that iOS and OS-X have to be 
> reasonably similar for this to be feasible.

Not at all, it makes things easier certainly, but there's a 
reason why mobile devs always test on the actual devices, because 
there are real differences.

>> Let me correct that for you: there are many more iOS 
>> developers now, because it is a _much_ bigger market.
>
> Yes, but that does not mean that your original core business is 
> no longer important.

When you're making almost 5-10X as much from your new mobile 
business, of course it isn't:

https://www.macrumors.com/2017/11/02/earnings-4q-2017/

Now, they're not going to dump 10-15% of sales because the Mac's 
a fading business, they'll just keep milking it till it doesn't 
make any sense, as I already said.

>> Just a couple responses above, you say the iPhone UI will keep 
>> those users around.  I'd say the Mac is actually easier to 
>> commoditize, because the iPhone is such a larger market that 
>> you can use that scale to pound the Mac apps, _once_ you can 
>> drive a multi-window, large-screen GUI with your iPhone, on a 
>> monitor or 13" Sentio-like laptop shell.
>
> By commoditise I mean that you have many competitors in the 
> market because the building blocks are available from many 
> manufacturers (like radios).

Yes, that's what I was referring to also, the hundreds of 
millions of Android 7.0 smartphones now shipping with built-in 
multiwindow capability, ie the same building blocks as macOS.

> However, I think "laptop shell" is perceived as clunky. People 
> didn't seem to be very fond of docking-stations for laptops. 
> Quite a few went for impractically large screens on their 
> laptops instead.

There are all kinds of perceptions out there, but cost and "good 
enough" functionality rule the day, and that's what the mobile 
laptop shells and docks will provide.

I agree that people usually have concerns that lead to 
large-screened laptops, as I worried that the 15" display on my 
Powerbook might be too small when I was getting it a decade ago, 
but I got by just fine.  Wondered the same when I got my 13" 
1080p Win7 ultrabook five years ago, but ended up thinking that 
was the perfect size and resolution after using it.  I was 
skeptical that my 8.4" 359 ppi tablet would suffice when I 
started using it, but haven't had much of an issue over the last 
two years of daily use.

Maybe I'm just very adaptable, but I've increasingly come to the 
conclusion that smaller works fine, especially with the extremely 
high ppi on mobile displays these days.

>> I agree that very few apps are used on phones, and that they 
>> aren't as sticky as desktop apps as a result.  Hopefully that 
>> means we'll see more competition in mobile than just 
>> android/iOS in the future.
>
> iPhones are easier to displace because the UI is not so 
> intrusive compared to a desktop and the apps people depend on 
> are not so complicated. That might change of course… As people 
> get used to the platform Apple can make things more complicated 
> (less to learn, so you can introduce more features one by one).
>
> There are things about modern iOS that I don't find intuitive, 
> but since so many have iPhones they probably get help from 
> people nearby when they run into those issues. Scale matters in 
> many strange ways…

I agree that the simplicity of mobile UIs makes it easier for new 
mobile entrants, but the much greater demand for mobile and the 
resulting scale means that desktop OSs will _eventually_ be 
easier to displace by mobile platforms.  That'll happen once all 
mobile devices ship with easily accessible, desktop-style 
multi-window UIs built in, which as I said before is starting to 
happen with Android 7.0 Nougat.

Interestingly, this complexity of multi-window UIs might provide 
mobile platforms the stickiness they've been missing, that they 
gin up by tricking their users into platform-exclusive apps like 
iMessage or Facetime.

>> Lack of competition at the high end certainly played a role, 
>> but as I noted to codephantom above, consumers not needing the 
>> performance played a much larger role, which is why Samsung, 
>> with their much weaker SoCs, just passed Intel as the largest 
>> semiconductor vendor:
>
> I assume those aren't used in desktop computers? Samsung need a 
> lot of SoCs as they manifacture lots of household items…

They're used mostly in mobile devices, that consumers are 
replacing their desktop, Intel-Inside PCs with but mostly putting 
to new uses that PCs could never be put to.

>> Yes, but would that be in 2020 or 2050?  Would people who 
>> never had a cellphone get a smartphone, driving that market 
>> even larger, as is happening today in developing markets?
>
> Ok, I think it was fairly obvious that smart phones would at 
> least for a while be a thing as it was already then fashionable 
> in the high end. What wasn't all that obvious was that people 
> would be willing to carry rather clunky iPhones and Android 
> devices with bad battery life compared to the Symbian phones… 
> Which I think was to a large extent driven by social norms, 
> fashion and the press pushing the story on frontpages over and 
> over…
>
> Also, when I think of it, I wonder if Apple would have 
> succeeded if the press had not played them up as an underdog 
> against Microsoft in the preceding decade. The underdog Apple 
> rising from the dust and beating out Microsoft and Nokia made 
> for a good story to push… (in terms of narrative/narratology)

You're not tracking my point, that nebulous claims 15 years ago 
about how mobile would be "a thing" are irrelevant compared to a 
projection of a billion mobiles sold in 2013, which is what 
happened.  MS, Nokia, and others linked in this thread clearly 
thought as you did about mobile, yet they completely missed the 
boat.  Clearly they misjudged the scale, scope, and timing of 
that coming mobile tidal wave.

>> Jobs certainly wasn't, almost nobody was.  If there were a few 
>> making wild-eyed claims, how many millions of dollars did they 
>> actually bet on it, as Jobs did?  Nobody else did that, which 
>> shows you how much they believed it.
>
> Apple had worked on this for a long time and had also already 
> failed at it, but they decided to pushed it again when touch 
> screen technologies made it possible.

Yes, Apple made a big push, _at the right time_, while everybody 
else didn't.  Google and Samsung followed fast, to their credit, 
while everybody else fell to the wayside.

>> I'm not sure how the starting point matters, google funded 
>> Android from nothing and it now ships on the most smartphones.
>
> I don't think Android came from nothing, and it was 
> significantly more clunky than iOS, but Google did this to have 
> an option if other giants would try to block their revenue 
> stream from ads… So it was more passive-aggressive than a 
> business.

I see, please tell me how much market share Android came from 
then.  It was a startup that never released a product before 
being bought and grown inside google.

>> But even the google guys never bet the company on it, just 
>> gave it away for free for others to build on, which is why 
>> they never made as much money as Apple either.
>
> Well, it was to proctect their business, not to develop their 
> business, so I am not sure if Android is a good example.

A good example for what?  They started a mobile OS from nothing 
and grew it to two billion-plus users today, which you implied 
only those with a "starting point" could do.  Their motivations 
for doing so are irrelevant to that fact, but yeah, that's part 
of why they gave it away for free and didn't make as much money 
off it as Apple did, which they're now starting to backtrack with 
their in-house, high-priced Pixel line.