Why Xiaomi, Lenovo, and Huawei Can't Compete with Apple

Re:Why Xiaomi, Lenovo, and Huawei Can't Compete with Apple by contingencies on Monday February 15, 2016 @07:53AM (#11103068)

I've said it before and I'll say it again: the first mobile device manufacturer to commit to making ad-hoc and mesh networking fully available to developers in a functionally secure fashion will profit immensely. It will certainly herald a major shift in mobile. Why the hell can't your phone talk to your TV talk to your computer talk to your wife's phone within an app? "Send this music to friend", "Play this game with whoever's on the smart-TV", "auto-share my RSS reads with family and friends", etc.

Now, I'm no lawyer and I'm not interested in digging through Google's Android licensing fortress, but even if there are issues there, if there's a place in the world where a company can make the requisite API extensions happen and have them reach a mass-market product regardless of legality, it's China. That company will win the developing world low end smartphone segment, because cellular data simply doesn't exist in an affordable, user friendly and decent performance manner for most of the developing world's population.

It will bring a return of SMTP/UUCP-style store and forward. It may be the apple in the developing world's eye.

Closest thing out there right now seems to be http://developer.servalproject.org/dokuwiki/doku.php

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Re:Why Xiaomi, Lenovo, and Huawei Can't Compete with Apple by kayoone on Monday February 15, 2016 @08:23AM (#11103217)

Nobody is doing that because it's very complex. You will need a lot of mature open standards or a set of proprietary ones to talk to the devices around you like that. Ironically this already works best within the Apple ecosystem. If you own an iPhone, Mac and Apple TV the integration to hand off calls and stream audio/video around etc is pretty good, while on the open side of things, stuff most of the time kind of works and breaks to often.

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Re:Why Xiaomi, Lenovo, and Huawei Can't Compete with Apple by signal11 on Monday February 15, 2016 @02:53PM (#11105481)

The other company that should be able to do this well is Samsung (they make TVs, phones and other consumer electronic items). In reality (and I own a Samsung Smart TV and have owned Galaxys) I felt their software was extremely crappy and I just ended up avoiding it.

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Re:Why Xiaomi, Lenovo, and Huawei Can't Compete with Apple by contingencies on Monday February 15, 2016 @10:00PM (#11107641)

Actually I used to work for Samsung, and I've been to their HQ in Suwon, Korea. It's a very corporate corporation, not an engineering corporation. I'd expect someone like HTC or a Chinese competitor to crack this nut first.

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Re:Why Xiaomi, Lenovo, and Huawei Can't Compete with Apple by signal11 on Monday February 15, 2016 @08:16AM (#11103183)

> the first mobile device manufacturer to commit to making ad-hoc and mesh networking fully available to developers in a functionally secure fashion will profit immensely

Ironically, Apple did this in iOS 7, and this resulted in chat apps that could work even in the absence of a phone signal (e.g. FireChat, which now works on Android too). I think a big blocker from getting these to work on TVs is that TVs had non-standard OSes. With more TVs running Android, and Apple pushing SDKs for tvOS, I'll be surprised if these apps don't become more popular.

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Re:Why Xiaomi, Lenovo, and Huawei Can't Compete with Apple by kbart on Monday February 15, 2016 @08:12AM (#11103156)

Such devices would be great from the user point of view, but not so great if you want to make money from them. Apple have proven that walled gardens will make you tons of money, while a lot of manufacturers, that provide more open solutions, struggle to survive. It's not so much of a technological problem as that ad-hoc and general purpose computing/networking is notoriously hard to monetize.

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Re:Why Xiaomi, Lenovo, and Huawei Can't Compete with Apple by kristiandupont on Monday February 15, 2016 @03:41PM (#11105778)

You can do that with the internet -- what is the benefit to this, besides from privacy? I can see that aspect in it, but I don't think the business case in that is as big as you are making it.

Every time there's a privacy issue with Facebook, HN is up in arms declaring Facebook dead but the truth of the matter is that most people just don't care.

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Re:Why Xiaomi, Lenovo, and Huawei Can't Compete with Apple by contingencies on Monday February 15, 2016 @09:59PM (#11107639)

what is the benefit to this, besides from privacy?

Cost. Developing world people ... they maybe walk to market, maybe visit another village, they don't want to drop huge money on mobile data, which is stupid slow anyway and developers don't care about their use case. With local mesh it's fast enough that things work anyway.

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