Why would this project be more effective at doing this than iOS or Android?
I don’t see why people other than ideological technologists would want to use this phone.
To be clear, I think it’d be great if they did, but I think you’re massively understating the difficulty of challenging iOS and Android. Many companies have tried before - Microsoft, Amazon, Canonical, and failed.
This is an excellent question. The basic answer is that the incentive structures are different. Apple’s platforms are primarily designed to efficiently deliver commercial software. The app-store, the apis and everything else about their OS ecosystem is designed around the idea that packaged Apps, immutable to the user and remotely maintained by a commercial developer, are the answer to solving end-user problems using computers. They implement this model better than anyone else, but it’s not the only model.
Two other models are GNU Linux and it’s open source ecosystem, and the Smalltalk model as exemplified by pharo. In both of these models, the user isn’t just a consumer of Apps or the system, but is an active participant in creating it.
I’m not suggesting that either of these are the solution as they stand. I’m just pointing out that the iOS / Apple model is not the only possibility. You are right that just competing with it directly would fail. Even Android is failing at that.
> I don’t see why people other than ideological technologists would want to use this phone.
This is perjorative sounding, but a reasonable concern. If the answer was ‘people would use smalltalk instead of buying apps’, or ‘with Linux people can build whatever phone they like’, then I’d agree with you.
Of course we need something that end-users can plausibly use without being a technologist.
My argument is that we can actually build such a thing, and that it can be much better as a ‘bicycle for the mind’ than iOS.
> Many companies have tried before - Microsoft, Amazon, Canonical, and failed.
This is to be expected. A company trying to compete with Apple on their terms, even if they have the resources of Microsoft, is going to fail.
The answer will be a low-end disruption - something that is good enough, but also capable of things that iOS is not because of the commercial model. It won’t come from one company trying to take on Apple directly.
...What? Citation needed. Android by far accounts for the majority (85%) of smartphones not just worldwide but even in nearly all wealthy countries other than the US, Canada and Japan.
https://www.mobileapps.com/blog/android-vs-ios-market-share#...
The fact a lot of people download free apps is pretty much meaningless.
You may as well say a lot of people visit websites on Android.
By the same logic, you could argue that Linux is failing relative to both OS X and Windows in the server market because it's not making as much money.
It’s not the world’s most active software ecosystem. The web is.
> is failing because it doesn't extract as much capital
It is failing as a business.
> as a system set up as a premium product ecosystem targeted at the world's elites?
If you consider most American teenagers to be ‘the world’s elites’, then ok.
> By the same logic, you could argue that Linux is failing relative to both OS X and Windows in the server market because it's not making as much money.
Only if it were true, but it isn’t.
That’s a big “if” though. Curious if you think there are larger trends that would suggest that the current standard of the “walled garden”/closed software model will become less effective than the “active participant” model in meeting the computing needs of everyday people.
Actual computer literacy in the sense of being about to both read and write programs is only going to increase over time.
My sense is that Apple is underserving the needs of software creators in general, by shoehorning everything into Apps.
They could respond to this, and I have been expecting them to for years. My sense now is that they may be too are too blinded by the store model to realize what is happening.
This is one of the trends that I think Jobs would have understood, but that a post Jobs Apple may miss.
Another trend is the rise of crypto. I am not a Bitcoin bull or anything like that, but now that there is so much creativity in the crypto space, I think it’s entirely feasible that we could solve the problem of distributing trust, so that we can provide something for end users with the safety of the App Store but without the central gatekeeper.
This is not even close to being a solved problem yet, which is why I oppose the breakup of app stores.
However the basic tools seem to exist for us to solve it, as does the pressure.
AFAIK every single change in tech starts from such people.
Why would non-idealists use this phone when the alternative they already have in their pocket and know how to use can do everything the PinePhone can do?
1) avoid the privacy issues of Android & iOS 2) have the confidence that as long as their hardware work, they will have updates 3) buy from a brand that will allow you (or a third party) to fix your hardware (Pine64 sells you spare parts, and at reasonable prices!) 4) have an user-replaceable battery 5) have an affordable smartphone (I know, there are 30$ android phones but they tick none of the above points)
The points 2 to 4 will interest an increasing number of people this century, imo
edit: typos
Nobody expects them to.
People will use it when it does something the alternative they already have cannot do.
Using the term ‘idealists’ is perjorative but more importantly, it implies confusion about why people buy this phone.
The people who buy the phone today do so because it allows them to do things which the alternatives cannot. I.e. the purchase is pragmatic. This is the precise opposite of idealism.
The answer is to do things they cannot do, or will be too slow to do. This is unlikely to be possible for a company like Microsoft.
But banks see this is an expense that can be cut if everyone would just use the Android or IOS smartphone they already own (conveniently making the customer pay for the hardware), and when you have that support in place, you would want to be able to do the actual banking on your smartphone too — not just authenticating. So now banks have two apps and a PWA they must maintain, along with the infrastructure for the dedicated card-readers.
So at this point your bank is asking all the people still using card-readers to please consider using the app, so they can kill off that feature. Dutch bank ING tried this when their old authentication method needed replacing (they where one of the last banks still using SMS tokens). Their approach was to nudge/annoy/scare customers into using their app for a year, but in the end they folded and grudgingly had to provide stand-alone card-readers as well.
Some of the newer small digital only banks in the Netherlands are 100% app only though, and the bigger banks are quite jealous, but can't just drop support for their existing customer base.
It clearly isn’t going to do so overnight or in a year or two.
But it easily could over the 5-10 year timeline. A distributed App Store plus an experience that is more attuned to the needs of users than iOS or Android can accomplish that.
To solve the ‘bank’ problem all it needs to do is provide a really solid PWA story.
What it shouldn’t do is provide Android compatibility.