One problem with relying on emulation is that Google has moved a lot of functionality from the open source Android layer to Google Play Services, and they obviously wont publish that on someone else's platform.

https://developers.google.com/android/guides/overview

Yes, this is a problem.

But frankly, many users only want messaging, maps, banking and a few other things.

WebAssembly could solve that.

You can install those from the Play Store, can't you? If you are going yo emulate Android, it's best to go all in and install the Google services into the emulator too. (Of course, the distributor can't just install it, but he can make the device ready for installing it, requiring only some confirmation.)

There doesn't seem to be. Hell BB10 was basically what you describe and IIRC had a layer to let let devs submit Android apps into the Blackberry World from day one. It wasn't enough and devs couldn't even be bothered to do that. Later they partnered with Amazon and added the Amazon App Store and let users add their own Android apps. Still wasn't enough. It was a great phone OS and hands down was the best at email/messaging. Maybe a true FOSS community effort could carve out more of niche with this though.

Even Microsoft couldn't make it work with barrels of cash. Granted they did make some huge mis-steps.

You can probably make the case for it being a triopoly today had Microsoft done some things differently. But that's different from saying that Microsoft could realistically start down the mobile phone path again today. You can be sure if they thought they had any realistic hope of making it, they would try.

Blackberry's android application sideloading made it one hell of a killer smartphone. I had a Q5 as a work phone for a while and it was great to still have so many apps I was used to from android. The killing blow was everything moving to needing play services just to function.

Windows Phone was a shame, but completely Microsoft's fault. I liked the Windows Phone UI/UX, and the irony is that if they had've invested more into something like Xamarin, they could've likely had extremely compelling tooling for big enterprises (like banks) to support Apps on different platforms. But even Skype for Windows Phone took ages to actually land.

Or emulate Android apps, like you said. That solves the initial issue of having no apps. It seems like Google Fuchsia will likely take this approach. Although it isn't clear if another platform could do this, without a lot of goodwill from Google - and good luck with that.

I loved my lumia 520. It was cheap as chips, fast as hell and at the time more user friendly than whatever overheating droid alternatives were available. I think it was one of the fastest selling phones at the time.

I distinctly remember Google making it a right pain to use Google's products on the phone, namely Youtube and Google Maps. In addition I remember a bunch of articles talking about how Google prevented Microsoft from developing a native youtube app and doing shady nonsense regarding User Agent filtering.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/01/google-maps-windows-...

https://geekinsider.com/google-blocks-youtube-on-windows-pho...

How Google got away with that is beyond me.

Certainly makes me somewhat glad that Microsoft just chose to yoink chromium for edge. At least now Google can't do any more shady nonsense with the browser to filter them out.

I never owned a Lumia phone but everyone I knew who did have one loved it.

It was on my short list for my next phone at one point, but the platform imploded before that happened.

Microsoft using Chromium for Edge, it's a bad notice. It only helps Google to get a strong hold on the web and his standards...

Microsoft is a trillion dollar company with experience working on Chromium and browsers. They have the talent and resources to run/take over chrome.

If Google makes a misstep, it wouldn't take too much effort for Microsoft to run a hostile fork and capture a massive user base. They already are the 2nd most popular browser.

As it is, they have nullified Google's anti-competitive nonsense of using the browser as a way to manipulate markets.

Granted as a Firefox user, I conceded your point to how to affects open standards. Frankly though, that has already been long tarnished by Google anyway.

> I think there is room for a third platform

And it already exists: GNU/Linux phones running desktop OSes, Librem 5 [0] and Pinephone [1].

[0] https://puri.sm/products/librem-5

[1] https://pine64.org/pinephone

I think there is absolutely no way we should consider it a third platform next to the other two giants. It is way too early to call it that when they struggle with even just being daily drivers for the most enthusiastic.

Surely, 2022 will be the year of Linux on the palmtop!

You should take a look at SailfishOS. I switched from Android to Sailfish OS 8 years or so ago. The original Jolla Phone was really nice and the OS too. Later I switched to an Sony Xperia X with Sailfish OS, but it goes only downhill from there. I think the problem are the devices, the software might be okay. Now I'm with an IPhone and I'm still not happy, it's just something that is not horrible.

I have no idea if they will try it again someday, but I would love to see Microsoft give this another go. I think strong messaging about "quality over quantity" of apps would actually be a boon to them. I never go looking in the App Store for new apps anymore - just give me my video streamers, a Reddit client, Spotify, Slack, Discord, and Signal and I'm good to go.

Exactly. Years ago the number of apps in each app store was portrayed as "more is better" and a moat against new platforms. But realistically, how many apps does the average mobile user actually use, now that the novelty has worn off? I would guess that 75% of all users actually care about maybe 50 different apps combined, like Facebook, Netflix, WhatsApp, Spotify, etc.

It's been said many times that Microsoft could've won the mobile wars by simply taking a billion dollars, and paying the companies with the top 100 apps in the Apple app store to port their apps to Windows Mobile. That's $10 million each.

Instead, they spent billions and billions of dollars trying to attract developers to their platform before eventually shuttering it.

There was a phone with awesome hardware, an awesome mobile-first operating system, and practically no apps. Bill admitted his biggest mistake was being too preoccupied with the antitrust activity in Europe, and missing the shift to mobile computing cost him ~400 billion.

I agree with this so strongly I was about to write the same and have held the theory a long time. I wonder if there is a data set out there to show 95% of the world population has substantially similar apps installed and the ones they care about enough to consider a deal breaker are even fewer and less diverse. I don't think MS would even have had to spend that much.

I'm sure many would be reluctant to trust m$ as a 3rd party in the mobile phone stakes, particularly with their telemetry, which is the root of the cancer plaguing the existing platforms (including desktop) already.

Most people aren’t using $ in words like Msft. Most likely find that weird. Same with caring about telemetry if they even know its definition. This is not even getting into not caring about all of this enough to call stuff “cancer”

Microsoft does jackshit of a telemetry compared to Big Google.

Google seems like they have lost a lot of their Android enthusiasm. I could see them making a deal with Microsoft for Android.

Does google have enthusiasm for anything anymore other than ads and search? Maybe cloud services? I would be afraid to use anything but open source tools on their cloud service given the kill rate they have for products...

> Does google have enthusiasm for anything anymore other than ads and search?

Does google have enthusiasm for anything anymore other than ads?

Fixed that for you. More info: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31094407.

I don’t think you’re crazy. I think WebOS really could’ve done it if they’d had a better launch partner than Sprint, and had done better marketing.

Their application Model was web technologies based, which is quite popular now, between React-Native and PWAs.

I’m doubtful though that someone could pull out off now. Mostly because you need access to the services that people already use and Google/Amazon/Apple already wall their gardens to their own liking.

Firefox tried it some years ago. Same Microsoft, Samsung, etc...

I still miss Firefox OS. What happened to it? To me it seems that it was going well, but it was impossible to buy a phone with Firefox OS.

Got abandoned by Mozilla :/

AFAIK KaiOS (the operating system for some T9-keyboard-only phones like the rebooted Nokia 8110) is Firefox OS with a new coat of paint, but it also seems kinda dead. And no touchscreen in those devices, so not really comparable to "normal" smartphones anymore... :/

long live WebOS!

PostMarketOS is pretty great.