You may recall I bought a Meizu Pro 5 Ubuntu Edition phone from China in June 2016. I wrote up a review here.
Unfortunately Canonical (the company which leads the Ubuntu project) announced they were ceasing development of the Ubuntu phone OS in April this year. (See also this Ars Technica article here.)
My Motorola Moto G phone (1st gen) was starting to show its age, and I thought it was time to find a new phone. I wanted to replace it with something open and thought about my options.
I was initially quite keen on FirefoxOS, a web-based operating system made by Mozilla. Alas, Mozilla announced in February 2016 that it was discontinuing its involvement in the Firefox OS project for phones, so this one is beyond hope now.
Another alternative is Cyanogen Mod (CM). CM is basically open source Android with a few modifications, and apart from it’s terribly difficult-to-spell name, the project is quite promising. It has the big advantage of being more open source than normal Android, while also allowing users to install Google apps if they choose. Fundamentally though, it’s still Android which means Google is steering the metaphorical software ship CM has latched onto. I’m also not aware of any phones which come with CM pre-installed (edit: turns out there are actually some).
Finally, Ubuntu phones have been on the horizon for a very long time, and have more recently started to look pretty good. (The OS is technically called ‘Ubuntu touch’ as it runs on tablets too) . One thing I particularly like about Ubuntu phones is that they’re designed to have frequent over-the-air (OTA) updates. This features makes them more sophisticated in this area than Android phones, despite the somewhat futile efforts of Google.
If you were cynical, you could argue that Ubuntu phones are too late arriving — the battle has been fought and Apple and Google have won — and it might only attract a few open source nerds at the fringes. But like any good open source believer, I’m hoping that the platform will eventually be a success. If I can buy a phone and help the cause then I may as well 🙂 Continue reading “Review: Meizu Pro 5 Ubuntu edition”
Nilay Patel had an interesting article atThe Vergeabout the limitations of the mobile web. His argument is that web browsers on mobile devices are terrible, which leads people to look content through apps:
Apps have become nearly irrelevant on desktops because the web experience is close to perfect, while apps are vitally important on phones because the web experience is dismal.
It also leads to companies like Facebook and Google trying to ‘solve’ the mobile web problem by either putting their content inside a walled garden (Facebook) or strip out most of the web page (Google).
He does mention that part of the reason The Verge loads so slow is that their website is because of the amount of crap they’ve loaded into it:
Now, I happen to work at a media company, and I happen to run a website that can be bloated and slow. Some of this is our fault: The Verge is ultra-complicated, we have huge images, and we serve ads from our own direct sales and a variety of programmatic networks. Our video player is annoying. (I swear a better one is coming, for real this time.) We could do a lot of things to make our site load faster, and we’re doing them.
I saw an interesting response to Nilay’s article on the lmorchard blog, where picks up on this last point about the crappyness of The Verge’s website. His takeaway message is:
… there are many things that can make the mobile web suck. Bad CSS layout, heavy UI frameworks, you name it. And, yeah, browsers can get better. They are getting better. There are interesting capabilities on the horizon.
But, I can’t help thinking if everyone shrank those tracking & advertising icebergs down to some sane magnitude relative to the actual content, that this web might be a better place overall.
This latter argument sounds much more sensible to me. Doesn’t it sound like a better idea to strip out the crap on the web rather than trying to make the crap move faster?
Over at The Verge, Vlad Savov has written quite an interesting analysis of Google’s market power in response to US antitrust regulators looking into whether Google has engaged in anticompetitive practices. I’ve written in the past about Google’s somewhat evil Android business model, but it’s interesting to think whether Google’s business practices could be thought of as “anti-competitive” and therefore need some kind of government regulatory response.
Savov sums up like this:
“It’s clear that Google is in a dominant position. It’s less clear how that can possibly be remedied when the company is giving away its software for free and under terms that everyone seems to find advantageous. Google is guilty of making software people and companies want. Now what?”
Overall, I think Savov has been a bit too easy on Google, but he definitely raises an interesting question: does what Google is doing count as being “anti-competitive”? I think that just because Google’s android offering is free doesn’t really affect whether it’s abusing its position and being anti-competitive. Mobile operating systems seem to be quite vulnerable to firms abusing their positions because of the strong network effects in play — as Savov points out there’s no apps for other operating systems because there’s no critical mass.
More broadly, if you disagree that Google’s behaviour with android is anti-competitive, but it’s still not desirable behaviour, where does that leave regulators and the public interest? Can regulators ever be nimble enough to challenge these quasi-anti-competitive actions, or do we just pray for the best and hope that innovation will throw up another competitor?
Android is a hugely popular mobile operating system, accounting for about 80% of smartphones. I used to think that it was great to have a mobile OS that was also open source. But I’ve gradually come to realise that Android’s open source credentials leave a lot to be desired, and that Google is engaged in some pretty anti-competitive behaviour.
So I’ve been thinking recently whether using an android phone or tablet is consistent with a concern for privacy, a desire to avoid monopolistic products, and a sympathetic attitude towards open source software. The conclusion I’ve come to is no – Android is pretty evil. Continue reading “Is Android evil?”
Howdy stranger 
