Not that I’d discard the idea, but it just seems more likely to succeed with more phones, if we stuck with android, just in another flavor.
The desktop app argument may sound cool on the surface, but to me it’s almost a counter argument. But that’s because I used windows ce pocket (or whatever it was called) before smartphones became a thing. It was really just a PDA with a GSM modem, that could make calls. Anyway, at the time people hadn’t figured out the smartphone UI, and everything required a stylus. I mean, even the keyboard required a stylus, because the interactable objects were too small to reliably hit with your fingers. Running desktop programs on your phone requires some tweaking to work.
Running desktop programs on your phone requires some tweaking to work.
I‘m curious to see how Ubuntu Touch addresses this. Nowadays smartphones are just normal computers, so you have to wonder whether the historic restrictions of Android and iOS are still relevant. I‘m inclined to see it as a user-interface problem only (small screen, touch vs click), which is a fully solved problem on web, with responsive layouts. Not sure what happened to Windows, but that’s also quite old and maybe it was just not well designed.
Not that I’d discard the idea, but it just seems more likely to succeed with more phones, if we stuck with android, just in another flavor.
The desktop app argument may sound cool on the surface, but to me it’s almost a counter argument. But that’s because I used windows ce pocket (or whatever it was called) before smartphones became a thing. It was really just a PDA with a GSM modem, that could make calls. Anyway, at the time people hadn’t figured out the smartphone UI, and everything required a stylus. I mean, even the keyboard required a stylus, because the interactable objects were too small to reliably hit with your fingers. Running desktop programs on your phone requires some tweaking to work.
I‘m curious to see how Ubuntu Touch addresses this. Nowadays smartphones are just normal computers, so you have to wonder whether the historic restrictions of Android and iOS are still relevant. I‘m inclined to see it as a user-interface problem only (small screen, touch vs click), which is a fully solved problem on web, with responsive layouts. Not sure what happened to Windows, but that’s also quite old and maybe it was just not well designed.