Mobile OS Alternatives: Are companies confused ??

Alright, following are the mobile OSes I remember off the back of my head:

1. Windows CE
2. Windows Mobile
3. Symbian Series x
4. Symbian Anna
5. Symbian Belle
6. Symbian^3
7. Meego
8. Maemo
9. Bada
10. Android
11. iOS
12. Tizen
13. Blackberry
14. I am sure I have missed lots of them killed at various stages of their lifecycle

Out of the lot, iOS and Blackberry have been pretty much focussed on both software and hardware front, Android has been battling multiple versions and form factors, but has otherwise been focussed, Windows has evolved from CE to Mobile to now a full-blown (almost) Windows 8.

Let's look at the others: Palm faltered somewhere along the lines and was gobbled up, Symbian was killed by its own parent and Maemo/Meego died in their infancy. Samsung tried its own Bada platform but nowadays not much is heard about it. And now the news is Samsung with Intel and a few others is launching Tizen.

Just how many different OSes are we going to have? The rate at which these OSes are being nipped in the bud without trying its full potential is alarming. Why can't companies actually commit to some long term plans with these mobile OSes?

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Both Windows Mobile 5.x/6.x and Windows Phone 7 are (different) layers on top of CE. Phone 8 is a tweaked RT layer on top of NT-on-ARM.

If Phone 7 could be characterized as "dead" Phone 8 should be considered "decomposed." I can't imagine anyone developing for these platforms, since they have market share trending toward 0 rapidly.


Some of the OSs you listed only have a meaningful existance regionally.

Some cover both phones and tablets, while others also cover set top boxes, embedded systems, desktops, game consoles, etc.


Despite criticism over version churn, Android is one of the few where you can write applications that run on any version. You just have to be sure to choose your API-level target appropriately, and for the most part each new version is a superset of the older ones. Breaking changes are rare. Yes, things do get deprecated and eventually support is removed, but in general this isn't the kind of problem you see on other platforms which shift radically.


I suspect some of those minority OSs you listed are meant to be disposable weapons employed by Samsung, et al. to gain leverage over the bigger names. The losers will be the consumers who foolishly buy into them and later find no future path.


What is the context of your question? As a consumer, a programmer, or perhaps as a technology strategist?

There also appears to be an increasing number of cross-platform tools that will build apps for multiple targets. The targets are generally Android, iOS, and Windows Phone something. Generally, these seem to be predominantly HTML 5 tools, but not exclusively. Perhaps the underlying OS will diminish in importance, possibly because there is no single winner.

HTML5 ends up not really being a "standard" at all because of radically incompatible implementation differences. Multimedia codecs are just one area.

Mobile applications built on HTML5 often suffer from generic ugliness as well since it becomes a lot of work trying to make them look native and to follow UI interaction guidelines for each platform, i.e. they suck.


Mobile Web Technologies Tide is Turning?

MoMo London HTML5 vs Native

Why HTML5 provided more tricks than treats in 2012

I see that with HTML5, but I'm fairly sanguine about the long-term prospects (and long-term in programming means months, not years) in this regard. The situation appears to be the same as after the ANSI Standard C++ spec was ratified. It took a few iterations before any compilers were 100% compliant, and a few more iterations before most or all were.

I don't want to sound favourite, although I have owned and used Windows phones (6.1, 6.5) and Nokia phones (dumb and smart, Symbian series 40, Belle), and a bit of off-beat ones like Philips (they did make mobile phones!) and Sony Ericsson. My observation is only the iOS, Win Mobile, Android and Blackberry have been persistent while the other OSes were abandoned by their creators (without even making an attempt to realize their true potential).

My rant is from all the perspectives. If I am a developer, I can't really start learning Tizen because whoa! Two years down the line Tizen will have been replaced by something else while Tizen is relegated to an amateur developer community as a pastime. The moment I decide to target Symbian and sell my apps and make some money, along comes someone at Nokia who decides to 'donate' the OS to the open source community and poof! goes my revenues.

As a consumer, the Bada phone seems to offer all the goodies of a twice-costlier Android, but six months after I buy I might find myself with no OS or app updates.

If I invest in Nokia, I don't know if they will ever continue with promising OSes like Maemo or Meego, and they are surely not going to explain their rationale to me. So I am not sure my money is being used for the best cause.

As for the development platform, it's another confusing world. While some communities are trying to publish platforms which will work across a wide range of OSes (take Qt, which is even supposed to work on normal PCs!), there are others which are pushing for a more native way of writing software (iOS?). So that's another world of confusion.

However the treatment meted out to such promises as meego or maemo, or even Symbian is truly disappointing, since these could have spawned whole ecosystems of their own (Symbian already had it), and it will take a lot of time for something similar to be built for a new OS.

But after all, what's the logic of this use and throw approach??

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Personally I just try to spend my time a couple of years behind the curve. It may not be glamorous but it's stable. Personally I'm not even sure this whole interweb thingy's not just a flash in the pan.

Android has settled enough in the past 2 years that vendors have stopped "skinning over" the standard UI or adding proprietary launchers. This has eliminated the worst of the headaches application developers once faced.

Quote:

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... the Android UI has come far enough along that stock Android is actually a superior device.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFab8InuiFE

What next?

Polaroid introduces the iM1836 mirrorless camera with Android

That's what was promised with Java. It was touted as the one platform or language which would work on each and every device including TVs, set tops, mobiles, PCs and wristwatches (I made that last one up, but it could've been a reality).

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There are efforts to make slimmed versions of Mono work on lots of devices too, complementing Microsoft's .Net Micro Framework.