Mobile Carriers Cry "Less Operating Systems"

A NYTimes story says "Multiple systems have hampered the growth of new services, mobile phone executives say. " The story does a good job of capturing some of the changing dynamics in the mobile OS market — but rightly raises the point that given the sheer size of the mobile market, it's unlikely we're going to see the homogenization we have in the desktop market.

Shome mishtake shurely?

"FEWER" systems! "FEWER"!

I know they have trouble adding-up, but jeez...

Re:Shome mishtake shurely?

I logged in JUST to type the same thing. That grated on my eyes something fierce. I thought "Might they mean 'less operating system' as in a smaller one?"

Re:Shome mishtake shurely?

THANK YOU!

For those who don't get it, fewer is for things you can count, less is for things you can't.

Not Quite Sure...

This may be flamebait, a troll, or just general bitching, but I've got some karma to burn, so WTF. I am always amazed that computer geeks have such a negative attitude about spelling and grammar, considering that most people here have some knowledge of and experience with programming, and many program for a living. It seems to me that if you can't spell, you can't program.
int main() works, but
innt mayn() doesn't
So why is it that people who are proud of their fluency in C++, or whatever, are proud to sound like a drooling mouth-breather in English?

Re:Shome mishtake shurely?

$ less operating systems
operating: No such file or directory
systems: No such file or directory

Cygwin doesn't like it either.

Answer

The answer is simple and obvious but unfortunately unlikely to happen: The mobile companies should collaboratively work on a single OSS operating system, which they can all use as a base, and then build their own stuff on top of that. It would be better for everyone (apart from the companies that make operating systems of course).

Re:Answer

The mobile companies should collaboratively work on a single OSS operating system, which they can all use as a base, and then build their own stuff on top of that.

Perhaps. But despite what the article claims, the problem is not a proliferation of operating systems. The problem is a proliferation of userland APIs. If the phone presents a consistent API to userland programs, then the underlying OS is irrelevant. To an extent, the mobile world has a standard API in the form of J2ME. But it's far from universal, and support is patchy, so an app written for one phone may or may not work on another phone. And of course, J2ME isn't necessarily the best choice of API in the first place. But your single OS solution could still potentially suffer from the problem of multiple APIs, so that in itself isn't a complete solution. I'll admit that it would probably help the situation, though, and agree with you that it's unlikely to happen.

Re:Answer

What REALLY makes me LMAO with this thread is that this is EXACTLY what you all rail against on the desktop, where y'all get a glowy feeling imagining a world with hundreds (or thousands) of different desktop operating systems.

Here the cellphone operators are telling you that this is a bad thing, and, ironically, you're by and large agreeing with them... Why not tell them that every vendor should pick their own linux distro that they can customize and install and be unique? Afterall, it's EXACTLY what you'd all do if the platform in this article were PC's instead of mobile phones...

-AC

Re:Answer

What REALLY makes me LMAO with this thread is that this is EXACTLY what you all rail against on the desktop, where y'all get a glowy feeling imagining a world with hundreds (or thousands) of different desktop operating systems.

No, I don't. In my perfect word there would be one or two core OS, and they would be OPEN SOURCE. So, there is nothing ironic about my viewpoint.

well

If/when there is one mobile OS they will be crying MORE, MORE!

Good!

it's unlikely we're going to see the homogenization we have in the desktop market.

I sincerely hope so. More competition -> better products.

Right now if a mobile phone gets popular it's because it has features that more people want, not because 'everyone else uses that one'. That's the way it should be.

Now if only we could get the desktop market to behave that way.

Re:Good!

Except the razr, which looks pretty but has almost no features to speak of and breaks easily.

That ones popular because they've made a dozen pretty version of it. That phone is being treated like an accessory to an outfit rather than something to talk to people with.

If that trend continues, we'll end up with phones that you can't actually use with a plan...because they don't actually do anything except make cool noises (i.e. you can't communicate to other people with 'em).

Re:Good!

Sends and Recieves Phone Calls

I'm amused that this is listed as a "feature" of a telephone.

Say what you will about Windows

Say what you will about Windows on the desktop, but the homogenization of the desktop OS is one of the main things that accelerated the growth of the PC. I'm not saying that it would be good for the mobile market by any stretch of the imagination -- one of the reasons we have so many OSes is that we have so many devices, each targeted at different tasks.

However, in my mind only one OS could possibly fill the bill for all mobile devices, and that's Linux. Linux is easily and readily modifiable, not just by license, but by the way it's grown into a modular kernel that's fairly platform agnostic these days, one that can be stripped down to the tiniest sizes if necessary.

If I had one mobile OS to choose from -- well, Linux would be it. And it's not just because I'm a Linux-using geek, but because it really is the best tool for the job.

Re:Say what you will about Windows

err, under that logic, wouldn't Apple have had an even bigger advantage?

It's the platform which matters, not the kernel

Hmm... not sure whether the parent has really worked on a mobile phone platform. I've worked extensively on several: many proprietary RTOS platforms, Linux and Windows Mobile, with a little Symbian thrown in.

Linux is a kernel. A pretty good one, I grant, but it only provides kernel services. The key to a mobile device is what sits on top of the kernel, and Linux has less of a good story to tell. Look at Windows mobile or Symbian and you'll notice that they each provide a well-defined set of telephony oriented services and APIs and a set of applications which use these.

If you want to build a product based on Symbian or Windows Mobile, you basically just have to implement a set of well-defined APIs and device drivers for your platform and you're good to go. While this is far from being a trivial undertaking, it provides a stable environment for 3rd party application developers, who stand a reasonable chance that their application will work as expected on any device supporting the OS.

The Linux situation is fast-developing, but there's no question that the rich telephony middleware layer isn't really there yet. There are a variety of different consortia, all of which have websites with "white papers" and some of which have formal API documents. To my knowledge, however, none has anything close to a complete, commercial quality implementation of a reasonably full suite of telephony middleware and user applications. I don't doubt that this will eventually arrive (there's a lot of pressure in that direction), but there's no 'standard' that I can see.

Let's just look at UI and application framework: there are at least two common options and a rich variety of more-or-less unsupported options: QTopia (which is probably the most mature right now, but costs $$$) and GTK+ (which is free but less mature on embedded platforms). If I'm an application developer, which do I target. Unlike Linux desktop machines, most of which resolve the problem by installing most of the libraries for both, space is at a premium on mobile devices - so QTopia devices require QT for the UI (and lock out GTK+ applications) and GTK+ devices do the converse. This is important to operators as a QTopia based phone is sufficiently different to a GTK+ based phone that they would really need to treated as separate platforms even though the kernel is the same.

At least the UI frameworks exist and work pretty well. What about the code to do things like:
* Manage a SIM-based phonebook
* Interface with a CDMA or UMTS modem (which needs to be specified
    in an abstract way to support the many different chipsets out there)
* Implement the SIM toolkit
* Implement all of the user notifications required for SMS, supplementary
    services, SIM and so on.
* Gracefully manage multiple network connections in a seamless manner
    (upmarket device probably has cellular packet service, Bluetooth,
    WiFi, possibly tethered connection to desktop machine, IrDA, ...)
* Secure update of the software images on the device
* Over the air provisioning of connections and services

I could go on, but I guess the point is made.

Sadly, Linux for embedded mobile devices risks becoming marginalized by a repeat of the 'desktop wars': several incompatible implementations of some pretty basic services which end up fragmenting the market because none achieves critical mass. Success means reducing the number of 'initiatives' (probably to one) and showing us the code. Enough of the white papers...

Our needs

What we need here is a good, old-fashioned monopoly.

You know, something we can praise for setting standards and reducing overall expense now, and hate for existing later on.

I bet it wouldn't be such a problem...

I bet it wouldn't be such a problem if they just left out the crippleware in order to nickel and dime us.

cell phone companies have hampered the growth more

Will all of the lock down, lock in, and prison sentences (aka 1-2 year cell phone contacts)
I once tried to get a windows mobile phone and they said that you must pay for 2 years for data + voice to get it at the deal price.
T-mobile is cutting off data / internet to non T-mobile apps on some of there phones.
others lock down Bluetooth to force you to use there network, and some have internet data limits.
The I-phone is cool but they only want you to use payed for apps on it.

Ah-diddums.

You have to feel for the poor mobile telcos.. They have to work so hard supporting a number of operating systems on phones so that they can hobble them and make sure that their customers are wrung of every penny they can be.

Now, instead of crying about possible missed new lock-ins because it's too much effort to write the shackling software they should just shut-up and let the phone makers produce phones that the public want rather than those designed purely for the mobile telco's mean, narrow minded, penny pinching marketing departments.

Waaaaah!

Oh poor carriers! Boo hoo hoo!

They're just upset because they put a lot of research and development into stripping the features out of phones that they find inconvenient, and having multiple systems means they need to spend that much more in tech so that they can hamper the new devices similarly.

I mean, they CAN'T just let the phones be, can they? If they did, then the phones would have the out-of-the-box capability to transfer ringtones and wallpapers 'n whatnot directly from people's PCs, or from web sites OTHER than the carriers!

New OSes have *nothing* to do with the fact that adoption is being hampered. It's the greed of the telcos that are hampering things, because they demand that phones be completely locked down so users are ONLY allowed to do what the telcos want, like paying 4 bucks for crappy renditions of Madonna songs.

I know nobody wants to admit it...

But this is why Microsoft is actually a good thing on the desktop market. I'm all for using different OSes, but the sheer number of applications available for a single OS (And in this case it happens to be Windows) is staggering compared to how bad it COULD have been had we had multiple OSes that were popular. It's expensive to develop cross platform support, which is why most companies will aim for the market that makes them the most money.

I'm still looking forward to Linux and Click and Run technology -- that is the first step of many needed to start surpassing Windows on the desktop.

Giant load of crap....

That isn't the problem at all. The vendor of each OS has to deal with that problem, not the carrier.

The problem is that carriers want to develop features they can charge for on a recurring revenue (pay-per-use) basis. In a multiple OS, high flexibility world, features exist on the handset, not on the network. That means the customer gets to use music, video, voice dialing, games, photos, VNC, SSH, instant messaging, e-mail, etc, and it all looks like data to the network, or doesn't even use the network. This stops them from charging you per message/photo/song/minute of video, because messages become tiny bits of inexpensive data, photos get transferred to the user's PC via a memory card reader or data cable instead of through the high priced photo service (or as a message that is indistinguishable from a tiny amount of data), etc...

Developers don't write for mobile platforms because they aren't welcome there, not because there are too many OSs. When the carriers say that the number of OSs limits new applications, what they really mean is that it limits their ability to lock down applications as a service.

Thank god

I do not know about you guys but I prefer more competition and less vendor os lock in.

Java is huge in the mobile market as a result.

The problem I have is all the oses are dictated by the monopolies of the carriers. Even the menu's must work all the same and all applications except java applets need to be signed so they can be the gatekeepers aka the carriers.

article contradicts itself

Two operating systems run more than 95 percent of the world's computers, but dozens of systems are behind the 2.5 billion mobile phones in circulation ...

Last year, two-thirds of smart phones sold ran on Symbian's operating system, an increase of about four percentage points from 2005, according to Canalys, a consultant and market research firm based near London. Microsoft was second last year with a 14 percent market share, slightly less than the year before, followed by Research in Motion, which makes the BlackBerry, with 7 percent, and Linux, with 6 percent...

So 89% of the cell phones in the world run one of two operating systems. Throw in RIM and you have 96% of the phones covered with three operating systems, not dozens. It doesn't sound too disimilar from the desktop market.

In reading the article it sounds more like somebody wants to push out any new entrants to the market, sounds something like the desktop market, sounds like a bad idea, sounds like anti-competitive, sounds like monopoly speak, sounds like somebody in management is tired of paying all those high paid engineers and wants to force everyone into the same phone so they can pay for a smaller development crew to cover everyone who has a phone and increase their profit margins so they can pay the CEO even more than he is worth.

Let the market decide, if the companies developing cant hack it, fold.

burnin

The Apple approach

The other approach that Apple seems to be encouraging, is to let the hardware manufactures support their own devices. Sure it means the mobile carriers lose some control, but in doing so they also offload some of the headaches. Mobile carriers want to control so much, that they are causing their own problems.

Mobile developers cry it too (well, "fewer")

On today's build list:

• Symbian UIQ
• Symbian Series 60
• Symbian Series 60 v2.0
• Symbian Series 60 v2.2
• Symbian Series 60 v3.0
• Symbian Series 80
• Symbian Series 80 v2
• BREW 2.10
• BREW 3.12
• BREW 3.14
• Palm 5.4
• Palm 6
• WinCE 4 SP 2003
• WinCE 5 SP
• WinCE 5 PPC
• J2ME CLDC
• J2ME CDC
• J2ME JSR-184
• J2ME M3G

And that's just the ones that I can remember off the top of my head. Some of these are legacy builds, but there are still customers who want them. A large part of our product family is platform abstraction code; if you want to support multiple mobile platforms, you either bloat your code with abstractions, or drown it in #ifdefs. In either case, you have to write to the lowest common denominator, and avoid anything that's even remotely platform dependent, which does engender decent coding discipline but at the result of reducing productivity. That's mostly a C issue, but even J2ME isn't immune, particularly when you have to deal with extensions like OpenGL ES or M3G.

If I never had to work in anything but (e.g.) J2MD CDC OpenGL ES or (gasps of outrage!) WinCE SP2005 again, I'd be a very happy bunny indeed.

Mobile Users Cry, "Less Phone Executives"

"Mobile phone executives have hampered the growth of new services", mobile phone users say...

Easy Fix

The fix for this is easy, and I understand already implemented in Finland and a few other countries - phone manufacturers can't sell service plans and network companies can't sell phones.

Open access, open API's, competition in the phone market, competition in the rate plan market.

This appears to be the sweet spot for government regulation in this market because it increases competition, not decreases it.

I imagine it also drives towards Internet-based services as a means to avoid redundant negotiations with multiple carriers for every new feature a phone manufacturer wants to implement.

Its the file format, stupid

Standardizing the OS is unimportant. Even the web is OS neutral, r.g., HTML, PDF, MP3, etc. The industry just need to define open file/transport protocols and let the handset makers innovate all that they want.

This is Pure Bullshit

They complain about all the phones because they have to configure them all. Well, this is a bunch of horseshit. The manufacturer will be happy to do that for you, aside maybe from loading in custom graphics. And it's unimportant anyway, because you can't even take the config from a RAZR V3 and dump it to a RAZR V3i for instance. Many settings are the same, but many settings are NOT the same (the speaker/mic gain table is not the same, for example) so you actually have to roll a whole new config file not just for different phone families, but even for different phones inside the same family.

I'm not sure what the real issue is - maybe someone inside the industry can explain that. But having more types of phones to configure is not a big deal. Also, you don't HAVE to configure phones you're not selling, so it's even less of an issue.

Question re: J2ME

To me the more important question is: how universal is J2ME? Can it be run on most of the OSes?

If J2ME is widely accepted and works well on every OS, I wouldn't mind having many OSes.

Not from the carriers I've spoken to

They are very careful to play Symbian off against Windows and (to a lesser extent) Palm.
As soon as one OS is dominant, the owner will be able to demand a larger portion of the pie.
No industry is going to let Microsoft own the space if they can help it.

Open source may change this...

Apples and Oranges

Give us(the end-users) the ability to choose our OS! like the PC market. Which apparently has far fewer options than a cell phone(um sarcasm). These people have no clue at all. -out

OpenMoko fanboi

Okay, I know I'm just a raving OpenMoko shill, but if you think the iPhone is open, you have another think coming.

Do *you* want control over your phone the same way you have control over your desktop (assuming you run Linux)? Check out OpenMoko [openmoko.org], and the FIC Neo 1973. It's essentially a palm-top computer that also happens to be a GPS-enabled phone, all running Free software.

The iPhone will restrict software just as much as current offerings do.

Re:the real reason

Hate to break it to you, but Apple has the clamps on full tighten already. In the case of the iPhone, the device will only do what both Apple and Cingular approve. 3rd parties aren't allowed to develop for it. Apple isn't your savior here...given the chance it will be the greatest offender. By all means though, take your chances for now. When Jobs says he has your best interests at heart you believe him, right?

Re:But what is good

But as a consumer, why should I care about how hard a market is to develop for? Are the prices a little higher? Maybe, but nothing like what they are under a monopoly. Price out Microsoft Office or Vista and then price out the most expensive thing you've ever purchased for your cell phone.