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Comment by lotsofpulp | Hacker News Reader

> Why do I only have 2 choices?

There’s an extremely high barrier to entry and people don’t have time to learn different operating systems.

Used to have windows phone as a choice, but never ever did google cooperate in getting something as major as YouTube on that platform.

(Yet Roku and more do.)

I left Windows Phone several years ago due to lack of apps. Recently I found the old phone in my home and played with it a bit. WP UI was awesome, I miss it. It was so clean, so easy to use, so beautiful. But the lack of apps really killed it.

What was it 5 years that Google denied any perceptible lag on their platform before coming out with Project Butter. Windows Phone was the only other mobile OS as responsive and snappy as iOS.

I absolutely loved my Windows Phones and was gutted when they killed the product.

Actually they even blocked it. Microsoft had a YouTube app in the store but Google blocked it [0]

[0]: https://www.cnet.com/news/microsoft-neuters-youtube-windows-...

Everyone had to learn these mobile OSes which are extremely unintuitive.

The barrier is caused by a lack of available software (something html5 has largely solved outside of games/Snapchat/apples anti competitive behavior with chat etc.)

The barrier to entry is not high. There used to be many more options for phone OS.

I doubt developers miss the days of having to make a dozen different builds just to get a single J2ME app working on major phones. Forget about cross platform.

We don't have to miss them, because we live them every single day on Android.

When phones were much more limited in their functionality and user expectations were nowhere near as high as they are today.

Complexity of phones since 2007 has skyrocketed. Can a small team create a phone OS and the ecosystem users have grown accustomed to today?

GNU/Linux has a larger and much more healthy app ecosystem than either of the popular mobile OSes.

And before you say a desktop DE is unusable on a handheld I’d urge you to actually try it. I’ve owned multiple handhelds running GNU/Linux with either the DE I used on my laptop (fvwm at the time) or lxde and they’re more comfortable than mobile GUIs. (I’m particular: there are far fewer mobile dialogs and touch controls popping over eachother right before you tap them.)

I have been a linux user since early teenage. So I don't need any nudge for that.

But on phones, I prefer a great screen, good camera and everything else the mainstream offers. I have a proper camera and good laptops with display and everything but nothing beats the convenience of a good phone for someone who is a nomad(well before covid-19). If linux handhelds work for you, power to you. But I have never found any in the last five years at least that I wanted to use as a daily driver. Would be interested in recommendations though.

The barrier to entry is very high because for your OS to be able to compete, it has to support a similar app ecosystem. Getting most major app developers on board with supporting a new OS is pretty much impossible, especially given how many of them rely on Android or iOS specific software.

I don't think this is unique to mobile either - pretty much everyone uses Windows or Mac because those OS's support the software that they want to use (although with everything moving to the web this is going away to some degree). The main difference with mobile is that the expectation (or requirement, with Apple) is that you will install software through the app store rather than just downloading it from the internet like on desktop.

Microsoft Surface Duo is now taking pre-orders and it runs Android

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