Alternative operating systems for smartphones
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The year is 2020 and it may seem that on the smartphone front the
battle goes on only between Apple iOS and Google Android. If you look
at it from the mainstream point of view, it's not far from the truth,
but if you are willing to step outside and be a bit alternative,
you'll find, that there is still much more going on.
This post is just a list of alternative systems I have found to be
still in development, with a short note about each of them, not a
comparison or review.
Tizen - Let's start with the bad one, so we can progress to better
systems. Tizen is joint project between Intel and Samsung that started
when Nokia announced move away from MeeGo to Windows Phone back in
2010. Samsung hoped to create an in-house Linux-based alternative to
Android, but this never really happened. It's mature enough and the
user interface looks much like Samsung's GUI on Android, but it wasn't
pushed enough against its competitors. The latest version of the OS is
from August 2019, but the last released phone - Samsung Z4 - is almost
three years old and even then it was positioned in the low-end
segment. Tizen then slowly moved from phones to smart watch and smart
TV segment and it doesn't look like it's going to change in the near
future.
KaiOS - The second one is way more promissing. KaiOS is system for so
called smart feature phones, very cheap devices of classic phone
construction, ie. with hardware keys and without touchscreen, but it
brings modern features to them, like 4G/LTE, GPS and apps. It's based
on boot2gecko project, much like the now defunct FirefoxOS was, so the
apps are written HTML5+JS and therefore quite easy to develop. Phones
are priced between $30 and $100, targeted mostly to developing markets
and quite popular there. I have found several references, that it's
now the third most used mobile OS after Android and iOS, which would
be remarkable achievment. Also it's the OS of my Nokia 8110 4G, so I
know it from my own experience.
Sailfish OS - In the first decade of the century, Nokia had the chance
to shape the landscape of smartphone century. Instead of doing that,
they did long series of bad decisiona and lost their position first to
Apple, then to Android. One of the bad decisions was to kill their
in-house system called MeeGo at the same time when first device with
it - Nokia N9 - entered the market. Employees of Nokia decided not to
let the system die, formed a startup company called Jolla and
SailfishOS was born. After couple of dedicated devices (some of them
with just local availability) Jolla started to sell the OS license for
selected Xperia phones (X, XA2, 10), so you buy the phone, unlock the
bootloader, install SailfishOS and live happily ever after. I tried
the OS on Xperia X and was surprised how good it is. As there are
community efforts to support other phones and there even is official
kit/guide to help the porting, this is very interesting operating
system and I hope to hear about it more in the future.
Maemo Leste - Before MeeGo there was another Linux-based OS at Nokia:
Maemo. In fact MeeGo is product of merging the codebase of Maemo
(Nokia) and Moblin (Intel) in a joint venture, which I mentioned by
Tizen. But everything started several years before that, when Nokia
made Nokia Internet Tablets - 770, N800, N810. I used the first one
around 2007 and it was a very good device, I never understood, why
Nokia didn't make it into a full phone, it could have done what iPhone
did and it could have done it about a year earlier. Then N900 came -
the only phone with Maemo and it was quite a success among open source
enthusiasts, so Nokia decided to go for it with Intel, MeeGo was born
and killed just a year afterwards. Maemo Leste is project trying to
continue where last version of Maemo stopped. It can be installed on
N900, N9, N950 (developers-only N9 version with QWERTY keyboard),
Nexus 5, Droid 4 and few others.
LuneOS - Another community effort to continue with an OS which was
abandoned by its mother company, this time by HP. It's continuation of
webOS, which was created by Palm inc. as a main competitor to iPhone
in times, when Android wasn't ready to even try. After couple of years
HP bought the whole company, released another couple of phones, a
tablet and then one day killed the platform, then made it open-source
and then sold it to LG, which based on it its smart watch and smart TV
products. After it became clear that LG won't produce any webOS
phones, community took the wheel and LuneOS was born. The last release
is about half a year old, it works on some of the original devices, on
Nexus 4 and 5, several Xiaomi phones and a Raspberry Pi. I tried it on
Nexus tablet two years ago and it was usable and visually appealing.
Ubuntu Touch - Ubuntu had big plans with mobile devices and as in many
previously mentioned systems, the materialization was poor. The
community stepped under the name UBPorts in and now you can install
the OS on 35 different devices, including brands like OnePlus, Nexus,
Xperia, Xiaomi and other.
PostmarketOS - The main purpose of this system is to bring a Linux
distribution in the traditional sense of that term to mobile devices,
mostly abandoned by their creators after a very short lifespan.
According to the website of the project it now boots on more than 150
devices, on the other hand calls do not work on most of them as that
is not the primary goal at the moment. Very promising, i.e. it works
on N900 with current mainline kernel.
That seems to be all. Not as much as on desktop PC, not as much as k
SBC scene, but still far from the widely perceived duopoly. And as it
looks like I have some devices supporting some of mentioned operating
systems, I may try them and have again some fun. The KaiOS is almost
boring, because it "just works"...
