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They didn't really have a choice. They were building on open-source software and Linux and Arm are somewhat bad at abstracting the hardware. So this means that the manufacturers must homebrew their own distro for their hardware, instead of just publishing drivers like windows hardware does.
They've been working on fixing this, but fundamentally they built their castle on sand. And if they hadn't, they probably never would've gotten anywhere at all and we'd all be on Blackberry or WebOS or WinPhone or whatever.
Windows Phone and webOS were amazing. Not just for their time, but even today. Major advancements in mobile OS’ came from WebOS like multi window task managing and my favorite feature of all came from Windows Phone. The most perfect on screen keyboard man has ever made. Specifically with audio. It had click sounds that were specific to a region of the keyboard and it was a low tone that was audibly pleasing. I wish we still had the same levels of competition that we did back in the day. Link to a video about the pleasing typing sounds on windows phone
There are still features of my windows phone I miss today.
Metro UI was and still is a sexy AF interface. The widget tiles had a motion to them that was delicate and beautiful. It was just such a beautiful OS. I’ve kept most of the phones I’ve ever owned because I like them and of the 10 or so I’ve done through over the last 13 years especially my two favorites are my windows phones an HTC 8x and a Nokia Lumia 1020.
Also the tiles were so useful because they didn't take too much space and gave you necessary information at a glance. Another thing I liked was the app drawer where you just click on some letter and it pulled up a grid of letters (I don't know what is the term used for this feature, it’s also there in windows pc) and we can just click on the letter of the app we want to access. I found this very convenient because I am very lazy about actually typing the name of the app I want or even scroll down for it. In fact I now use a third party launcher called launcher 10 on my android. It's very similar to the windows phone launcher. I still have my old windows phone which I had purchased in 2014.
That was an interesting video.
You guys really just said that Linux and open source licenses are "a castle on sand" and they should "have done it like Windows"?
If you start running before anybody notice you may be able to make it. Go. Just. Go.
But no, seriously, that's why I prefer Android. I have versions of it customized to handheld consoles, single board computers and a bunch of other stuff. I don't want to be out there buying licenses for my platforms from Google.
Samsung is the biggest phone manufacturer in the world, Sony is a massive corporation.
If people want to sell phones the least they can do is have the software staff to back it up by doing maintenance. If I wanted an iPhone I'd buy an iPhone.
Look I love open-source but the whole lack of a separate binary driver layer is dumb and is why Windows can support a machine for over a decade while Android has terrible device-specific support windows and you don't just get your new OS version from Android Update, you have to get it from your vendor.
Imagine if you owned a Dell and couldn't run Windows Update, but had to use Dell Update instead?
I have an ASUS.
So... no need to imagine anything.
Also, I'm not an OS engineer, but that wouldn't require a closed source, privately licensed OS, would it? Just to not build it as a Linux offshoot, I suppose.