Mobile Archive

Sailfish OS 5.0, originally released late last year as part of the new Jolla C2 Community Phone, will now be pushed to all Sailfish OS devices. There have been several other minor releases since the original release, so if you’re running Sailfish OS on something other than the C2, you’re getting a release with some more bugfixes and improvements. The main improvement is an upgrade to Gecko ESR91, with work underway to move to ESR102 – this is far from the latest release, but sticking to ESR releases seems like a wise idea for a smaller team. This release also upgrades the Android application support to Android 13 (API level 33), and adds the microG 0.3.6 enablers. There’s Wireguard support now, call blocking, and new landscape view for a variety of applications. Incidentally, I was one of the first people to publish a review of the original Jolla Phone, exactly 11 years ago in 2014. Since I was such an early adopter, I have the The First One version, and it just so happens I’m also one of the very few people who actually received the Jolla Tablet, after being an extremely early backer of that device, too. I still have both of them, and especially the Jolla Phone I used as my main device for quite a while – half a year to a year, or so – before going back to Android. I’m glad Sailfish OS is still going, and I’m definitely interested in giving this new release a go. I would need to buy the Jolla C2 Community Phone, and if finances allow, I may actually do so. In case you want to help, feel free to become an OSNews Patreon or make a one-time donation through Ko-Fi.

An OPO (compiled OPL) interpreter written in Lua and Swift, based on the Psion Series 5 era format (ie ER5, prior to the Quartz 6.x changes). It lets you run Psion 5 programs written in OPL on any iOS device, subject to the limitations described below. ↫ OpoLua GitHub page If you’re pining for that Psion Series 5, but don’t want to deal with the hassle of owning and maintaining a real one – here’s a solution if you’re an iOS users. Incredibly neat, but with one limitation: only pure OPL programs work. Any program that also has native ARM code will not work.

At the Snapdragon Summit today, Qualcomm is officially announcing the Snapdragon 8 Elite, its flagship SoC for smartphones. The Snapdragon 8 Elite is a major upgrade from its predecessor, with improvements across the board. Qualcomm is also changing its naming scheme for its flagship SoCs from Snapdragon 8 Gen X to Snapdragon X Elite. ↫ Pradeep Viswanathan at Neowin It’s wild – but not entirely unexpected – how we always seem to end up in a situation in technology where crucial components, such as the operating system or processor, are made by one, or at most two, companies. While there are a few other smartphone system-on-a-chip vendors, they’re mostly relegated to low-end devices, and can’t compete on the high end, where the money is, at all. It’s sadness. Speaking of our mobile SoC overlords, they seem to be in a bit of a pickle when it comes to their core business of, well, selling SoCs. In short, Qualcomm bought Nuvia to use its technology to build the current crop of Snapdragon X Elite and Pro laptop chips. According to ARM, Qualcomm does not have an ARM license to do so, and as such, a flurry of lawsuits between the two companies followed. ARM is now cancelling certain Qualcomm ARM licenses, arguing specifically its laptop Snapdragon X chips should be destroyed. What we’re looking at here is two industry giants engaged in very public, and very expensive, contract negotiations, using the legal system as their arbiter. This will eventually fizzle out into a new agreement between the two companies with renewed terms and conditions – and flows of money – but until that dust has settled, be prepared for an endless flurry of doomerist news items about this story. As for us normal people? We don’t have to worry one bit about this legal nonsense. It’s not like we have any choice in smartphone chips anyway.

Earlier this year we talked about Huawei’s HarmonyOS NEXT, which is most likely the only serious competitor to Android and iOS in the world. HarmonyOS started out as a mere Android skin, but over time Huawei invested heavily into the platform to expand it into a full-blown, custom operating system with a custom programming language, and it seems the company is finally ready to take the plunge and release HarmonyOS NEXT into the wild. It’s indicated that HarmonyOS made up 17% of China’s smartphone market in Q1 of 2024. That’s a significant amount of potential devices breaking off from Android in a market dominated by either it or iOS. HarmonyOS NEXT is set to begin rolling out to Huawei devices next week. The OS will first come to the Mate 60, Mate X5, and MatePad Pro on October 15. ↫ Andrew Romero at 9To5Google Huawei has been hard at work making sure there’s no ‘application gap’ for people using HarmonyOS NEXT, claiming it has 10000 applications ready to go that cover “99.9%” of their users’ use case. That’s quite impressive, but of course, we’ll have to wait and see if the numbers line up with the reality on the ground for Chinese consumers. Here in the est HarmonyOS NEXT is unlikely to gain any serious traction, but that doesn’t mean I would mind taking a look at the platform if at all possible. It’s honestly not surprising the most serious attempt at creating a third mobile ecosystem is coming from China, because here in the west the market is so grossly rusted shut we’re going to be stuck with Android and iOS until the day I die.

That’s the 1983 Convergent WorkSlate, a one-of-a-kind handheld system from some misty alternate history where VisiCalc ruled the earth. Indeed, even the “software” packages Convergent shipped for it — on microcassette, which could store voice memos and data — were nothing more than cells and formulas in a worksheet. The built-in modem let you exchange data with other Workslates (or even speak over the phone to their users), and it came with a calculator desk accessory and a rudimentary terminal program, but apart from those creature comforts its built-in spreadsheet was the sole centre of your universe. And, unlike IAI and the Canon Cat, I’ve yet to find any backdoor (secret or otherwise) to enable anything else. That means anything you want to program has to be somehow encoded in a spreadsheet too. Unfortunately, when it comes to actually programming the device it turns out the worst thing a spreadsheet on an 8-bit CPU can be is Turing-complete (so it’s not), and it has several obnoxious bugs to boot. But that doesn’t mean we can’t make it do more than balance an expense account. Along the way we’ll examine the hardware, wire into its peripheral bus, figure out how to exchange data with today’s future, create a simple game, draw rudimentary graphics and (with some help) even put it on the Internet with its very own Gopher client — after we tell of the WorkSlate’s brief and sorrowful commercial existence, as this blog always must. ↫ Cameron Kaiser The amount of knowledge, skill, and sheer passion Cameron Kaiser displays in every one of these articles he writes is astonishing, and I’m incredibly grateful websites like OSNews can benefit from the work of people far, far smarter and more skillful than I’ll ever be. The code for the projects detailed in the article is available on GitHub, and more technical information can be found on Kaiser’s website.

Similar to less popular handheld of the era, the Gameboy, the Psion used a proprietary cartridge format for distributing commercial software. Psion sold blank cartridges, flashing hardware and duplicators to software houses, as well as releasing a number of titles under their own license. There’s a wide range of commercial software available for the Series 3 family, and only some of it was ported to the Series 5 (I really wish Scrabble had been released on Series 5). The range of software available was significant. Cartridges unlocked the Psion 3’s ability to play a large number of games, provide phrase book translation to a number of languages (Berliz Interpreter), route plan your car journeys (Microsoft Autoroute), look up the best wines for this year (Hugh Johnson’s Wine Guide) or build your organisation chart Purple Software’s OrgChart. ↫ Kian Ryan I have a Psion 3, but the only cartridges I have are empty ones you can use for personal storage. I’ve always wanted to buy a selection of cartridges on eBay, but sadly, my Psion 3 died due to me forgetting to remove the batteries when immigrating to Sweden, something I only discovered like five years later. I was smart enough to remove all batteries from every single device in my massive collection, but I guess the Psion 3 slipped through my fingers. Anyway, this article is a great look at some of the cartridges that existed for the Psion 3, and it’s really making me want to replace my broken Psion 3 and buy one that comes with a set of cartridges. There’s something really attractive about how the Psion 3’s EPOC operating system worked, and the third party programs look like so much fun to explore and use.

As cool as the organizer was, it was extremely limited in pretty much every way. Psion had got many things right in the first go, as reviewers were quick to admit, and that made iterating on the design somewhat easy. The Organiser II CM released in 1986 was built on the Hitachi HD6303X (Motorola 6803) clocked at 920kHz with 8K RAM and 32K ROM. The screen was a much improved dot matrix LCD with two lines of sixteen characters. This version also shipped with a little piezo beeper built in, and an expansion slot on the top. The expansion slot could allow for a wired power adapter, a serial cable, a bar code reader, a telephone dialer, and even a USB port. Given the reputation of the first model for ruggedness and the coverage of the same quality in the second model, this particular model sold quite well to companies who needed handheld computers for inventory and other purposes. The Organizer II XP launched the same year, and this model had 32K RAM and a backlit screen while otherwise being the same machine. Given that both of these models had significantly more RAM than their predecessor, the programming capabilities were greatly enhanced with a new language, OPL, which was similar to BASIC. ↫ Bradford Morgan White The Psion Organiser II is the very root of all mobile computing today. This may seem like hyperbole – but trust me, it really is. I have an Organiser II LZ64 with a 32k datapak (memory card), and while it may look like a calculator, this little machine from 1986 already contains the very skeleton of the graphical user interface Palm would eventually popularise, and the iPhone and Android would take to extraordinary heights. Turn on an Organiser II, and you’re greeted by a home screen with a grid of applications (no icons, though, of course – just labels) with a selector you moved around with the cursor keys. Hit the EXE key, and the application would load up, ready to be used; hit the home button (the ON key if my memory serves) and it would take you back to the home screen. This basic paradigm, of a grid of applications as a home screen you always return to, survives to this day, and is used by billions of people on their Android and iOS devices, both smartphones and tablets. People with little to no knowledge of the history of mobile computing – or people spreading corporate propaganda – often seem to act as if the release of the iPhone was the big bang of mobile computing, and that it materialised out of thin air because Steve Jobs alone willed it into existence. The reality is, though, that there is a direct line from the early Psion devices, through to Palm OS, the iPhone, and later Android. There were various dead end branches along the way, too, like the Newton, like Symbian, like the original Windows PocketPC, and so on – but that direct line from early Psion to that fancy Pixel 8 Pro or whatever you have today is solidly visible to anyone without an agenda. I love my Organiser II. It’s approaching 40 years old now, and it still works without a single hitch. There’s barely a scratch on it, the display is bright, the pixels are clear, the characteristic sliding cover feels as solid today as it did when it rolled off the factory line. This is where mobile computing began.

Stranded on a desert island; lost in the forest; stuck in the snow; injured and unable to get back to civilization. Human beings have used their ingenuity for millennia to try to signal for rescue. there’s been a progression of technological innovations: smoke signals, mirrors, a loud whistle, a portable radio, a mobile phone. With each invention, it’s been possible to venture a little farther from populated areas and still have peace of mind about being able to call for help. But once you get past the range of a terrestrial radio tower, whether it’s into the wilderness or out at sea, it starts to get more complicated and expensive to be able to call for rescue. In the next year or so, it’s going to become a lot simpler and less expensive. Probably enough to become ubiquitous. Hardware infrastructure is already in place, and the relevant software and service support is rolling out now. It’s been possible for decades for adventurers to keep in contact via satellite. The first commercial maritime satellite communications was launched in 1976. Globalstar and Iridium launched in the late 90s and drove down the device size and service cost of satellite phones. However, the service was a lot more expensive than cellular phone service, and not enough people were willing to pay for remote comms to be able to overcome the massive infrastructure costs, and both companies went bankrupt. Their investors lost their money, but the satellites still worked, so once the bankruptcies were hashed out they fulfilled their promise, as least technologically. On a parallel track, in the late 1980s International Cospas-Sarsat Programme was set up to develop a system for satellite aided search and rescue system that detects and locates emergency beacons activated by aircraft, ships and people engaged in recreational activities in remote areas, and then sends these distress alerts to search-and-rescue (SAR) authorities. Many types of beacons are available, and nowadays they send exact GPS coordinates along with the call for rescue. In the 2010s, the Satellite Emergency Notification Device or SEND device was brought to market. These are portable beacons that connect to the Globalstar and Iridium networks and allow people in remote areas not only to call for help in emergencies, but also to communicate via text messaging. Currently the two most popular SEND devices are the Garmin inReach Mini 2 and the Spot X. These devices cost $400 and $250 USD respectively, and require monthly service fees of $12-40. For someone undertaking a long and dangerous expedition into the backcountry, these are very reasonable costs, especially for someone who does it often. But for most people, it’s just not practical to pay for and carry a device like that “just in case.” In 2022, the iPhone 14 included a feature that was the first step in taking satellite-based communication into the mainstream. It allows iPhone users to share their location via Find My feature with new radio hardware that connects to the Globalstar service. So if you’re out adventuring, your friends can keep track of where you are. And if there’s an emergency, you can make an emergency SOS. It’s not just a generic Mayday: you can text specific details about your emergency and it will be transmitted to the local authorities. You can also choose to notify your personal emergency contacts. Last week, at WWDC, Apple announced the next stage: in iOS 18, iMessage users will be able to send text messages over satellite, using the same Globalstar network as its SOS features. Initially at least, this feature is expected to be free. With this expansion, iPhone users will have the basic functionality of a SPOT or inReach device, without special hardware or a monthly fee. SpaceX’s Starlink, which first offered service in 2021, has much higher bandwidth and lower latency than the Globalstar and Iridium networks. Starlink’s current offering requires a dinner plate sized antenna and conventional networking hardware to enable high bandwidth mobile internet. It’s great for a vehicle, but impractical for a backpacker. However, SpaceX has announced 2nd generation satellites that can connect to 1900MHz spectrum mobile phone radios, and T-Mobile has announced that it will be enabling the service for its customers in late 2024, and Apple, Google, and Samsung devices are confirmed to be supported. Initially, like Apple’s service, this will be restricted to text messaging and other low-bandwidth applications. Phone calls and higher bandwidth internet connectivity are promised in 2025. The other two big US carriers, AT&T and Verizon, have announced they will be partnering with a competing service, AST SpaceMobile, but it’s unlikely those plans will come to fruition very soon. Mobile phone users outside the US will also need to wait. Apple’s Message via satellite is only announced for US users, as is T-Mobile’s offering. So if you’re in the US, and have an iPhone, or are a T-Mobile subscriber with an Apple, Samsung, or Google device, you’ll soon be able to point your phone at the sky, even in remote areas, to call for help, give your friends an update on your expedition, or just stay in touch. Pretty soon, Tom Hanks won’t have to make friends with a volleyball when he crash lands on a deserted island, at least not until his battery dies.

Huawei plans to expand its native HarmonyOS smartphone platform worldwide, despite coming under US-led sanctions that have deprived it of access to key technologies. The Chinese tech megacorp released its own phone platform in 2019, the same year that US sanctions blocked Huawei from having further access to Google’s Android software to power its devices. More recently, the company saw its Mate 60 Pro smartphone become the top selling device in China’s huge consumer market, displacing rivals such as Apple’s iPhone. It also has a newer device, the Pura 70, that could pose a bigger threat to Apple sales in the country. ↫ Dan Robinson at The Register If there is one company that has the capabilities and will to truly offer a third alternative, it’s Huawei with HarmonyOS. This company has the full might of the Chinese state behind it, and it clearly has the drive to prove itself after the various sanctions levied against it in recent years that barred it from using Google’s Android. It’s obviously already experiencing major success in its home market, but now the company intends to go global, country by country, to positino HarmonyOS alongside iOS and Android. Huawei basically takes a brute-force approach, explaining that they identify the 5000 most popular applications, which they claim cover 99% of users’ time with their smartphones, and port those over first. I’m not entirely sure how they convince developers to port over their applications, but I’m guessing money is involved. Fair play, I would say – it’s not like anything else is going to break the stranglehold Apple and Google have over the mobile application market. We haven’t really spent much time talking about HarmonyOS in the west in general, and on OSNews in particular, which is a bit of a shame because it has some interesting characteristics. For instance, it has a multi-kernel design, where it uses the Linux kernel on more powerful devices like smartphones and tablets, and the RTOS LiteOS kernel on lower power IoT devices. DSoftBus is another interesting part of the operating system, which allows multiple devices to kind of join together and share data, applications, and control seamlessly. HarmonyOS supports both Android and true HarmonyOS applications, the latter of which are marked with a little logo in the corner of the application icon, but the unique features of HarmonyOS, like DSoftBus, are only accessible to true HarmonyOS applications. Developing these native applications can be done in DevEco Studio, which is built atop IntelliJ IDEA, using ArkUI. Huawei even went so far as to develop its own browser engine for HarmonyOS, which it recently released as open source, called ArkWeb. While HarmonyOS currently still supports running Android applications, this will soon no longer be the case as the company is working on HarmonyOS NEXT, which will remove Android compatibility to focus entirely on true HarmonyOS applications instead. NEXT also does away entirely with the multikernel approach, ditching both the Linux and LiteOS kernels for a new HarmonyOS microkernel, and uses Huawei’s own Cangjie programming language for application development. HarmonyOS NEXT is currently being tested on a variety of Huawei devices, with a beta and final release planned for later this year. It’s just our luck that the only potentially viable competitor to Android and iOS is a party closed-source operating system from China, which will surely bring with it a whole host of security concerns in the west. It’s really difficult at the moment to ascertain just how much of HarmonyOS – and specifically, HarmonyOS NEXT – is available as open source, which is a major bummer. I don’t think I’d ever want to use a (partly) closed source Chinese operating system for anything major in my life, but if it’s open source we could at least see non-Chinese forks that I’d find easier to trust. The road of iOS and Android competitors is littered with the bodies of failed attempts – Symbian, the various iterations of Windows Phone, BlackBerry, Sailfish, Ubuntu Touch, the GNOME/Plasma attempts that just can’t grow beyond proof of concepts – and there is no way to know if Huawei can pull off outside of China what it did with HarmonyOS inside China. Western markets are incredibly weary of anything related to Huawei, and for all we know, this operating system won’t ever even be allowed inside the US and the EU in the first place. Regardless of international politics and the CCP’s brutal, totalitarian, genocidal regime, HarmonyOS NEXT seems like a very interesting platform with fresh ideas, and I’d love to at least try it out once it hits international markets with proper localisation into English. I’ll take a problematic Chinese smartphone operating system competitor over no competitor at all – even if I won’t use it myself, it’ll be at least some form of competition both Apple and Google desperately need.

But just as smartphones would do, PDAs offered a dizzying array of operating systems and applications, and a great many of them ran Palm OS. (I bought my first Palm, an m505, new in 2001, upgrading from an HP 95LX.) Naturally, there’s no way we could enumerate every single such device in this article. So in this Ars retrospective, we’ll look back at some notable examples of the technical evolution of the Palm operating system and the devices that ran it—and how they paved the way for what we use now. ↫ Cameron Kaiser at Ars Technica This sure takes me back to my own in-depth Palm retrospective from – checks notes – 11 years ago (!). It turns out all the images from that article no longer load, so I should set aside some time to fix that up.

You heard it here first folks: systemd is coming to postmarketOS! As a mobile oriented OS, our main goal has always been to work for everyone. From technical folks to casual users. postmarketOS should have all the benefits you expect from a Linux based distribution, such as being free software, respecting your privacy, getting updates until your device physically breaks, respecting your attention and not shoving advertisements in your face. Your phone should be a tool you use, not the other way around. This is of course not an easy task, one of the main blockers we found as we collaborate more closely with KDE and GNOME developers is that they have a hard time with our OpenRC-based stack. In order to get KDE and GNOME working at all, we use a lot of systemd polyfills on top of OpenRC. So while we are technically “not using systemd”, in practice we already do use a large chunk of its components to get KDE and GNOME running, just different versions of those components. While we are very grateful for everybody who works on these polyfills, we must point out that most aren’t a full replacement, and take additional effort to support and maintain. As much as we might want to romanticise the idea of spending 6, 12, 24 months attempting to come up with an even vaguely competitive alternative to systemd, we would quite simply rather be working on making postmarketOS better. ↫ postmarketOS blog This is the sensible choice to make, and I’m glad they made it. It makes no sense for a relatively small project that already has to deal with the difficulties of supporting smartphones to also have to deal with shoehorning the smartphone variants of GNOME and KDE into an init system they’re not at all made for.

Plasma 6 is coming together nicely on the desktop! Coming back from hiatus, I was pleasantly greeted by a much more working session than when I last saw it in May; I have now completely switched over to it on my main machine! On the other hand, there is still a lot of work to do on mobile to prepare it for the Plasma 6 release in February. I will outline the current situation and the work I have done in the past few months in order to make Plasma 6 a possibility for Plasma Mobile. ↫ Devin at espi.dev The linked blog post provides a great overview of the work that is being done and needs to be done on Plasma Mobile for Plasma 6, and I have to say that it’s definitely looking good and I’m quite interested is somehow giving Plasma Mobile a go. The problem, however, is one that’s all too familiar to anyone who’s tried to run anything but Android or iOS as their main mobile operating system over the past 15 years or so: the lack of the kind of applications that you need to be a part of modern society. I don’t like it, but without my banking applications, identity applications I need in Sweden, things like WhatsApp, Signal, Discord – my phone would basically be a curious toy instead of a useful tool. Add needing the best possible smartphone camera to the equation – I have two small kids – and using anything but iOS and Android is simply out of the question. One alternative smartphone operating system knew this, and implemented fairly transparent Android application compatibility – Sailfish – through their Aliendalvik tool. It seems Jonas Dreßler, who works on GNOME Shell for mobile, was curious, and decided to take a closer look at Aliendalvik, to see if there’s anything there that the teams working on bringing KDE and GNOME to smartphones can make something of it. Sadly, Aliendalvik is not open source, so some reverse-engineering was required. The interesting thing here is that due to the fairly standard userspace Sailfish is using, the Android integration is mostly using standard freedesktop APIs to integrate with the host OS: Running Android apps are exposed as individual Wayland surfaces/windows, notifications from Android appear as org.freedesktop.Notification messages on DBus, music player controls are exposed using MPRIS, and even text input for android apps can be provided using the Wayland text input protocol. This means that basically Aliendalvik should work just as well on a standard Linux distribution like Fedora, Arch Linux, or Debian. The Android container can be started using standard linux container tooling and the host integration binaries are compiled for ARM64 and mostly link to various open source Qt libraries. ↫ Jonas Dreßler After a few days of reverse-engineering, hacking, and lots of other hard work, Dreßler managed to get Aliendalvik to work on GNOME Shell running on Arch on a smartphone, with all the integration between the Android applicatins and the underlying Arch installation working, and the code and instructions are up on Github. He also posted a video showing it working, and it’s indeed as impressive as it sounds. Sadly, the elephant in the room here is, of course, the fact that Aliendalvik is not open source. Jolla could potentially offer it for purchase on non-Sailfish Linux-based smartphones, or perhaps even release it as open source entirely, but I’m not entirely sure if Jolla would be interested in any of that. The company is… In a bit of an odd state, and I feel like it’s mostly been in limbo with not as much progress as they once hoped they’d make. Releasing one of their crown jewels as open source seems unlikely. My personal conviction is that if we ever want a Linux smartphone that is somewhat viable but isn’t Android, it’s going to have to be either Plasma Mobile or GNOME Shell on mobile, running on one of the popular, mainstream distributions that already run on ARM, are interested in mobile, and have a huge community to power the whole thing. Things like Sailfish or even Ubuntu Touch, as interesting and impressive as they are, just don’t seem viable to me in the long term when the entirety of the KDE and GNOME communities are working on their own projects.

Android and iOS share a common problem: they copied desktop text editing conventions, but without a menu bar or mouse. This forced them to overload the tap gesture with a wide range of actions: placing the cursor, moving it, selecting text, and invoking a pop-up menu. This results in an overly complicated and ambiguous mess-o-taps, leading to a variety of user errors. It’s less of a problem if you only do short bursts of text in social media or messaging apps. But doing anything more complicated like an email gets tedious. However, in my user study on text editing, I was surprised to find that everyone had significant problems and rather severe workaround for editing text. With the extremely talented Olivier Bau, together we created a prototype called Eloquent, which offers a much simpler solution. We presented this work at UIST 2021. This is now one of my favourite articles I’ve ever read. I despise text input and text editing on mobile devices, whether they be Android or iOS. I hate it with the passion of a thousand burning suns, but it seems like nobody else cares. Luckily, the author of this article, Scott Jenson, a man with an impressive career doing UI work at Apple, Google, and others, agrees with me, and together with his colleagues, during his time at Google, he came up with an entirely different, touch-first way of editing text. The end result – be sure to watch the video to see it in action – immediately clicks for me. I want this. Now. This would be a massive usability improvement, and the fact it isn’t in Android yet, despite being developed at Google, is further evidence Google has no clue how to make good ideas float to the top. Jenson explains why Eloquent, as they called their new input/editing system, won’t ship with Android, while he expresses a bit more optimism Apple might be more open to rethinking mobile text editing: Unfortunately, shipping something like Eloquent would be challenging. First, as too many people mistakenly see text editing as “done”, there is little appetite to fix it. Second, users have been trained to cope with this error-prone approach for well over a decade. Asking people to change at this point would be hard. But most importantly, fixing text editing isn’t seen as important enough in the war between Android and iOS. It’s not the flashy feature that shifts your Net Promoter Scores. What I find ironic is that a fundamental change, like fixing text editing, could make people feel much more at ease using their phones and could be an enormous reason to switch. But it would be a slow burn and take years of steady effort. Android just can’t think this way. Apple just might. Android needs this.

At its peak in 2017, the global smartphone market saw more than 700 brands fiercely competing. Fast forward to 2023 and the number of active brands (that have recorded sell-through volumes) is down by two-thirds to almost 250, according to Counterpoint’s Global Handset Model Sales Tracker, which has been tracking sales of these brands across more than 70 key countries. So many good brands and good ideas kicked to the curb by the stranglehold Apple and Google have on the market. While many of these brands were mere OEMs, it also includes companies making their own platforms.