A developer who worked with the Ubuntu Phone project has outlined the reasons for its failure, painting a picture of confusion, poor communication and lack of technical and marketing foresight. Simon Raffeiner stopped working with the project in mid-2016, about 10 months before Canonical owner Mark Shuttleworth announced that development of the phone and the tablet were being stopped.
He said he had started working on Click apps in December 2014, began writing the 15-part “Hacking Ubuntu Touch” blog about system internals in January 2015, became an Ubuntu Phone Insider, got a Meizu MX4 from Canonical, and worked on bug reports and apps until about April 2016 when he sold off/converted all my remaining devices in mid-2016.
Raffeiner said that the decision to stop developing the Ubuntu Phone had been made around October 2016 but the public were only told about it in April 2017.
Unlike the Ubuntu GNU/Linux operating system which was able to create a niche for itself due to the cost (Windows, Mac) and usability (Red Hat, SUSE) factors, Raffeiner said Ubuntu Phone, which was first released in 2015, was entering a saturated market where Android and iOS had already grabbed marketshare. He said he began to have doubts about the project in December 2015 and left in mid-2016, saying he had done so because his work no longer made him happy and also because he had lost interest in software development.
Source: https://www.itwire.com/open-source/78641-ubuntu-phone-project-failed-because-it-was-a-mess-claim.html
Submitted by: Arnfried Walbrecht
The problem was closed documentation and source code of the big name SoC and add on hardware, forcing Canonical to use libHybris and doing tricks and jumping hoops every turn. Maybe the only luck of getting a true open mobile phone will be via a Raspberry Pi 3 module maybe?
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