Today 10 years ago I went to Poland to buy a Phone with pre installed #Firefox OS on. The Phone was a Alcatel One, so very shitty. Two years later I installed Firefox OS on my Nexus 5 instead.
For the curious people, Firefox OS kept living in a way, being used as the foundation for KaiOS, which was a smart operative system for “dumb” phones. This one took off in certain parts of the world.
i really hope these alt-mobile OS’s take off, i know theres things like pinephone and kde mobile but they’re still a little bit rough around the edges last i checked… at the same time tho maybe i should do some more digging around. i imagine someone’s made a daily-driveable alternate OS for phones at this point
It would be great, but a big problem that I see with a new, completely different OS is… the apps.
If a new OS not based on Android launches tomorrow, it will have no 3rd party apps, and it will be very hard to catch momentum without WhatsApp, Youtube, Netflix, Spotify, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter X (🙄), Uber… all of those apps that most people use their phone for 90% of the time.
It’s what killed Windows Phone. There was a period of about 6 seconds to get in on the commercial phone OS game, and it was long gone by the time Windows made a legitimate effort (Windows Mobile phones didn’t really count - they were stuck with legacy PDA software).
Honestly, the AT&T exclusivity and the late rollout of the app store (iPhones initially only had the factory apps) were the opening that let Android in.
I usually buy last year’s pixel model when they go on sale around end of year. prefer to use my desktop as eyes aren’t great at skimming tiny text. on a 6a which should last until next year. could get by with much less
I always thought those were really cool! I used to have the launcher they made for Android on my old Droid Turbo, and it was pretty cool! Then it stopped working when I got a new phone with a newer version of Android.
I still have mine in a drawer. Sure newer phones are taller but that thing was fucken WIDE. It felt more like a small tablet. I don’t know if it’s right to say that Google made it though; really it was made by Motorola
Same here; I’ve got mine in a box along with my Pixel XL, Nexus 5, and Moto X (which feels like a tiny Nexus 6). I tried the Nexus 6 for a few hours about a year ago, and it was still surprisingly snappy. I have a Note 20 Ultra for my daily driver, and it still feels small compared to the girth of the Nexus 6. I feel like I could possibly use it today, which is one of the reasons I keep it around, in case of an emergency.
My Nexus 6 was the worst phone I’ve ever had. It aged like milk. It was so bad I jumped off Google phones and never went back. Getting the OnePlus 3T was like breathing fresh air again.
Edit: had the Nexus S and Nexus 4 before the 6, loved those phones… So jumping off Nexus was no small matter.
I’ve had android phones since the G1. The Nexus One was pretty freaking sweet, but my favorite phone of all time was either the Nexus S or the Nexus 5x. The curved screen on the S was great and it fit into the back pocket of my pants “like a glove”.
It was quite slow because of the hardware, it sometimes wouldn’t recognize touches, and the software had so many bugs like that when you got a call, you couldn’t take it because there would be some overlay over the button to take the call which would steal the touch most of the time, etc.
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