On 1/5/2024 4:08 AM, John Dallman wrote:
> In article <un7lua$3rjrl$1@dont-email.me>, ldo@nz.invalid (Lawrence
> D'Oliveiro) wrote:
>> Not sure about sheer quantity, but there was a definite feeling
>> that the important apps came first to Apple's platform for many
>> years.
>
> iPhone users are apparently far more willing to spend money on apps. I
> don't have numbers for this.

That is pretty well known.

iPhone are more expensive than average Android phone (Samsung sell
expensive models, but there are sold a lot of cheap phones as well).
iPhone users at average have significant larger income than
Android users. iPhone users spend more money on apps than
Android users.

A random source:

https://explodingtopics.com/blog/iphone-android-users

<quote>
Mobile apps are projected to generate $542 billion in global revenue in
2023. By 2027, that number could reach $732 billion.

Consumers spent $85.1 billion in the App Store in 2021, while
Google Play’s apps generated $47.9 billion. The App Store is clearly the
winner in revenue, which seems counterintuitive when you consider that
both devices have a similar spread of free vs. paid apps.
iPhone’s apps are 95% free and 5% paid. Android’s apps are 97% free
and 3% paid. That suggests that iPhone users may be more willing to
spend money on apps than Android users.
On average, iPhone user spends $12.77 per app. By comparison, the
average Android user spends $6.19 on each app. For in-app purchases, the
average transaction on iPhones is $1.07, while the average transaction
on Android is $0.43.
</quote>

Arne

On 1/5/2024 8:33 AM, Simon Clubley wrote:
> On 2024-01-04, Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> wrote:
>> That problem still exist for anyone trying to get into the
>> phone market without being hooked into Apple App Store or
>> Google Play.
>
> Sailfish OS seems to have established a niche for itself:
>
> https://sailfishos.org/
>
> It also comes with an optional Android compatibility module if you want it.
>
> Last I heard however, there were restrictions on which countries it is
> available in.

There are lots of niche OS in the phone market.

But the keyword is niche.

Microsoft and Nokia tried to change the big market from
2 to 3 but failed.

I don't see Sailfish or any other OS succeed at large
scale. In the west.

If the government in China decide that Chinese people
has to use a Chinese OS on their phone, then such
could succeed in China and be sold in hundreds of millions
of copies. But that would be non-technical and non-market
driven.

Arne

In article <un9111$5lv4$3@dont-email.me>,
Simon Clubley <clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP> wrote:
>On 2024-01-04, Arne Vajh�j <arne@vajhoej.dk> wrote:
>> On 1/3/2024 4:52 PM, John Dallman wrote:
>>> Me, I regarded Windows 2000 as the peak of their GUI design, and it's
>>> been getting worse, on average, ever since.
>>
>> Many have that feeling.
>>
>> Not quite so many if they actually go back.
>>
>> I had to recently do some work on XP. I was not impressed.
>>
>
>I looked at some articles with pictures of the Windows 2000 UI recently
>and nothing has changed my impression that it is still one hell of a lot
>more usable that the default Windows 10 UI.
>
>For example, which arrogant cretin thought it was OK to _force_ 1px
>borders on users in Windows 10 ? Those are not borders, those are piss-takes.
>
>Also, looking at those Windows 2000 UI pictures reminded me of how much
>more easier it was to navigate instead of those horrible flat low-contrast
>UI elements in Windows 10 where it's sometimes hard to even tell _what_
>is clickable.
>
>John is absolutely right about Windows 2000.

I'll confess, I never cared for the Windows GUI. It was (and
is) too "busy" for my tastes, starting from the early days and
continuing to the present.

For years and years, twm with X11 was my preferred environment,
then Plan 9. DECwindows was kind of cool, as a port of Motif to
VMS, but I rarely used it.

I vividly remember Dennis Ritchie demonstrating Plan 9 to me in
his office at Bell Labs one day. A comment he made has always
stuck with me; it was something along the lines of text being a
body one could manipulate, distinct from the small glyphs that
were, in contrast, static and immutable, but that permeated most
user interfaces at the time. THAT was a relevation.

Sadly, the world moved on. Now we have the web. Oh well.

- Dan C.

On 1/5/2024 4:08 AM, John Dallman wrote:
> In article <un7lua$3rjrl$1@dont-email.me>, ldo@nz.invalid (Lawrence
> D'Oliveiro) wrote:
>
>> Not sure about sheer quantity, but there was a definite feeling
>> that the important apps came first to Apple's platform for many
>> years.
>
> iPhone users are apparently far more willing to spend money on apps. I
> don't have numbers for this.

Probably explains one of the reasons I am not an Apple fanboy.
I have never paid for an app. :-)

bill

On 1/5/2024 10:27 AM, John Dallman wrote:
> In article <un7652$3pjg7$3@dont-email.me>, arne@vajhoej.dk (Arne Vajhøj)
> wrote:
>> I don't know hos much he was thinking about "the Windows Phone 8
>> code base" versus just "a MS OS for phones".
>>
>> But what I heard from most WP users back then was that they
>> actually liked the UI.
>
> Experienced Windows users often did. The majority of Android devices in
> the world, and a very large chunk of the iPhones, are used by people who
> haven't used any other kind of computing device, and thus aren't familiar
> with Windows.

True.

But there are still around a billion people with Windows experience.

>> What made many of them drop WP was the lack of apps. The WP
>> apps eco-system could not compete with the gazillion
>> iOS and Android apps.
>>
>> Companies only developed apps for iOS and Android, because there
>> were too few WP users. And there were too few WP users because
>> companies only developed apps for iOS and Android.
>
> Microsoft tried to apply pressure to ISVs that had significant Windows
> products to put them onto Windows Phone. However, they didn't do this
> selectively, they just assumed everyone was after the personal apps
> market because they were. My experience of this was that they were
> annoyingly persistent about trying to get us to do things that didn't
> make any business sense.

Sound to me like someone at MS really didn't understand the phone
app market.

Most of the critical apps does not even come from ISV's. They
come from companies offering non-software services that can
be delivered via app. Google search, bank, weather service,
grocery shop, Facebook etc..

Arne

On Fri, 5 Jan 2024 13:25:01 -0000 (UTC), Simon Clubley wrote:

> The fact that one is integrated into the OS and the
> other is an add-on user-level module to another OS does not negate the
> common factors of how they have evolved for the worse.

One of them gives users little or no choice; the other one does. So the
fact that the latter continues to exist in so many forms is all down to
users having a choice, and exercising it. The same does not apply to the
proprietary platform.

On Fri, 5 Jan 2024 08:59:53 -0500, Arne Vajhøj wrote:

> There are lots of niche OS in the phone market.
>
> But the keyword is niche.
>
> Microsoft and Nokia tried to change the big market from 2 to 3 but
> failed.

They probably managed more sales than those “niche” OSes, yet that still
counts as “failure”.

On Fri, 5 Jan 2024 15:27 +0000 (GMT Standard Time), John Dallman wrote:

> Microsoft tried to apply pressure to ISVs that had significant Windows
> products to put them onto Windows Phone.

They also I think paid money to makers of Android phones (like HTC) to
bring out Windows Phone versions of their products. This only highlighted
the disparity between the inflexibility of their platform, versus the
versatility of Android.

For example, Windows Phone 7 only ran on a single core. Windows Phone 8
only ran on two cores--no more, no less. This was when contemporary
versions of Android could run on anything from a single core up to--I’m
not sure, there were 4-core, might even have been some 8-core devices by
that time.

There was an interesting ARM chip (from NVidia? Qualcomm?), used in some
tablets, that had 5 cores: 4 full-power ones, one low-power one. The
latter only engaged when the load on the machine was low, when the full-
power cores would shut down.

Linux could handle this dynamic reconfiguration of cores without a reboot;
the NT kernel could not.

On Fri, 5 Jan 2024 18:58 +0000 (GMT Standard Time), John Dallman wrote:

> But Microsoft and Nokia didn't do at all a good job of
> selling them phones.

Windows Phone was just an inferior product.

When Elop took over at Nokia, work was already well under way on the N9,
which ran some kind of Debian derivative. He couldn’t kill off the
project, but he could ensure there was no followup, and that the release
would be very limited.

As I recall, when it came out, there were rave reviews everywhere it sold.
And then when stocks ran out, that was the end of it: the potential for a
successful range of products that could have saved Nokia, killed off by
its blind allegiance to Microsoft.

On 1/5/2024 6:25 PM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
> For example, Windows Phone 7 only ran on a single core.

WP7 was a bit limited because it was based on Windows CE.

> Windows Phone 8
> only ran on two cores--no more, no less. This was when contemporary
> versions of Android could run on anything from a single core up to--I’m
> not sure, there were 4-core, might even have been some 8-core devices by
> that time.

Good story. But it has nothing to do with reality.

WP8 was Windows NT based and supported up to 64 cores. Probably
never tested above 8 though due to CPU's available.

Arne

On Fri, 5 Jan 2024 19:43:49 -0500, Arne Vajhøj wrote:

> On 1/5/2024 6:25 PM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>> For example, Windows Phone 7 only ran on a single core.
>
> WP7 was a bit limited because it was based on Windows CE.

No, it was all the NT kernel.

>> Windows Phone 8
>> only ran on two cores--no more, no less. This was when contemporary
>> versions of Android could run on anything from a single core up to--I’m
>> not sure, there were 4-core, might even have been some 8-core devices
>> by that time.
>
> Good story. But it has nothing to do with reality.
>
> WP8 was Windows NT based and supported up to 64 cores.

The Windows Phone 8 specs were public knowledge. That’s what Microsoft
told OEMs. I was watching all this unfold at the time.

Certainly it would not run on a single core.

On 1/5/2024 8:26 PM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
> On Fri, 5 Jan 2024 19:43:49 -0500, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>
>> On 1/5/2024 6:25 PM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>>> For example, Windows Phone 7 only ran on a single core.
>>
>> WP7 was a bit limited because it was based on Windows CE.
>
> No, it was all the NT kernel.

I don't know where you get all those weird ideas from.

Everybody know that WP7 was CE based.

One of many sources:

https://www.engadget.com/2010-03-18-windows-phone-7-series-the-complete-guide.html

<quote>
Windows Phone 7 is the successor to Microsoft's line of Windows Mobile
phone operating systems. It's based on the Windows CE 6 kernel, like the
Zune HD, while current versions of Windows Mobile are based on Windows
CE 5.
</quote>

There has been some debate whether WP7 was actually using a pre-release
of Windows CE 7.0 instead of Windows CE 6.0. But no doubt about the CE
part.

>>> Windows Phone 8
>>> only ran on two cores--no more, no less. This was when contemporary
>>> versions of Android could run on anything from a single core up to--I’m
>>> not sure, there were 4-core, might even have been some 8-core devices
>>> by that time.
>>
>> Good story. But it has nothing to do with reality.
>>
>> WP8 was Windows NT based and supported up to 64 cores.
>
> The Windows Phone 8 specs were public knowledge. That’s what Microsoft
> told OEMs. I was watching all this unfold at the time.
>
> Certainly it would not run on a single core.

Not supporting 1 core may be true.

But MS publicly stated the support for up to 64 cores.

One of many sources:

<quote>
Microsoft is on stage at the Windows Phone Developer Summit offering us
a bite of what's to come in Windows Phone 8, and one of the tastiest
morsels may just be the noticeably more diverse hardware it will
support. The new platform won't just support dual-core processors -- it
will support as many as 64 cores, should such massively parallel chips
come to exist in the platform's lifetime.
</quote>

Arne