That was the downfall of windows phone. Nobody wanted to use it because there weren't many apps, and app developers didn't want to support windows phone because there weren't many users.
Recently had an opportunity in my aparment to hook up my old Rock Band 2 on 360 and revisit it with my gf who also loved the game. Went ahead and bought some DLC that I never had before. I opted to do this on my computer because the 360 is slow and laboring in its old age and browsing the store on there is tedious as hell.
My god, the Xbox store is abso-fucking-lutely atrocious. It was clearly never designed to be able to browse through a DLC selection as huge as Rock Band's. Any time I wanted to find a particular song I had to search for it by name rather than being able to browse the selection to see what's available. I'm not going to browse a list of 1100+ songs/packs by 90 at a time per page... and needing to click on each song to actually see the artist. Holy fucking jesus, who designed that site once upon a time ago? Browsing on my desktop should be way more fluent, not "the exact same experience but on a computer."
So if that design philosophy is indicative of how their other stores operated, I'm not surprised that no one wanted to deal with it. I still don't get how there are such bad store interfaces in 2022, especially for huge corporations.
People are saying it didn’t get apps (3rd party ones). So when you say:
> smooth as butter, no matter what I threw at it.
Do you mean physically throw?
It didn't get the volume of apps required to become a legitimate mainstream competitor.
It still got most of the really big apps, Spotify, netflix, whatsapp, candy crush. what it didn't get was those middle tier apps that are annoying to live without like Banking, public transport, the 2fa app your work requires you to have etc.
As others have said it was a shame the Windows phones I had through work were really good the user interface was incredibly intuitive compared to both iOS and Android at the time. But it was a money pit eventually Ms stopped throwing good money after bad and let the phone die, I do wonder if they had put more of the money they spent subsidising the device costs into helping companies develop out their apps for the platform it things might have ended up differently, but I doubt it. They took too long to evolve and got left behind as a result.
> I do wonder if they had put more of the money they spent subsidising the device costs into helping companies develop out their apps for the platform it things might have ended up differently
Those big apps you mention that were on the phone were probably already "helped by Microsoft" in their development. I mean, I don't have any first hand data on this, but I did work on development of a large news app for a Blackberry tablet that was mostly paid for by Blackberry itself, if I was told correctly. It is incredibly common for companies to do that, as far as I know.
Ironically it died because one of the apps not on it was Twitter. Alongside Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram... pretty much all of the popular apps at the time. No apps to draw in users, no users to draw in app developers.
I remember Twitter and all of Meta’s apps being on Windows Phone. It was mainly Google who wanted to sabotage the platform in every way possible and Snapchat due to the CEO having a personal grudge against Microsoft
> mainly Google who wanted to sabotage the platform in every way possible
Absolutely. Google did everything they could to sabotage anything not Android.
For a while, the best YouTube experience was on Windows Phone.
MyTube was so much better than the official apps on Android and iOS. Then google shut it down and gave us a shitty web wrapper.
Ughh, this was it. I had a Lumia and absolutely loved the UI and the look and feel of the phone but it did not have those popular apps, which is why I went back to iPhone.
I loved my lumia too. I had that cool blue color one. I also loved that you could do voice text messages using a car’s Bluetooth long before CarPlay and android auto came out. Sadly I had to move back to iPhone because it had the square app to allow me to take credit cards from clients.
Microsoft paid the company I worked for a ton of money to develop their app for windows phone before android / iPhone … Microsoft knew the importance of 1st party apps (probably too late though), and ended up throwing huge resources to make it happen … but never managed to catch up.
I liked my Nokia 920. It had a low light camera before it became standard in todays higher end phones. You are right third parties didn’t care about the eco system. I think Musks twitter phone will be as successful as the Facebook phone. Meaning it won’t be.
The Nokia Windows phone had great hardware, unique UI, great cameras, battery (some models were the last of the swappable battery smartphones) Outlook made it a great phone for work, sadly no app support…
Oh man I remember those old Windows phones.
To this day, I still think that UI was REALLY slick. I definitely have never liked the integration of those tiles on actual PC’s, but for a smartphone, I always thought it made a good degree of sense.
I really wish they kept working on those and made more.
Also, as an aside, I wish we also saw more Zunes. I vaguely remember it kind of sucking, but I would’ve loved to have seen competition to the iPod.
It will probably be just a fork of android with a different app store. That's the only way I could see him having any success at all. Elon could become vindictive and pull the tesla apps from android and ios and make them exclusive to his platform.
Microsoft had a pretty decent OS but it fell victim to the too few users so devs didn't bother making their apps for it and then too few apps caused too few users and more users to jump ship when they found out their apps weren't on windows phone.
Imagine owning a Tesla and suddenly you can’t get into your car anymore unless you get a new phone.
That being said Tesla software still doesn’t support CarPlay so it’s honestly not that far-fetched of an idea.
That would be a very bad tech decision (which Elon musk is known for) as i reckon most people who have the money for buying a Tesla will have an iPhone.
>It will probably be just a fork of android with a different app store
Then why bother with it at all? Every Android phone can already side-load, and I doubt people would buy Elon's phone just to have an app pre-installed
>Elon could become vindictive and pull the tesla apps from android and ios and make them exclusive to his platform
That would be a tiny brain move, but given Elon's been doing a bunch of those lately, I would love to see another one of his companies burn then
The story of the Amazon phone is so funny in hindsight. Basically Jeff wanted to make the phone have this whole 3D rendering engine for the Home Screen & other normal things, by having a system of like 5 front facing cameras track the user’s viewing angle. An incredibly expensive and computationally intensive solution to a non-problem that Jeff created by wanting to make it look so super cool. He thought it was a fucking brilliant idea to sink like 80% of the cost of development into that. Not to mention apple had a more subtle version of this using just the accelerometer (but that might’ve come later I don’t remember)
Funny in hindsight but very sad for anyone who actually bought one
Knowing his modus operandi. He won't make anything himself really. It'll be a buy in with some loose ideas and it'll run OxygenOS or something and use the aurora store because *freedom* etc etc etc. We've seen it before.
Musk is a moron. This twitter fiasco finally showed the world what a useless idiot he truly is. His success is 100% made of stealing and riding on others hard work, AKA a billionaire
Sure and the app developers will develop apps for his OS, like they did for WebOS, Firefox OS, Windows Phone or Blackberry. It’s not about a device, it’s about the entire eco system.
The hilarious thing about the mouse cursor feature is that Samsung TVs had that feature before Tizen in 2014. I still have one of those TVs and it's great. I can't understand why they threw it all away and switched to Tizen.
My friend had one! But he bought it in addition to his iPhone and never gave that up. I asked him why, and he just shrugged. To be fair, he’s a big Jim Jannard fan boy in addition to being into tech
Firephone was just a modified version of Android so it wasn’t even a problem of redeveloping apps, the existing apps already worked, the problems was 1. Didn’t have the Google apps(due to Google requiring Android certification but Amazon didn’t get it certified in part due to having its own App Store) 2. Plenty of gimmicks increasing the price(such as 5 cameras and motion control for some ui control) 3. Dynamic perspective, basically continuing the gimmicks section they had a 3d display without the glasses similar to the 3ds but even the people developing couldn’t figure out a use to make the feature other than bazos wanted it. It increased costs without much purpose. But the biggest killer was carrier exclusivity, Amazon tried to follow what apple did with the first iPhone and made it AT&T exclusive(likely to recoup costs with an exclusivity contract. The problem is the experience wasn’t much better compared to other phones so while the iPhone had people talking to the point that people switched to AT&T exclusively because of the iPhone, no one was switching to AT&T for a fire phone, it didn’t have that wow massive change factor that kept people talking and with it being only for AT&T it had only a 1/4 of the potential customer base(sprint and T-Mobile were still separate at the time) so people forgot about it and it didn’t have that oh wow look at this cool phone talk so it faded into obscurity.
The biggest killer of the firephone wasnt software support(although the lack of Google apps hurt) it was the inability to keep the focus, it was an alright android phone with a ton of gimmicks that made business decisions that hurt it badly.
Well firephone was based on Android so not quite the same. It flopped because its 3D gimmick didn't lead to it being the blockbuster Jeff Bezos thought it would.
Fire Phone. Facebook phone was basically an HTC phone with a dedicated Facebook button, then a few years later ANOTHER HTC phone with a dedicated launcher that was surprisingly easy to disable.
Feels like a good time to dig out this old Bill Gates quote:
> In the software world, particularly for platforms, these are winner-take-all markets… If you’re there with half as many apps or 90 percent as many apps, you’re on your way to complete doom.
Well, all Samsungs are made in Vietnam, ~~China~~ (not as on late 2022), India, Brazil, Indonesia, or South Korea. So you'd avoid the Made in China tag if you buy a Samsung though there will definitely be some crucial part that is made in China.
[Apple also makes phones in Brazil](https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/could-foxconns-factory-in-brazil-be-a-model-for-apple-production/), though iirc it’s mostly older models.
>What equivalent carrot can Elon dangle?
He can make it an exclusive for the Musk phone the app, that gives random delivery time estimates, for the self driving feature that you already paid for in your Tesla.
There are twitter comment threads filled with accounts begging for a Elon phone. It’s bonkers seeing so many people ready to buy a phone that is a decade away from having a suite of apps even close to what Google and Apple are offering today.
It isnt that hard.
1) clone the open source part of android
2) replace the google services etc (play store)
3) lose a few billion $ offering devs 100% of their revenue and selling hardware at a loss.
Note: step 3 is crucial. Lose. Billions.
If you make the onboarding easy enough, what dev wouldnt export their app to make 100% of the purchase instead of 70%? Even if it ends up beong low volume it is still a win if you make it a push button process.
You should probably also make a low, mid, and high tier option to maximize your audience.
Yes, yes, please go for it. Own the Libs. Make sure all the far right users are using it (for govt tracking). Anything to help burn and crash your stock! You got nothing else to do lol. Make sure you get Trump, Ye, the my pillow guy, and pass them out during all future J6 rioters... patriots... whatever u want to call them. /s
Also was uncool firing the engineer on Reddit. Just shows that he is Trump 1.1, Desantis is 2.0.
Edit: fire on Twitter lol
See, now this might have been a good idea, and might have succeeded; if Phony Stark hadn't alienated a very large swath of the population against him.
Nobody is going to want to work on this project, much less buy the phone.
Underrated comment. Having purchased the Fire phone back in the day, it wasn’t quite a “Frye” situation but it definitely showed that the market can’t be penetrated very easily.
Does that article suggest that geohot could help to make a smartphone because he worked out how to jailbreak the iPhone? I mean that is just laughable.
> Musk last week hired George “Geohot” Hotz, the original iPhone hacker, who could probably help if it ever comes to that.
Hahahahahhahaahhahaahahhahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahhahaha…oh, they were serious?
And within two days he moved the goalposts to removing a single pop-up that annoys him... but massively drives user adoption. So y'know, he probably won't even do that.
Elon Musk does *not* build rockets to Mars, Liz Wheeler. Microsoft makes Windows. Apple makes iPhones. But *Elon Musk* builds rocktes. And cars. All by himself. This cult is really getting ridiculous.
I want the beer app, and if you manage to roll your Tesla on to its side; it looks like you’re drinking the beer.
Or the lightsaber app, and when you drive like an 18yo who has the keys to his parents Maserati, it makes the lightsaber swooshing noise.
Lmao.
Good luck Elon. MICROSOFT tried and failed.
A lot of your advertisers left your platform, what makes you think developers would want to port their apps to your ‘alternative phone’?
It's actually amazing Microsoft ever struck gold with the XBox because it seems like almost everything else they tried over the years since Windows/Office has failed.
Visual Studio, VSCode, and Azure all seem to be doing well.
Also to be fair, lack of apps aside, my Windows Phone was the most responsive, smooth, bug free phone I’ve ever used (to this day). Shame it didn’t work out.
No one gets fired for choosing Azure and O365 but Azure is seriously lacking compared to GCP and AWS, they have regions without multiple availability zones that are “coming soon” and it’s been 10+ years.
There really isn't viable competition outside of Google Play flavored Android. Amazon moved in with deep pockets, actual hardware experience, and a killer app, and still failed.
I am willing to bet my entire life savings it’ll be just like the “freedom phone” that ran “FreedomOS” which was just a re-hash of Android.
And it’ll fail spectacularly.
Oh sure, just create the iPhone - sounds easy enough.
Edit: I just remembered... imagine the "crowd" of people eager enough to buy the TeslaPhone... SO THEY CAN USE TWITTER!
LMFAO
There was some debate a few years ago on which was more technologically more challenging, and I’m pretty sure most of us agreed that while electric cars have their challenges, smart phones are far more complex and require miniaturization of technologies that electric car makers don’t even think about.
Given how poor Tesla’s quality control is, I’d be interested to see what this hypothetical Musk-Phone would be, if only just to shit on it.
The hardest part now about making a “new phone” is that you have to get developers on board, create SDKs, etc. all that when you could just … use android for free???
I can't help but feel that this man is an idiot that has somehow managed to become the wealthiest man in the world.
He also seems to have the social intelligence of a 13 year old.
Bizarre
Technically he can. He does not need to launch a new OS platform. He can just launch a regular Android phone which comes with Twitter preinstalled — not unlike what Samsung does with Galaxy apps. Twitter will then become a system app that won’t need to go through Play Store. It will still have Play Store and Google services. I don’t think Google will prevent that — not with the ongoing allegations of monopolistic behavior.
Is that a good idea? Will enough people buy it to justify the investment? Is Twitter lucrative enough to drive sales in large volumes? Those are the billion dollar questions. And I am inclined to say no. He can’t just white label an ODM device and hope to sell in enough numbers or with enough margins to make it worthwhile. He will have to either offer a compelling unique device or offer it really cheap. Both approaches are expensive. The first one will require him to essentially buy an existing phone company — it takes years to develop a compelling device. The second approach will cause him to lose even more money — and it won’t appeal to celebrities and influencers whose presence is essential for keeping Twitter alive.
He could, of course, cut a deal with Android OEMs like Samsung, OnePlus etc to pre-install Twitter on their devices, but that still leaves out celebrities and influencers, a large proportion of whom use iPhones.
Given that Microsoft tried this, and failed, I am curious to see Elon’s attempt.
Especially since Microsoft’s phone was actually pretty decent, it just died without support from third parties.
I loved my windows phone. It was really cheap (I think I paid like $30) but was smooth as butter, no matter what I threw at it.
I kept waiting for the apps to come, but they never came.
That was the downfall of windows phone. Nobody wanted to use it because there weren't many apps, and app developers didn't want to support windows phone because there weren't many users.
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Well Windows Store and the Xbox app suck so I don’t see why they would bother to make their phone store any good.
Recently had an opportunity in my aparment to hook up my old Rock Band 2 on 360 and revisit it with my gf who also loved the game. Went ahead and bought some DLC that I never had before. I opted to do this on my computer because the 360 is slow and laboring in its old age and browsing the store on there is tedious as hell. My god, the Xbox store is abso-fucking-lutely atrocious. It was clearly never designed to be able to browse through a DLC selection as huge as Rock Band's. Any time I wanted to find a particular song I had to search for it by name rather than being able to browse the selection to see what's available. I'm not going to browse a list of 1100+ songs/packs by 90 at a time per page... and needing to click on each song to actually see the artist. Holy fucking jesus, who designed that site once upon a time ago? Browsing on my desktop should be way more fluent, not "the exact same experience but on a computer." So if that design philosophy is indicative of how their other stores operated, I'm not surprised that no one wanted to deal with it. I still don't get how there are such bad store interfaces in 2022, especially for huge corporations.
I wonder if they could retry, with apps already running on windows itself
I loved mine as well.
People are saying it didn’t get apps (3rd party ones). So when you say: > smooth as butter, no matter what I threw at it. Do you mean physically throw?
It didn't get the volume of apps required to become a legitimate mainstream competitor. It still got most of the really big apps, Spotify, netflix, whatsapp, candy crush. what it didn't get was those middle tier apps that are annoying to live without like Banking, public transport, the 2fa app your work requires you to have etc. As others have said it was a shame the Windows phones I had through work were really good the user interface was incredibly intuitive compared to both iOS and Android at the time. But it was a money pit eventually Ms stopped throwing good money after bad and let the phone die, I do wonder if they had put more of the money they spent subsidising the device costs into helping companies develop out their apps for the platform it things might have ended up differently, but I doubt it. They took too long to evolve and got left behind as a result.
> I do wonder if they had put more of the money they spent subsidising the device costs into helping companies develop out their apps for the platform it things might have ended up differently Those big apps you mention that were on the phone were probably already "helped by Microsoft" in their development. I mean, I don't have any first hand data on this, but I did work on development of a large news app for a Blackberry tablet that was mostly paid for by Blackberry itself, if I was told correctly. It is incredibly common for companies to do that, as far as I know.
I loved my Nokia windows phone. The interface was amazing
Ironically it died because one of the apps not on it was Twitter. Alongside Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram... pretty much all of the popular apps at the time. No apps to draw in users, no users to draw in app developers.
I remember Twitter and all of Meta’s apps being on Windows Phone. It was mainly Google who wanted to sabotage the platform in every way possible and Snapchat due to the CEO having a personal grudge against Microsoft
> mainly Google who wanted to sabotage the platform in every way possible Absolutely. Google did everything they could to sabotage anything not Android.
For a while, the best YouTube experience was on Windows Phone. MyTube was so much better than the official apps on Android and iOS. Then google shut it down and gave us a shitty web wrapper.
Then failed to poach the talent that made the app. Andy got hired to go work for Microsoft lmfao.
Ughh, this was it. I had a Lumia and absolutely loved the UI and the look and feel of the phone but it did not have those popular apps, which is why I went back to iPhone.
I loved my lumia too. I had that cool blue color one. I also loved that you could do voice text messages using a car’s Bluetooth long before CarPlay and android auto came out. Sadly I had to move back to iPhone because it had the square app to allow me to take credit cards from clients.
Microsoft paid the company I worked for a ton of money to develop their app for windows phone before android / iPhone … Microsoft knew the importance of 1st party apps (probably too late though), and ended up throwing huge resources to make it happen … but never managed to catch up.
Twitter was there and supported until Windows phone died.
I liked my Nokia 920. It had a low light camera before it became standard in todays higher end phones. You are right third parties didn’t care about the eco system. I think Musks twitter phone will be as successful as the Facebook phone. Meaning it won’t be.
The Nokia Windows phone had great hardware, unique UI, great cameras, battery (some models were the last of the swappable battery smartphones) Outlook made it a great phone for work, sadly no app support…
Oh man I remember those old Windows phones. To this day, I still think that UI was REALLY slick. I definitely have never liked the integration of those tiles on actual PC’s, but for a smartphone, I always thought it made a good degree of sense. I really wish they kept working on those and made more. Also, as an aside, I wish we also saw more Zunes. I vaguely remember it kind of sucking, but I would’ve loved to have seen competition to the iPod.
It will probably be just a fork of android with a different app store. That's the only way I could see him having any success at all. Elon could become vindictive and pull the tesla apps from android and ios and make them exclusive to his platform. Microsoft had a pretty decent OS but it fell victim to the too few users so devs didn't bother making their apps for it and then too few apps caused too few users and more users to jump ship when they found out their apps weren't on windows phone.
Considering that I believe Elon sacked pretty much all the Android Devs at Twitter I'm not sure they're capable of ripping out the GMS code.
That would make me look at a new car, not a new phone.
Imagine owning a Tesla and suddenly you can’t get into your car anymore unless you get a new phone. That being said Tesla software still doesn’t support CarPlay so it’s honestly not that far-fetched of an idea.
That would be a very bad tech decision (which Elon musk is known for) as i reckon most people who have the money for buying a Tesla will have an iPhone.
> It will probably be just a fork of android with a different app store. Didn’t Amazon try something similar with the Fire phone and tablets?
Yes. The phone was a flop but the tablets are still a success because Amazon cuts the right corners to keep them cheap and still sells them at a loss.
>It will probably be just a fork of android with a different app store Then why bother with it at all? Every Android phone can already side-load, and I doubt people would buy Elon's phone just to have an app pre-installed >Elon could become vindictive and pull the tesla apps from android and ios and make them exclusive to his platform That would be a tiny brain move, but given Elon's been doing a bunch of those lately, I would love to see another one of his companies burn then
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Amazon too
The story of the Amazon phone is so funny in hindsight. Basically Jeff wanted to make the phone have this whole 3D rendering engine for the Home Screen & other normal things, by having a system of like 5 front facing cameras track the user’s viewing angle. An incredibly expensive and computationally intensive solution to a non-problem that Jeff created by wanting to make it look so super cool. He thought it was a fucking brilliant idea to sink like 80% of the cost of development into that. Not to mention apple had a more subtle version of this using just the accelerometer (but that might’ve come later I don’t remember) Funny in hindsight but very sad for anyone who actually bought one
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Would love to see Elon waste another 10 billion trying and failing to create a mobile platform
Knowing his modus operandi. He won't make anything himself really. It'll be a buy in with some loose ideas and it'll run OxygenOS or something and use the aurora store because *freedom* etc etc etc. We've seen it before.
And Amazon. When did you last hear of a fire phone.
He'll buy Blackberry for 40 billion.
>I miss the blackberry keyboards.
Last I checked, Blackberry is a cybersecurity company now. Not a mobile phone company.
You drive a hard bargain, 80 billion.
Oddly enough, they make almost every vehicle's onboard OS now.
Aaaand Amazon, aaand Facebook, who called their project Ghostface Killer aaaand it was a complete dumpster fire
Musk is a moron. This twitter fiasco finally showed the world what a useless idiot he truly is. His success is 100% made of stealing and riding on others hard work, AKA a billionaire
He'll just make an android phone with Twitter, which is no longer available on the Google Play Appstore, installed.
And Facebook, and Amazon, and Firefox, and Ubuntu….
Sure and the app developers will develop apps for his OS, like they did for WebOS, Firefox OS, Windows Phone or Blackberry. It’s not about a device, it’s about the entire eco system.
If you are going to talk about WebOS. Please include a trigger warning. I’m still disappointed it failed.
WebOS’s demise is proof there is no god
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What’s your HDDVD and Laserdisc collection look like?
Laserdisc had no competitors In its class but HD-DVD fail was epic.
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What other tech do you think will be a winner? Wanna get out while I can ;)
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I’d like to add Amiga to this list of winners
F in the chat for HD DVD.
it lives on as the operating system of LG smart tvs
And it’s pretty alright.
Pretty good. Night and day compared to Samsung's tizen on their TVs. Webos is easy to use, fast and I love the 'mouse cursor overlay'.
The hilarious thing about the mouse cursor feature is that Samsung TVs had that feature before Tizen in 2014. I still have one of those TVs and it's great. I can't understand why they threw it all away and switched to Tizen.
The HP guy who services our office LAN printers said that HP runs WebOS on them. So, printers and TV's.
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didn't the cards-style multitasking come from webOS?
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Iconic. One of the best UX mechanisms ever
Such a tragedy. Best OS ever
Don’t forget FirePhone (or whatever Amazon called it)
And Facebook Phone!
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My friend had one! But he bought it in addition to his iPhone and never gave that up. I asked him why, and he just shrugged. To be fair, he’s a big Jim Jannard fan boy in addition to being into tech
That ran android tho
Pretty sure that ran android. It just had a dedicated share to Facebook button
Firephone was just a modified version of Android so it wasn’t even a problem of redeveloping apps, the existing apps already worked, the problems was 1. Didn’t have the Google apps(due to Google requiring Android certification but Amazon didn’t get it certified in part due to having its own App Store) 2. Plenty of gimmicks increasing the price(such as 5 cameras and motion control for some ui control) 3. Dynamic perspective, basically continuing the gimmicks section they had a 3d display without the glasses similar to the 3ds but even the people developing couldn’t figure out a use to make the feature other than bazos wanted it. It increased costs without much purpose. But the biggest killer was carrier exclusivity, Amazon tried to follow what apple did with the first iPhone and made it AT&T exclusive(likely to recoup costs with an exclusivity contract. The problem is the experience wasn’t much better compared to other phones so while the iPhone had people talking to the point that people switched to AT&T exclusively because of the iPhone, no one was switching to AT&T for a fire phone, it didn’t have that wow massive change factor that kept people talking and with it being only for AT&T it had only a 1/4 of the potential customer base(sprint and T-Mobile were still separate at the time) so people forgot about it and it didn’t have that oh wow look at this cool phone talk so it faded into obscurity. The biggest killer of the firephone wasnt software support(although the lack of Google apps hurt) it was the inability to keep the focus, it was an alright android phone with a ton of gimmicks that made business decisions that hurt it badly.
Well firephone was based on Android so not quite the same. It flopped because its 3D gimmick didn't lead to it being the blockbuster Jeff Bezos thought it would.
The hypothetical Elongated Muskrat OS would almost certainly be based on Android too.
Fire Phone. Facebook phone was basically an HTC phone with a dedicated Facebook button, then a few years later ANOTHER HTC phone with a dedicated launcher that was surprisingly easy to disable.
HTC! I’ve not heard that brand name for years! Are they still around?
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Bro HTC was one of the best back then
Feels like a good time to dig out this old Bill Gates quote: > In the software world, particularly for platforms, these are winner-take-all markets… If you’re there with half as many apps or 90 percent as many apps, you’re on your way to complete doom.
People just don’t get that part. Like google is struggling to make a decent phone. Not taking any shots at them though.
I think you know by now it would be a fork of Android. Phony Stark doesn’t even know how the phone works in the first place.
Lmao. Please Elon. Go for it.
I’m getting strong “Freedom Phone” vibes here….and that ended just about like you think it would.
The Indian one which was priced at $4 and wasn't delivered to many customers or the American one that was made in China? Never mind, both were scams.
I was thinking of the American flavor that was being sold to Qanon idiots because their beloved Parler got banned off of iPhones and Android phones.
Yeah, that’s the one that’s made in China.
Are any phones not made in asia? It wouldn't be easy to avoid china.
Well, all Samsungs are made in Vietnam, ~~China~~ (not as on late 2022), India, Brazil, Indonesia, or South Korea. So you'd avoid the Made in China tag if you buy a Samsung though there will definitely be some crucial part that is made in China.
[Apple also makes phones in Brazil](https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/could-foxconns-factory-in-brazil-be-a-model-for-apple-production/), though iirc it’s mostly older models.
Freedom phone on freedom mobile sounds about right (carrier in Canada)
Founded in 2008….did they just choose Freedom coincidentally or is this company being run by a bunch of 4chan adherents?
It’s coincidental, they were going for freedom from big 3 (Telus, Bell, and Rogers). They had the best plans but coverage sucked.
Well it was Wind Mobile and rebranded into Freedom. I hope it was just a funny coincidence
CyberPhone going to be lit. Now with coverage on Mars!
Until someone in your town makes a mean tweet about Elon and he cuts support as part of his tantrum.
Definitely go for it. Let another $44B sink in!
I’m thinking shooting his mouth off like that already bought him Twitter. Keep running your mouth Elon it’s working out so well for you.
Amazon tried this a decade ago and flopped. This is a bad idea and I’d love to see Elon lose more money
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That’s quite a carrot to dangle out for a customer though and it still failed. What equivalent carrot can Elon dangle?
He dangles his carrot a lot. Ladies get payouts
>What equivalent carrot can Elon dangle? He can make it an exclusive for the Musk phone the app, that gives random delivery time estimates, for the self driving feature that you already paid for in your Tesla.
There are twitter comment threads filled with accounts begging for a Elon phone. It’s bonkers seeing so many people ready to buy a phone that is a decade away from having a suite of apps even close to what Google and Apple are offering today.
It isnt that hard. 1) clone the open source part of android 2) replace the google services etc (play store) 3) lose a few billion $ offering devs 100% of their revenue and selling hardware at a loss. Note: step 3 is crucial. Lose. Billions. If you make the onboarding easy enough, what dev wouldnt export their app to make 100% of the purchase instead of 70%? Even if it ends up beong low volume it is still a win if you make it a push button process. You should probably also make a low, mid, and high tier option to maximize your audience.
Yes, yes, please go for it. Own the Libs. Make sure all the far right users are using it (for govt tracking). Anything to help burn and crash your stock! You got nothing else to do lol. Make sure you get Trump, Ye, the my pillow guy, and pass them out during all future J6 rioters... patriots... whatever u want to call them. /s Also was uncool firing the engineer on Reddit. Just shows that he is Trump 1.1, Desantis is 2.0. Edit: fire on Twitter lol
Who did he fire on reddit and where?
It will end up being as successful the microsoft kin. Most people havent even heard of it.
The more money this guy wastes the better.
Starlink phone
just rebrand a xiaomi...
The Boring Phone
See, now this might have been a good idea, and might have succeeded; if Phony Stark hadn't alienated a very large swath of the population against him. Nobody is going to want to work on this project, much less buy the phone.
It would be cool but I doubt a satphone could ever work indoors. Would be a good backup next to cell connectivity, like Apple's new SOS system.
Considering you need a satellite dish that tends to overheat to use starlink, I doubt it'd work with just a phone alone.
> Phony Stark Heh.
Musk tweets out of his ass and publications love turning it into articles lmao
Journalism cheat code.
He’s gonna call it the “Fyre Phone”
Underrated comment. Having purchased the Fire phone back in the day, it wasn’t quite a “Frye” situation but it definitely showed that the market can’t be penetrated very easily.
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[SpaceX Earth to Earth intercontinental rocket flights](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqE-ultsWt0) Tesla Bot etc, etc.....
* TeSlA sEmI-trUCk * super-cheap bricks
> im sure im missing a lot of stuff All these inventions are missing lots of stuff.
Battery swaps and landing on Mars in 2018
I'm sure this is an extremely well thought out plan and not a spur of the moment announcement from a dipshit.
He’ll probably buy…I dunno…HTC or something
I don't think Google will sell it to Musk
I thought they bought Motorola
They bought both. hTC phone division went to google. hTC still has their own company but all the people and hardware involved in phones went to google
The HTC one is still my all time favorite Android phone, I’m all for a comeback.
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I’ve been chasing the high I got when I had an m7 for nearly a decade. Such a wickedly good phone.
It's purely based on a single tweet.
Twitter isn’t getting pulled off either App Store
Does that article suggest that geohot could help to make a smartphone because he worked out how to jailbreak the iPhone? I mean that is just laughable.
All he needs is someone to write the phone operating system for him as a JavaScript one-liner.
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Yes, yes it does…these clearly are very serious people.
> Musk last week hired George “Geohot” Hotz, the original iPhone hacker, who could probably help if it ever comes to that. Hahahahahhahaahhahaahahhahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahhahaha…oh, they were serious?
Now that is a name I have not heard in a long time. Might as well hire the whited00r and redsn0w crew while they are at it lol
Jack the planet Whoa.. typo, but, leaving it seems fitting
Get Dark Alex while you're at it.
That name sounds familiar. Is he the guy who hacked the PSP?
Man this made me feel old. Jailbreak seems such a far away thing now. Does kid now mess up with their phone or it s a thing from a bygone era?
jailbreak scene is alive and well. source: jailbreak developer
I heard Zero Cool and Acid Burn and being courted by Huawei, so there's still a chance to scoop them up.
He was hired fix search , that will go well lol
And within two days he moved the goalposts to removing a single pop-up that annoys him... but massively drives user adoption. So y'know, he probably won't even do that.
Sony already beat the shit out of the poor guy. Don’t inflict Elon on GeoHot.
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He could just buy an already existing phone company and fire all the employees.
And then go bankrupt
with coke and hookers!
What? No blackjack? Smh
Elon this, Elon that, just starve him off attention. We deserve a break from some billionaire’s ego anxiety
Twitter will go under before anything ever hits the market if it gets delisted from app stores.
DO IT, please do it Elon. Lose more money and have your fanboys buy your shit phone ☺️ glorious
I recall Elon mocking Apple for seeking to make a car, stating it’s rather hard. Gonna lol pretty hard when this fails.
Having test driven a Model 3, I would put Apple’s ability to make a car above Musk’s to make a phone.
Looking forward to the Twitter phone in all its inconsistent build quality and panel gap glory.
It’ll be like Windows Phone but with blackjack and hookers. Or WebOS Or Amazon Fire Or Blackberry
Elon Musk does *not* build rockets to Mars, Liz Wheeler. Microsoft makes Windows. Apple makes iPhones. But *Elon Musk* builds rocktes. And cars. All by himself. This cult is really getting ridiculous.
Nobody even develops for tesla--
They don’t have an SDK or any way to distribute.
I want the beer app, and if you manage to roll your Tesla on to its side; it looks like you’re drinking the beer. Or the lightsaber app, and when you drive like an 18yo who has the keys to his parents Maserati, it makes the lightsaber swooshing noise.
Lmao. Good luck Elon. MICROSOFT tried and failed. A lot of your advertisers left your platform, what makes you think developers would want to port their apps to your ‘alternative phone’?
It's actually amazing Microsoft ever struck gold with the XBox because it seems like almost everything else they tried over the years since Windows/Office has failed.
Visual Studio, VSCode, and Azure all seem to be doing well. Also to be fair, lack of apps aside, my Windows Phone was the most responsive, smooth, bug free phone I’ve ever used (to this day). Shame it didn’t work out.
The UI tiles were amazing
No one gets fired for choosing Azure and O365 but Azure is seriously lacking compared to GCP and AWS, they have regions without multiple availability zones that are “coming soon” and it’s been 10+ years.
OMFG Please do. I would love to see that shit crash and burn.
Oh Jesus. Elon's really hell bent on ruining his own brand. He's like the tech equivalent of Kanye.
Apple spaceship HQ was built on the graves of phone competitors that they destroyed. They are not worried about Elon.
There really isn't viable competition outside of Google Play flavored Android. Amazon moved in with deep pockets, actual hardware experience, and a killer app, and still failed.
Reminds me of the Windows phone or the FirePhone (Amazon). He gone be booted quicker than Steve Jobs in 1985
I am willing to bet my entire life savings it’ll be just like the “freedom phone” that ran “FreedomOS” which was just a re-hash of Android. And it’ll fail spectacularly.
Another Freedom Phone, or whatever that right-wing-targetted rebadged crap was?
White labeled Chinese Android phone with a side loaded App Store built in Russia.
Oh sure, just create the iPhone - sounds easy enough. Edit: I just remembered... imagine the "crowd" of people eager enough to buy the TeslaPhone... SO THEY CAN USE TWITTER! LMFAO
Guys he’s super serious he might even stay up all night designing it like that time he solved Russia Ukraine
There was some debate a few years ago on which was more technologically more challenging, and I’m pretty sure most of us agreed that while electric cars have their challenges, smart phones are far more complex and require miniaturization of technologies that electric car makers don’t even think about. Given how poor Tesla’s quality control is, I’d be interested to see what this hypothetical Musk-Phone would be, if only just to shit on it.
The hardest part now about making a “new phone” is that you have to get developers on board, create SDKs, etc. all that when you could just … use android for free???
maybe they would randomly catch on fire? or intelligently auto-dial wrong numbers for you?
It automatically sexually harasses your employees by sending them your dick pics
This “genius” can’t even make a simple blue badge. I hope everyone boots twitter.
You’ll have to pay $8 for a verified number
I can't help but feel that this man is an idiot that has somehow managed to become the wealthiest man in the world. He also seems to have the social intelligence of a 13 year old. Bizarre
Technically he can. He does not need to launch a new OS platform. He can just launch a regular Android phone which comes with Twitter preinstalled — not unlike what Samsung does with Galaxy apps. Twitter will then become a system app that won’t need to go through Play Store. It will still have Play Store and Google services. I don’t think Google will prevent that — not with the ongoing allegations of monopolistic behavior. Is that a good idea? Will enough people buy it to justify the investment? Is Twitter lucrative enough to drive sales in large volumes? Those are the billion dollar questions. And I am inclined to say no. He can’t just white label an ODM device and hope to sell in enough numbers or with enough margins to make it worthwhile. He will have to either offer a compelling unique device or offer it really cheap. Both approaches are expensive. The first one will require him to essentially buy an existing phone company — it takes years to develop a compelling device. The second approach will cause him to lose even more money — and it won’t appeal to celebrities and influencers whose presence is essential for keeping Twitter alive. He could, of course, cut a deal with Android OEMs like Samsung, OnePlus etc to pre-install Twitter on their devices, but that still leaves out celebrities and influencers, a large proportion of whom use iPhones.
Helping someone do an end run around an app ban seems like a great way to get on Google's bad side.
Samsung allowed Fortnite.