Former Ubuntu Phone developer Simon Raffeiner, who many of you know as sturmflut, has written a detailed blog post to share his thoughts on why he believes the Ubuntu Phone and Ubuntu Touch projects failed.
Simon Raffeiner has been working on the Ubuntu Touch operating system since its official announcement in 2013, believing in the goals and objectives of the project. He worked for about three years, until mid-2016, on various Ubuntu Phone-related issues, including, among others, Click apps, bug reports, and tutorials to get users started hacking Ubuntu Touch.
Now, a year after Canonical abandoned its Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system and the Ubuntu phone dream was put back on track, Ubuntu Phone Insider speaks in a lengthy article about why he believes the project failed and what others can learn from this failure. He also explains some of the challenges the Ubuntu Phone team faced and where they could have done better.
In the story, Simon Raffeiner said that the Ubuntu Phone project's biggest rivals were Android and iOS, and we can't argue with him on that. He believes that Ubuntu Phone isn't targeting a profitable niche and that the user experience offered on those devices was poor.
“People crying for a third alternative didn’t do so primarily because Android or iOS had a bad reputation or were too limited or gave users a bad user experience, but because they rightly feared a Google monopoly,” Raffeiner says. “Attacking Android and iOS wasn’t as easy as attacking Microsoft and Red Hat on computers and servers.”
Another thing that may have contributed to the failure of Ubuntu phones is the fact that smartphones and tablets from various mobile device manufacturers like Meizu and BQ were hard to come by and didn't deliver, according to the developer, even though Canonical's goals were to capture just one percent of the mobile phone market to keep the Ubuntu Phone and Convergence visions alive.
