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by miohtama 2378 days ago
Maybe it could be called a 3G modem platform instead of a phone.

To write UI software for a modern phone takes 150+ full time engineers in my experience. Only few organisations have this capability and this is why these things will never be phones people use.
5 comments
curioussavage 2378 days ago
150+ full time engineers!! no way...

purism already did it with a handful. Their new shell has a great design in my opinion and it runs ok. I'm not a fan of plasma mobile but it seems ok too. The hard part it seems to me is the layers below the actual UI, gpu support, energy consumption etc.

I'm confident these shells will get to the point where they are maybe better for the average phone user than desktop linux shells are for the average desktop user, mostly because reasonable phone UI patterns are more narrowly defined.

I'll bet apps support and camera quality will remain bigger deal killers after the shells mature some more.

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boomlinde 2378 days ago
> To write UI software for a modern phone takes 150+ full time engineers in my experience.

That's a bit like saying that you have to drive 150 km/h to get to Paris. What's the time budget? Where are they now? What are the goals? Surely you can imagine ways that the answers to these questions can vary enough between commercial and open source community projects that saying that you need 150+ engineers is a meaningless statement on its own.

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catdog 2378 days ago
Wouldn't be too pessimistic on the UI side. Building decent desktop UIs isn't easier and still people managed to do it without a (single) organization in the background.
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Erlich_Bachman 2378 days ago
It takes that much the first time you do it. A lot of time and energy goes not simply into writing the code, but into figuring out (through writing wrong code many times and then rebuilding it) how the UI really should work, feel, look, etc. But now they have the advantage of already seing all those results and knowing exactly what they need to build. This save a lot of time.
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nerdponx 2378 days ago
At least on the design side, this is a good opportunity for up and coming UX designers to build portfolio pieces while also being useful (instead of redesigning Spotify for the 1000th time).
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