[motoboi]

So we basically are seeing that google was "right" from their point of view in securing a mobile OS.

Facebook maybe thought this day would never arrive and could have avoided that by doing their own mobile OS too.

Well, maybe they declared this battle as lost and focused on the next one: VR. Problem is that VR took too long to arrive and death on mobile can kill Facebook?

[dazc]

'...and death on mobile can kill Facebook?'

Seriously wondering what impact this would have on the world other than a positive one?

[kaybe]

I'm not sure, going to a more monopolistic world still seems bad to me, even if I like and trust this particular player a little bit less than the others.

[mrweasel]

Facebook is a monopoly, in most parts of the world. I know some would claim that Twitter is a competitor, but I don't really see the two having much in common, other than being social networks.

[motoboi]

Probably not positive for Facebook stock owner's world.

But I personally agree with you. My world will be better without it.

[rmsaksida]

> Problem is that VR took too long to arrive and death on mobile can kill Facebook?

Facebook owns the most popular messaging app in the world (WhatsApp) and two of the most popular social networks in the world (Facebook, Instagram). Are they really in trouble because of the Android/iOS changes?

[motoboi]

People need a phone to use Instagram. Instagram makes money out of ads, not out of its users. So anything that threatens this revenue source can kill Facebook.

They can still do ads without tracking, but would that still be a trillion dollar business?

[polyomino]

Yes, but it would be worse for everyone involved

[heymijo]

Welcome to Milton Friedman's capitalism. Beat earnings expectations every quarter into perpetuity or watch your share price drop.

[skohan]

"Kill facebook" might be a tad hyperbolic for a company which basically prints money. "Facebook might be forced to get a haircut on mobile revenue" might be more accurate

[bushbaba]

Question is does google still collect the location data. And are they acting monopolistic here.

My understanding is that even the latest version of android phones home your location in real-time. Which google uses itself for ads.

[harikb]

> Which google uses itself for ads

Do you have a source? Google providing a location-based service for Android OS functionality is different from using it for ads.

[motoboi]

Take a look at recently unsealed documents from court about google location.

[hetspookjee]

I am extremely skeptical in anything Google states that they aren't using for ads and / or user tracking. There's plentiful of examples proving the opposites and it is littered with "whoopsies". Remember the time they "accidentally" equipped their google street view cars with Wi-Fi scanners? It's old but still is true. That happens to me too every now and then. Or how they see themselves above the law with their Google Analytics opt-out plugin that is the complete opposite of what the GDPR states.

[cardosof]

I guess that's what happens when you start late. Everyone else has their moats in place and you either 1) start from scratch at hardware level and develop a new phone from the ground up - electronics, OS, utility apps, dev tools or 2) focus on creating the next platform.

Both are really high cost, complex, multi-year bets with lots of moving parts and no real hint of consumer adoption/market size until way after the ship's sailed.

In my opinion, as a consumer, they're really on the path to make VR happen and their wrist-based tech and Oculus is very promising. What VR still needs, after all those years since it's been accessible to the general public, is a killer app, and one can only guess why no one has developed it yet.

[Duralias]

What would the "killer app" even be, you make it sound like it should be very obvious what it would be, but even knowing exactly what it should be, a killer app is still just luck and the right timing.

The only app that I could imagine bringing mainstream appeal would be a Ready Player One Oasis kind of thing (I've only seen movie, not read the book), but seeing and testing all the social vr apps we have now, the Oasis is the most fantasy thing about that universe.

[cardosof]

I'm sorry if I wasn't clear, my point is exactly the opposite: since we know commercial VR for quite some time and there's no killer app yet, maybe there won't be a killer app at all unless technology improves so much it'll look like magic (like Ready Player One).

[akmarinov]

VR's probably not going to be bigger or even equivalent to mobile, so they should've tried harder.

[motoboi]

I personally believe VR and mainly AR are the next and natural step in personal computing.

Ubiquitous computing may be the next step from there. Something like “the world is the computer and you just interact with it”.

[hakfoo]

It feels like VR is 5 years away forever.

Realistically, I feel like there are two near-intractible problems for widescale consumer adoption.

1. The space problem. For some experiences, yeah, you can sit in a chair and wear a helmet, but I'd expect many of the more compelling immersive experiences would involve flailing your arms and moving around. That's a recipe for disaster inside a small apartment without dedicated space-- you're gonna trip on something or break something. I seem to recall some designs for an "omnidirectional treadmill" to keep someone contained while giving them more room to roam, but that's a whole different thing to design and perfect.

2. The motion-sickness problem. I'm not sure if tracking will improve to the point where this isn't the factor it is now, but I'd expect some people are going to always have issues because of an conflicting sensory experiences-- the helmet says you're being blasted into hyperspace, but your stomach and legs say you're standing still.

[fooey]

VR also requires 100% task dedication

You can't alt-tab over to HN to browse during loading screens

Even assuming everyone had the hardware, the barrier to use is magnitudes larger than using a mobile device

Personally, I think VR has already plateaued

[rightbyte]

Hopefully VR will end up with a more permanent footprint than 3d cinema.

It is hard to evaluate VR with just the perception of what we have today and fantasies about how good the tech will be.

[ska]

VR has been 'the next big thing' for a lot of decades now.

[8note]

Be is gonna be more like 3d tvs.

Ar might be big, but vr is just silly

[tracerbulletx]

I don't see why it would kill Facebook. They still have the user profiles and photos with location and all kinds of other valuable signal.

[spoonjim]

Facebook realized that no amount of money was going to will a third mobile OS into existence. cf. Microsoft.

[toast0]

Microsoft actually had a winning formula. Make cheap phones that work alright. And they were getting market share with later wp7 and throughout wp8.

Between wp8 and WM10, they merged the phone team with the regular OS team, and eliminated (or at least gutted) their QA teams, and they decided to target the high end market only. There were no low spec WM10 phones, and there hadn't been many high end buyers anyway, so who was going to buy WM10? And upgrading to WM10, when available, was often a bad experience.

Also, mobile Edge had a nicer renderer than mobile IE, but it was sooooo much worse UX (laggy, slow, navigation buttons went into some sort of button press queue to be resolved seconds later). When you've driven away app developers, ruining the browser isn't a good choice.

So, it's not that you needed more money (although I'm sure it would help), you also need to not abandon the market niche you found in search of an unobtainable, but potentially more lucrative one, and you need to make releases be consistently better each time. (It would also help if one of the big players stumbled, but you can't count on that).

[ThrowawayB7]

IIRC Microsoft didn't eliminate their QA teams until after Windows Phone 10 was mostly dead.

Regarding apps, bear in mind that Google went out of their way to prevent Youtube and their other services from working on Windows Phone, e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/appsblog/2013/aug/15/... . There's nothing that Microsoft could've done to overcome that much of a disadvantage and anti-competitive scrutiny of Google hadn't gotten underway yet.

[toast0]

Google had apps for Windows Mobile 6, and Microsoft chose to throw that app ecosystem away for Windows Phone 7. WP8 could run WP7 apps, but for the best experience, you needed to redo a bunch of stuff in a way that only worked for WP8. Same thing for WM10, except that this time, Microsoft called it Universal, although a Universal app didn't work on the WP8 and WP7 devices; and AFAIK, WM10 never surpassed 7 or 8 in active devices; whoops.

Also, I had heard Microsoft blocked 3rd party browsers early on, when Mozilla wanted to develop Firefox for WP, that would have been a lot nicer than mobile IE and later Edge, and probably would have run YouTube just fine.

On the dates, I see a RTM date of Nov 2015, and GA of Mar 2016 for WM10; I think the end of QA and the merger of Windows Phone with Windows was actually at the same time, Nov 2014, AFAIK. It's a bit tricky to nail it down, but I think this article, read with hindsight speaks to those changes. https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-layoffs-operating-sy...

[ladyanita22]

Yeah, Microsoft had an exceptional OS that was competitive to iOS (and much better than Android) on its foundations and APIs. It had everything needed to succeed and get a big chunk of the market, except for a clear leadership.

Now, here we are, with extremely powerful Android phones that do little because they don't have a solid software foundation with which to build good software, an iOS has all the high-quality software.

[nirvdrum]

We just retired a Lumia 950 XL in my household. It's an all around better experience than Android in my experience, but there wasn't much point in continuing to push the boulder up the hill. And I liked the ability to pop in a micro SD card, which Apple doesn't support.

From my vantage point, Google did everything it could to kill off Windows phone. There was the big spat over YouTube, where Google wouldn't write a native YouTube client and banned Microsoft's. Google bought SoftCard (I think?) and subsequently killed off NFC payments for Windows phones. When they bought Waze, they ceased all development for Windows mobile, allowing that application to atrophy.

There were certainly a lot of other reasons Windows mobile had difficulty. Not the least of which is developers didn't want to have to manage apps for yet another platform. It looked to me like Microsoft was making good strides there, nonetheless, with some nice tooling. I don't use more than ten apps with any regularity and there were solutions for each of them on Windows mobile, at least.

But, rather than make its apps available everywhere its users were, Google used its market position to starve a competitor. And it wasn't merely a case of deciding not to build apps for it. They took active actions to try to kill off Windows mobile before it had a chance to grow. I see no reason to believe they wouldn't do it with any other new entry. We're just stuck with a duopoly now.

[toast0]

> We just retired a Lumia 950 XL in my household.

Man, that's a lot of commitment! I gave up when an app I was using for work ended WP8 support and I updated my Lumia 640 to WM10 and wasn't happy with it (Mobile Edge is really terrible, but I already complained), I could give up that app and go back to WP8, but I wasn't willing to live with the notification center bugs in WP8 that were actually fixed in WM10. I still miss live tiles, and the janky photo uploader app I wrote. :(

[nirvdrum]

The Lumia 950 XL shipped with Windows 10 native and was Microsoft's flagship phone, so it got updates for longer. But, yeah, live tiles were great and the UI was just super smooth. The dedicated camera button was fantastic. Being able to access Office apps in Continuum was really neat. I'm sure I have the timetable wrong, but there were features in Windows 10 mobile that took years before they were available on other platforms.

For now I'm using Square Home with a Samsung Galaxy, mostly because I like the hardware options on Android better. But, with the whole industry shifting to locked down devices much like iPhones, I may very well switch back to iPhone for privacy reasons. I really liked having a viable third option. C'est la vie.

[sumedh]

> Google used its market position to starve a competitor.

They just followed Microsoft's formula.

[MonaroVXR]

There are some differences between Android phone, so it's difficult to judge if you don't list the right one.

[johannes1234321]

They didn't even find enough users for their Android "launcher" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Home

A Facebook phone probably would give even more critical reception ...

[Sunspark]

Years ago a Facebook phone was planned. Its differentiating feature as I recall it was the "like" button.

[johannes1234321]

Nowadays it would be "share on insta"

But it's still interesting how they initially were late on mobile, with all the FBML embedded things (Zynga games) not working on mobile and things moving from their "platform" to mobile apps, but I assume for now with WhatsApp, Insta and messenger they "own" a notable amount of mobile screen time. Missing the underlying platform of course gives them "neutrality" that they can be on all OSes (till the privacy enforcements make it harder for them) instead of having to differentiate the Facebook phone from iPhone.

[brutal_chaos_]

https://www.theverge.com/2013/4/9/4206176/htc-first-review-f...

[indymike]

I can live without VR. I'm at a disadvantage without my mobile.

[baby]

I remember that there was a facebook phone, don’t know what happened to it

[intricatedetail]

Let's hope Google will also get banned from collecting data. It's time This advertising predatory business ends.