I wish Fairphone would take a page from Nothing’s playbook, especially when it comes to software. Nothing has shown with Nothing OS how to create a distinctive, cohesive user experience. Fairphone could adopt a similar approach: start by opening up the operating system to the community, allowing developers and users to build and improve features themselves. Fairphone could then review the best ideas, refine them, and integrate them into their own OS fully in line with their fair and sustainable philosophy.
Right now, Fairphone lacks its own recognizable OS experience, and that’s something I’d love to see change. By harnessing the power of the community, Fairphone could create a truly unique and innovative Android skin, rather than relying on standard Android skin.
That you can make Android “recognisable” in your sense is a blessing as well as it is a curse.
It is a blessing because it helped make Android very successful. There are options for users to customise it to a degree unheard of in the realm of most competition, which is nice, and it even goes as far as a legit Custom ROM scene because at the core it’s Open Source, which is even more nice, long may it last.
But the initial Android success came with phone vendors picking it up in no small part because it can be customised excessively to their benefit, too.
Which brings us to the curse because this results in Android not being Android from one device to another in a sense. Explain to others how to do something on an e.g. Samsung or Huawei when you know Android and could help them, but you don’t have a Samsung with “One UI” or a Huawei with “EMUI”. And this kind of customisation helps locking users to vendors, too, because if they grab a different vendor’s Android phone, seemingly nothing works like they are accustomed to at the first impression. This effect is intentional.
I’ll take standard Android anytime and make it as recognisable as is necessary for my use cases myself, thank you very much, standard Android vendors. I don’t need a unique “experience”, I’m not in search of one when I’m using just the OS of a computer device.
But for all I care, vendors can do what they want with their stock OSes, just leave the door open for users to install something else, and everybody will have a chance to thrive how they like.
Too many manufacturers are thinking that locking a system makes it safe. Worse, they won’t even let you unlocking it, despite explicit customer wishes to do so (latest infamous example: Xiaomi).
No, thank you. I’d prefer a clean(er) approach like LOS “lacking its own recognizable OS experience” instead of yet another “distinctive, cohesive user experience”. Also, I would get like to get rid of Google altogether.