Even if the GUI would be perfect and much better than android or iOS (which I greatly doubt, simply because of the man hours that went into those projects) there are two big things missing. An ecosystem of apps+apis and IMO even more important: sandboxing.
Applications having access to basically everything just doesn't fit anymore today. It would have made much more sense to concentrate on these technologies and get sandboxing on the desktop, as all the competitors are also still struggling with that.
I think they are smarter than what you think , They know this is not for everybody , and this is not going to replace android/iOS ever. They targeting people like me who are sick of android/iOS because of closeness of platform.Even canonical with its huge budget admits they don't have plan to replace iOS/android (which as you told is too late for such product , even for Microsoft which have shitload of money ) but they targeting specific user's.
p.s. This is my understanding as simple end-user.I might be wrong.
There is no money in android ? That is one of the funniest thing I ever heard in my entire life ! Just calculate how much android brought people to the internet , Then multiple it by some rate , it will be the money google make from advertising on android platform . How much internet going to grow , Google income will be grow also.
Every search , Every app which you download from google play , It is direct money which goes into google's pocket,
Put aside Google play income which it will get from every transaction _ 30% I think , I am not sure _ (which is huge but let assume google spend all of it on android ecosystem and maintaining).
You clearly misunderstood the article.As I mentioned eariler Yes , there is no profit in selling Android products _hardware:some , software:none_( which indeed article talks about that) , but that is not Google's strategy at all.Please search and read about Google's making money strategy.
Remember Android is "strategy" for Google, "point" is to bring more and more people to cloud/internet.thats why Android as software developed and available from Google for free.
I see where you're coming from but being able to leverage open-source software written in (at least) Qt as well as existing and upcoming Linux security features should alleviate some of those concerns. An Apple app store approach surely isn't the only way to distribute apps and "create a community".
One way or the other, open-source software should run on mobile to remain relevant in the future, and I think we should be supportive to those projects and people who try to build some momentum, often with minimal resources.
Kubuntu already uses MAC, and since this is using Muon they can plug whatever app store they want in, including kde-apps. If they wanted to, they could mandate the inclusion of AppArmor permissions files with apps, and then present the requested permissions to users at install, or even more easily do what Android M does and prompt the first time an access permission is invoked.
That, and xdg-app is a thing. They will probably just use those. But there are a lot of ways to do sandboxing of apps on modern Linux.
Even if the GUI would be perfect and much better than android or iOS (which I greatly doubt, simply because of the man hours that went into those projects) there are two big things missing. An ecosystem of apps+apis and IMO even more important: sandboxing.
Applications having access to basically everything just doesn't fit anymore today. It would have made much more sense to concentrate on these technologies and get sandboxing on the desktop, as all the competitors are also still struggling with that.