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I think that there's more to it than what's mentioned in the article: Todays mobile OSes (and iOS prominently) have been designed as consumer OSes. Now it is becoming apparent that mobile devices are eventually becoming a platform for work (well, "work" might be a bit exaggerated here) and targeted task-fullfilment too.

Time to rethink the mobile OS as a whole.

3 comments

Maybe that's exactly the point - they're consumer OSes. And while Android already does this, with intents, I doubt most consumers are very happy with this feature (if they even know it exists).

You want to do something with an image, for example, and you're greeted with a huge list of apps that all claim to handle images. Not only is it hard to find the app you want, most of the ones in the list have nothing to do with the task you're trying to accomplish. Hardly user friendly behavior.

FWIW, I personally don't really mind the huge list and can find my way around it, but I'm a heavy Unix user that does most of his work in the terminal already. Most consumers are not.

You are right. I can't see this for consumer devices. Also it would do major damage to app-stores, so there is no broader interest in it. And no one would release and maintain an OS dedicated to power users only (there are to few) – it just doesn't scale.

Apple had once an approach to this in the old Classic OS, by a switch that would enable or disable some access and features in the OS (esp. Finder). While this wasn't a great success on the desktop (like any other easy-suites), it might be worth to rethink for the mobile platform.

Android does this already. Windows 8 (RT) and Windows Phone do too. The article is only about iOS.

Windows RT does NOT do this.. They have a few very limited APIs for IPC, such as Search.. other than that, it's very tied down. Even so much so that it's impossible to make a universal file browser. You have to declare ahead of time which file extensions your application should be capable of opening

Think of Mac OS Automator for mobile devices (let's name it "Task Composer"), letting you assemble whole workflows based on pipes. But this would potentially harm any AppStore interests, so this will never happen, not on any of the current platforms.

(Edit: This would also afford to expose system calls to the end user, being the end of consumer haven.)

Yes. The Ubuntu Phone / OS is a interesting byproduct of this idea.