So with Remix OS being effectively canned, what other alternatives do remain for Android on x86? I do know they were leveraging the efforts of the aptly-named Android-x86 project, but I don't know to which extent they did and the state of completeness of said project.
I've used it before, along with similar "emulators" but what I was indeed looking for were for other native Android distros, one advantage being as they used to advertise it, that it was light enough for you to stick into an USB or a SSD then boot up your underpowered computer from it. I used Remix OS for my parents' computer as a no-frills alternative to a fully fledged Linux distro, and it actually worked pretty well for that.
I have backed and received a few Jide products and love them. The ones I have received will continue to work and benefit my family. It is a shame they are moving away from the consumer space but I wish them luck.
I recently ordered a pinebook and intended on installing remix OS on it. I think I will choose differently now though.
Open source isn't particularly appealing to a lot of enterprises, and now that they're focusing on that market, they have little to no reason to look for 'community contributions'. Giving away their special sauce isn't in their best interest.
If they were shutting down, open sourcing would be more likely.
"we decided to focus our company efforts solely on the enterprise space moving forward."
Edit: only the English page has been updated. If you're in China and get auto-redirected, click the 'English' button at the bottom-left to see the full message.
Lots of crowd funding projects have done this. Just look at the Jolla Tablet [0] if you want a concrete example of a company using backer's money as an interest free loan without delivering anything. Fortunately for Jide backers, they're actually receiving a refund. Jolla has been giving their backers excuses for why they cannot return the funds for the past 2.5 years.
I mean, this is how crowdfunding works. If you're not willing to risk getting nothing in return for your money, then don't crowdfund. You need to evaluate the people proposing the project before deciding to trust them with your money. There should be no expectation of a refund if the project fails.
This is reasonable in general, but the expected narrative for "project fails" is something like "we can't make this" or "we needed more money than expected" or even just "we got bored, screw you". It does feel a bit different when the answer is "we took this as seed funding to go enter a totally different market, suckers!" Or in Jolla's case, "thanks for the money, asshole!"
There are plenty of markets with risks to the investors that still have boundaries. If a mutual fund picks badly and loses money, that's an issue for the investors. If a mutual fund turns out to be using your money on personal bets (like the London Whale) or simply stealing the money outright, that's a legal issue.
> If a mutual fund turns out to be using your money on personal bets (like the London Whale) or simply stealing the money outright, that's a legal issue.
Exactly, there's a difference between failure and fraud.
If you're soliciting donations to advance your OS development, then pitch the project as such. If you're promising backers a physical good, and then you decide to pivot, keep the money, and not deliver the backers anything or return their money, then people will obviously feel like you've defrauded them.
Unfortunately from a legal perspective, crowd funding backers have little to no legal recourse when businesses decide to use their contributions as an interest free loan for their other business operations.
I thought that Remix was a doomed product the first time I'd laid eyes on it. We have seen similar attempts from other manufacturers in the past, be that Motorola's webtop, the mini apps lumped into several OEM ROMs that emulate floating windows or the third party app packages that do the same thing.
At the end of the day, Google is the only one who can viably create new modes of interaction and the new API's to support it.
OEM's can throw their own garbage together but they will typically only ever push it on a single flagship device or some quirky variant with this feature differentiating it from the horde of other models they vomit out in the space of a year. You will get the paltry in-built apps to use and perhaps the apps of one or two sponsored partners, the development community at large will not bother using the feature because they would be targeting such a tiny fraction of their users.
Android OEM's should be purely hardware companies, focusing on hardware gimmicks alone, leave the software to those who can do it properly. It's not dissimilar from ISP's gagging to be anything but a dumb pipe, inserting themselves between you and your media. It's very unwelcome.
Corporations "firmly" dismissed Chromebooks? Where are you citing this from? If anything, the recent ransomware attacks, that basically require you to have a bitcoin wallet if you're running Windows, is probably the reason enterprises are flocking to them.
My phone broke (only the screen) back last year and I used Remix OS as a substitute. I have to say I loved it! I could load the apps I wanted to use all from my desktop, including things that are limited by design to mobile/tablet.
I am so sad to see it gone, it seemed like the main project with a future in the space.
I have a remix mini attached to our TV. It's been a fine device for what we use it for- watching movies and TV shows from Google Play and the occasional ABC iView show. Sorry to see them exiting this space.
Take money from 'community', develop using that and get famous, get enterprise funding, stop community project and return the 'community money'. Good idea.
I was thinking exactly the same thing ... the Kickstarter backers were essentially Angel investors or VCs who put up the money but didn't get a stake in the company. That's a pretty good deal for the founders!
I understand how Kickstarter works ... I was more referring to the fact that those who funded their Kickstarter campaign didn't get a return on their investment (there are plenty that lose).
I won't go so far to say that the campaign was set up with false pretenses - I think the business probably just moved away from the consumer market - but the reality is that the backers funded the early stage growth of this company with no return-on-investment.
I think the point that the person is trying to make is that when you pledge money on kickstarter, you are doing it in hopes that you will see the product emerge -- because you want to buy/use it. An angel investor rarely invests because they want the product. They invest because they want the ROI.
In that sense, having an investor take care of the funding so that the product comes to market is a good thing for the kickstarter pledger. Presumably a successful kickstarter campaign helped secure the investor. It's a success from that perspective.
For Kickstarter to continue to function, most projects need to deliver what the backer originally wanted - this, in a way, represents an ROI since (presumably) the product of the campaign was worth more to the backer than the amount they spent.
There are of course a whole tier of backers that get stickers or just thanks for backing projects at lower tiers - these backers are altruists who believe that the project is worthwhile without expecting compensation.
There is never any ROI on Kickstarter... You are always throwing your money away. If you are lucky you get some stickers or a discount on the final product.
You're still not getting my point - if the Kickstarter backers had instead written a check as an Angel investor, they might have lost their money OR they might have recognized an ROI.
From my experience seeing games on kickstarter, this is pretty much what is reasonable to expect.
I mean the whole model is
1. Get money from community to fund game development
2. Sell the game again after, for extra profit, because why not
And somewhere along the way there's usually a total mis-estimation of funds and resources
At least here something was given back to the "community"...
The entire crowdfunding platform is absurdity; I'm not really sure what people are thinking when they use it. Nothing given back to community, significant risk of failure, no real quality control or even a basic measure to meet, and extremely hype-cycled. Its mostly just a platform to give away your money for empty promises...
No, it's crowdfunding itself that is absurd: You are literally pre-paying full price for a small chance that a product will actually be shipped to you.
Imagine Amazon, but instead of next-day delivery you get next-year delivery and there's a 90% chance your product won't be delivered at all: That's what crowdfunding is.
Traditionally, when funding a product, investors got a portion of the earnings to offset their risk. Crowdfunding has managed to eschew that in favor of just getting you to give people money just in case they can come up with a product. If the bet works out, great, you get a product, but so do I, and I didn't give the creators any money in advance. If it fails, you're out your money.
> You are literally pre-paying full price for a small chance that a product will actually be shipped to you.
Anecdotal, of course, but "small chance" for me is that I have received 28 out of 29 projects I've helped fund in roughly the time-frame outlined. Only one project did I simply waste money on (the Lunecase for iPhone). For me, that's a 96.6% success rate of crowdfunded items I've backed.
The reason I crowdfund is for the product, sure, but also for the extras that the main product won't have upon release. It's not so much bragging rights, I couldn't care less about that. It's because I feel like I'm getting more for my money, well, because I am.
Maybe you're just better at due diligence than the average person (who can't really be expected to know how products get launched and what the red flags are).
I would love to think so! But sadly I've been burned on some things in the past as well (usually trusting that Amazon ships me the right item, eBay, that one item on Kickstarter, etc). I do my best to check seller reviews/ratings on typical eCommerce sites, but with Kickstarter it's more about experience of previous campaigns (like Cool Mini or Not, I trust them implicitly now).
I do agree with you, though, that crowdfunding, as a concept, is a caveat emptor situation. Sadly, as is the case in the United States anyway, caveat emptor seems to be the norm.
The assumption you make is that the product would necessarily exist otherwise without the crowdfunding, which isn't accurate in my experience. The bet is sometimes between some product and no product.
My experience with crowdfunding involves web-comic print runs, where the product already exists (published on the web), and the money is used to print the books, and produce stuff like posters or t-shirts.
Since none of these require a huge R&D effort, delivery is pretty much guaranteed (although any number of external factors might cause a delay).
So what's the difference to Amazon? Essentially, none of the products involved would be any profitable if produced on an individual basis, and independent creators can't really afford to print a hundred copies of their books in hopes of someone actually buying them. Using crowdfunding, they can gauge demand and then get a volume discount by printing a large number of books at once.
It all boils down to what you use crowdfunding for. I would never fund an effort to develop a new widget from scratch, but I might chip in to have a convincingly demonstrated prototype mass-manufactured when the alternative would be to not get it at all.
I do Kickstarters for several artists I'm a fan of for print runs. Essentially the work is finished, or near finished, and the artist will crowdfund to get prints made to sell, they usually get enough funding to do about three fold what's ordered in the kickstarter. So the KS backers are already taken care of, and the remainder they'll sell at conventions over the next couple of years.
And yeah I've backed a couple gadgets too, they never came to market. So? It was like $35 total, and maybe two a year. I think I'll be alright.
As with most things, if you can't afford the risk, don't take it.
Everything I've funded has been realized. Do you have something to back up that 90% figure?
But in any case, I don't see any problems with this. The terms are completely clear and I know what I am getting into. I fund projects because I want them to succeed but I am well aware that they might not. As long as I get the impression that it didn't fail because of foul play, I am happy.
> No, it's crowdfunding itself that is absurd: You are literally pre-paying full price for a small chance that a product will actually be shipped to you.
This depends on the project. Board games, RPG books, and food products ship just fine. Some of the best food I've had has come courtesy of Kickstarter campaigns.
Computer games are hit or miss. They all end up late, but I got'em. My glowing plants are apparently never coming (https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/04/whatever...), but other than that, and with the exception of some fudge that was quite mediocre, I've been happy with my Kickstarter purchases, and Kickstarter has allowed me access to types of products that otherwise would not have existed.
Its not just that you are a prepaying with high risk, but that what is essentially a charity is somehow treated as a legitimate business enterprise. That the community fully accepts, and even expects the producer to continue selling the product after having the entire thing funded by whatever fans. For a physical good, this can be justified, but for software...
The benefit being some 33% proce reduction, or a special in-game kickstarter item, or a forum badge, or a little physical good related to the game and production costs vastly underestimated, or some other nonsense.
That people buy into this, I don't like at all. But the arrogance, stupidity and outright malicious of the devs that make use of it is infinitely more offensive. And thats just amongst the once-respectable developers..
It's an interesting comment on crowdfunding that it's now being compared to Amazon. The original buzz around the idea was that it was a way to pay people to do something that might fail. Getting a product was almost beside the point -- you were patronising creative risk-taking. I'm interested in why this idea failed. Was it the scams? The naive people who promised to deliver the impossible?
I think the problem is that it's marketed as a purchase too much. Consider the difference between:
"I want to do a crazy thing, and it might not even work. However, if you give me money, I have a chance, and I'll give you one of the things if it does end up working."
vs:
"We're making a crazy thing! Give us money now and we'll send it to you in a month."
Not sure what you mean by this. Out of the 35 projects I've funded (some of which are games), only 2 have failed to deliver, and I've felt cheated by none. If what you say is true, I'm a better gauge of success than VC's picking startups that will be successful.
Maybe the problem isn't crowdfunding, but your expectations of it and how you go about judging whether you should give money or not.
> Take money from 'community', develop using that and get famous, get enterprise funding, stop community project and return the 'community money'. Good idea.
Well, some projects "forget" step 5, so at least there's that.
>Take money from 'community', develop using that and get famous, get enterprise funding, stop community project and return the 'community money'. Good idea.
Except they took the "develop" stage out of the equation, and most likely never planned to make a functioning product except for shipping prototype grade minis.
See, what they did is not much different than other Android "OS" spinoffs: take white box product, and put android with custom skin on it. All of that costs $200k at maximum in China, not $2m.
What made them different thought is that they pumped so much into keep hype going. And that tactic paid them off. Corporate M&A people in the People Republic of China are known to be easily impressionable, if not worse.
It was more of an flavour(fork) of android than a linux distro. First they made installing android on x86 easy as installing linux or windows. Second they added desktop like launcher for android. So multiple apps can be open at same time and do window resize.
Besides the kernel, there is very little of "desktop" (or should i say GNU/Linux) present in Android.
They used Busybox (switched to Toybox at some point) for the core utils for example.
And the GUI stack is all custom to Android. No X11 etc (You can however install some APKs that allow you to run X11 programs locally. A reminder of the flexibiliy of X11, imo).
To get Android apps running on ChromeOS (based of Gentoo, iirc), both developed by Google, they had to "containerize" the Android environment.
This should be a good indication of how divergent from desktop Linux Android has become.
Given the background of founders, some might have thought that they only seek an interest-free loan.
From the time of original kickstarter campaign, the interest from the sum would've been more than enought to sustain the company given crazy interest rates in Chinese black banks
