Motorola's Linux Phones Frustrate Developers

n8willis writes "Three years after Motorola first announced it was migrating its smart phones to Linux -- and a dozen models later -- there are still virtually no third-party applications for them, much less open source ones. Symbian and Microsoft both give away free SDKs to all willing developers, but Motorola seems to be putting up hurdles instead. An article on NewsForge asks why is this the case?" NewsForge is a Slashdot sister site.

Well...

It might be because most people that put linux on small things are people that want to show people that they can do l33t things and are not interested in writing serieus apps. but why doesn't motorola port some linux apps themselves? it shouldn't be to hard for them, and there are plenty of them.

Not only developers frustrated

Those Linux phones would frustrate me too. Having to pipe AT commands directly from the command line to get them to dial, or use apt-get to manage contact details is fairly tedious.

Motorola

Motorola has its head squarely up its ass when it comes to community and its customers. They are a lumbering elephant of a company stuck in 1980s mentality.

We're Moto

We don't have to make sense - or even seem like an American company, anymore. Why are you bothering us?

Shouldn't you be out hassling Goldstar or Nokia somwhere, kid?

Also a problem of availability

I think one problem might be availability. Here in Europe, we CAN get exotic GSM phones, but you have to go to a specialty dealer. If you just walk into a mainstream electronics and home appliance shop or a cell phone booth you can't find any linux phones.

The specialty dealers take a large profit off the phones since they don't sell that many of them. So nobody has one, you never hear about one so you never know you might actually want one.

This, I think, is really too bad.

not surprised

Motorola's UI department is seriously THE WORST in the industry. Having owned numerous Motorola phones I really think they need to stop hiring artists to design their phones and employ some UI engineers.

Fire the engineers and marketroids.

you have obviously not had the misfortune of having to use Sony/Ericsson's phones, ever.

I have a T610. It's an OK phone, I guess, but there are a number of irritating quirks about it. For instance--there is no easily-discoverable sequence to the "received calls" list. Apparently, some genius thought that linear time is not relevant when considering whose calls you might have just missed. Unfortunately, since I don't live in an experimental piece of modernist fictional literature, I am left wondering who the hell called me and when.

My general complaint with mobile phones is that they have suffered from two great evils: feature bloat and a fetish for miniaturization. My phone is tremendously useful on paper, but the complexity of its operation (for everything but regular phone calls) mean most of those features are essentially useles. Add this to the fact that its tiny size makes controlling it needlessly difficult.

I blame the engineers who put the thing together. I also blame the marketing departments, who have compelled their engineers to fight a generally useless "button race," in the futile hope of being the most "full-featured" phone on the market.

One thing I'll say about Nokia: they've been very good at UI. I might buy one of their phones, next.

How is this unusual?

Knowledge-hoarding and incompetence from a big company? It's likely the move to Linux was made to either save money or as retribution from a manager/VP that was displeased with the previous supplier.

Motorola's customers are NOT we end-users, but the phone companies that buy the phones and get people to sign up to contracts with them. Unless it's those companies kicking up a fuss, Motorola probably couldn't care less. Why should they? Motorola never sold a phone to an individual buyer, only to companies looking for features like locking the phone into a specific network.

This is because consumers are not the customer

The real customer is Verizon, or Voda, or whomever the cell provider is. And the providers want to sell the crap they make, not good and free alternatives.

Re:This is because consumers are not the customer

Yup and in addition...

The big question is, what does Motorola gain by obstructing willing developers from bringing software to their platform?

Well, it keeps the development in the hands of the mobile phone companies using the phone who then will charge their customers to download songs, applications, etc. If they phone is wide open and anyone can develop for it why would anyone pay $2.50/song, $5 to $10/application, etc?

Exactly, they wouldn't and that's why phones with great development environments (like the T-mobile Sidekick) are dead in the water.

Anyone ever use/own a motorola phone?

Anyone who has ever owned or used a motorola phone, has to know that their software is horrible. I think this is a good situation where it may help to actually replace their entire software development team with people who are competent? Or else I (and many like me) will never consider buying a motorola.

In a word

The big question is, what does Motorola gain by obstructing willing developers from bringing software to their platform?

Control.

Initial QC is Motorola's biggest flaw

The RAZR and its ilk are standing on the shoulders of marginal work (like the v600)...Motorola tends to make the first few iterations, then bugfix, then make a good stable product. It's entirely possible that the Linux models aren't ready for primetime yet. (This is based on my experience with four v600's, a MPx220, and a RAZR.)

Who ever though it would be native apps?

I though it was blindingly obvious at the announcement that Mototola only saw Linux as a free os to run a Java VM on, if they had a hardware chip they could run the VM on Linux would be in the bin for the next product release.

GNU/Hurd Motorola phone?

...the cell phone of the future! The anti-DRM gpl'd software runs all music through a filter, transforming great hits like Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven" to a scratchy likeness of "Another One bites the Dust" by Queen...

The reason...

Well as i said on Osnews already, i'm one of the moderators/editor from motorolafans.com, and have been since the beginning, and it's true that motorola hasn't been exactly helpfull with getting the sourcecode and they still owe us the bootloader code, too. The reason that they are so unhelpful is ofcourse really obvious. Who are their customers? The big telco companies. Where do big telco companies make their money from? From their customers calling with their phones. If you start giving out the kernel source and encourage hacking on these phones (with sdio hardware and a mini usb host controller), the users will be voiping in no time, which would piss of their customers, the telco's.

No mention of Linux on their website

I have taken a look on their website, and there is nothing about a Linux phone.
The phone specs are not at all detailed, they focus too much on design.
Who would want a phone that looks like a rock?
And the whole HelloMoto thing is just weird. Maybe it works for Japan, but not for the rest of the world.

Above stuff has at least kept me away from motorola.
Sony Ericsson does a lot better on the presentation area.
Motorola should promote the tech side of the phone more.
If I'd known about a Linux phone with decent features and specs I'd have bought it.

This is simple

Verizon, Cingular, etc. : "Hello Moto, we make a significant amount of money charging total idiots for the right to license crappy ring tones, useless apps, games, and backgrounds. If you release a phone to our customers that allows them to install their own apps, music, and images we will stop buying your phones. Speaking of which, make sure we can lock out DUN and OBEX on your new line of bluetooth phones."

Motorola: "Yes sir, sorry sir."

Motorola drives me nuts

I was interested in writing a lightweight kernel to play with on the Motorola e815 and similar phones. Compiling binaries for the phone's cpu is no big deal, but the phone requires its kernel to be digitally signed.

If you replace the built in kernel with an unsigned one, it won't run. I swore my ass off when I learned that, although I wasn't surprised.

For anyone who claims there might be some FCC regulations that prevent this sort of experimentation, you won't produce interference accidentally with these phones. The radio interface is not complicated.

(And don't get me started with Verizon crippling the Motorola phones they sell. It's best to buy the phones independently from the service.)

I think the network service providers (Verizon et al.) should be banned from subsidizing phones, and be should be forced to allow the use of any phone compliant with the their networks' standards. There was an explosion in diversity of landline phones, and massive improvements in their capabilities and prices, when AT&T was similarly forced to untie the endpoint hardware from their network service. I want to see the same explosion occur in the wireless market.

Their goal is to lock you in to old rates for a year or two at a time, and thereby avoid the amazing price competition which occurred in wired network phone service. If buying the handsets is decoupled from subscribing to the network, they'll have no reasonable rational for forcing people to sign long-term contracts, and we'll see proper competition again. I'd be happy as hell to see that. I want phones that serve me, rather than the network service provider.

Do any service providers sell these?

I'm in the US, but I haven't seen Verizon/Cingular/Nextel/Sprint or any company offer a Linux based phone. It is one thing to be able to pay a company a few hundered dollars and have them give you the phone. Buying it on eBay or from a third party and hoping that it works with your service is different.

As soon as I see Cingular with a Linux based phone, I will own^H^H^Hp4wNzz0r it.

Availability of Linux Smart Phones

Both the A780 and the E680 are available for US networks, though most of their other models don't work inside the US's GSM frequencies and there's a real lack of linux CDMA phones. Both of these models are being hacked and there's a small community of users using these as routers. see http://www.dewmill.com/linuxphone.html [dewmill.com] for an example.

The dirth of linux smart phones has more to do with the weirdness of the US phone market. There are lots of cool linux phones (not just Motorola) that work outside the US on the standard GSM bands, but the popularity of CDMA and the unusual GSM bands make the worlwide phones not so usable here.

Both the a780 and the e680 have third party apps and are pretty damn cool. I think the poster just hasn't looked hard enough. That's a really old announcement of the a760 and I don't think its even for sale here in the US. Get with the program man!

Two words: Customer Support

They dont want native applications because they are more likely to brick the phone, causing warranty and customer support nightmare for carriers.

KDE dropping Kandy for "The Sync" didn't help

Kandy, KDE's Phone Syncronization application, and KPilot, KDE's Palm Syncronization application, were scrapped in favor of another program called "The Sync". The only problem: "The Sync" doesn't exist yet. I could never get KPilot to sync with my PDA or Kandy to work with my Motorola phone. And I don't even want to us anything GNOME has to offer considering I use Kontact.
I can only assume that KDE is waiting on the Linux guys to find some way to get the Motorola's to sync.

Motorola phones suck ?

For me it is an easy answer: I try to be polite: I dislike Motorola phones, and I am not surprised if tech savvy people would not get them, and would not care if it is linux, symbian or ce.

I personally really do not care if my phone runs linux, and even if it did I would not waste the time to write some killer custom app just because I can ... Of course I am not saying that I would not write scripts or whatever needed to maintain my data.

Besides: a phone's life span is soo short (unlike those old times) that for the time you develop something (as a hobbiist) someone comes out with a phone with 3 times bigger display, zoom lens camera and whatever else unneeded crap and you can start patching ....

I mean do you need linux on your phone ? Do you have a Motorola phone? Even that there are development tools for your phone, did you write a CE/Linux/Java/Midp/whatever app for it?

OK, I am negative today

It's because

Motorola generally doesn't have a single clue about what they're doing. They peaked in cell phones back in the 90's with the StarTAC, and haven't really done anything compelling since. The products suck, the support sucks, the tools suck, all the way around they have the most amazing feature-packed phones that deliver nothing less than total mediocrity. They throw away CPU time in favor of battery life, in such a way that it doesn't actually help. You know those ringtones they sell? Well, a frickin' 64kbps MP3 won't even play without constant stuttering and dropout, and this is on a V551. Sure, the RAZR will play just fine, but it's still a clunky, power-hungry monster. Don't even get me started on poor interface design. Mystery-meat navigation anyone? Screwball configuration options? How about bugs, that the cell carriers won't help to address? And incompatibility? Christ, it's a bluetooth phone, but I can't sync my contacts with it? I can read all the damned media on the phone all day long over the BT link, but, noooo, no contacts or anything actually useful. For that I gotta drop another fifty bucks for the PC connection kit (a cable, and poorly written Windows trashware that maybe will do what it purports) just to get my address book set up.

Screw Motorola. They deserve the bad press they get.

I call bullshit here.

I definently have to call bullshit, at least based on what's in the summary in this article.

The Motorola SDK for their mobile phones is available right now, both the linux and non-linux varieties of phones.

This article is discussing, of course, the availability of the linux source code itself, not the SDK. You do not need the linux source code in order to develop applications for their linux-based mobile phones, and to be perfectly honest, having to jump through hoops to get the kernel source really isn't that big a deal, since getting the SDK is as simple as signing up at www.motocoders.com

ash

Re:I call bullshit here.

The Motorola SDK for their mobile phones is available right now, both the linux and non-linux varieties of phones.

Having experience with one of the Motorola phones myself, I belive the article describes the current situation very accurately. As the article explains: the public SDK is only for java development. The intresting thing with having a Linux phone is to develop native applications. There is no public SDK from Motorola for native applications. That is the problem.

Linux phones that work in the US?

Do any of these Linux phones work with the services in the US? I haven't seen any being offered by the carriers themselves.

Symbian SDK is *not* free!

Having worked on a product for Symbian developers, I can assure you that the Symbian SDKs are not "given away". Symbian charged us to be "partners" with them. Then they charged for access to the SDK. Then they charged for access to the source. Then they charged for access to support. On and on. And the contracts were so constrictive that our legal department threw up their hands in despair. I believe they have every right to charge for their proprietary IP, but I want to make sure that the impression that they give "free" and "free" access to their SDK is eliminated!

There is a lot of room for improvement in SDKs

As someone who has done the embedded linux thing I've seen a couple of trends. First, you get a bunch of hard embedded guys who are used to controlling the hardware with an RTOS and they try to cram an app into a driver. It can work, it can even be "easy" but it's not really the linux way, it's not clean, you don't get a lot of advantages of having Linux in the first place.

The other one is shitty dev tools compared to some of the stuff you can do with other platforms. I'm a big fan of GCC and the linux tools, they aren't what's shitty. It's the whole process that ends up kind of shitty. Symbian is designed for phone apps, there is a defined way to cross compile and deploy apps, depending on what your app does you can probably prototype it and have something working pretty fast. In the Linux world, you either start completely from scratch and spend a lot of time building the environment and tool chains or you buy some half-assed product from one of the dozens of companies that do that for you and then once you see how shitty it is and how they really just packaged some free stuff you build your own anyways. I see tons of room for improvement in this space.

The other thing, again, it's not really bad, but Linux gives you a lot of rope, it is not that challenging to hang your self. Symbian and even Mobile Windows are fairly restrictive and provide a well documented set of services. Java is the closest thing on Linux to a highlevel set of standard APIs. Probably out in most real embedded situations just on virtues. That leaves linux with raw devices and programmers eager to make something work. I liken it to the perl philosophy, where the belief that more ways to do things is better; I think it means that a job is more likely to actually get done in reality but if there are 1 or 2 good ways to do something and 10 shitty ways it also increases that odds that the job will not be done in the best way.

A little bit of info

Most normal Motorola phones (like the E378i I have) use something called a Neptune as the main processor (its an ARM with a DSP inside I believe) with a custom motorola operating system (known as p2k in the moto modding community because of the p2k.sys driver used to access it).
The Motorola Linux phones use a platform called EZX. This consists of a Neptune processor like in a normal p2k phone with a (presumably different) version of the p2k operating system running on it to handle the network side (i.e. actually talking to the cell tower) and then an Intel ARM chip running a modified version of MontaVista Linux for the rest of the phone software.
They are using a modified version of the BLOB bootloader and a 2.4.x Kernel.
The userland is made up of various normal utillities (e.g. glibc, gnu fileutils etc) plus a (aparently hevily modified) version of qtEmbedded and a pile of motorola specific stuff.

Motorola HAVE released a kernel source tree for the EZX phones. And people have reported getting it to compile and run on their phones. Whether its complete, up-to-date or accurate I dont know.

Motorola are under no obligation to provide any SDK for these phones.
The only thing they need to do is to release the source code for any components under licences that require them to do so (e.g. BLOB, kernel, glibc etc). So far, other than the kernel release, they have not done so.
Several requests have been sent to motorola requesting the source code to those comonents but so far, no code has been forthcomming.

Motorola are under no obligations to share the source code, SDKs, docs, headers etc to the motorola specific stuff on the phone (unless its some how derived from GPL code that is). They are also not under any obligation to share any code to things like qtEmbedded (they probobly have a commercial licence from trolltech for that).

There are reports of a "leaked" SDK for EZX phones but I dont know much about it (using it would probobly be a violation of copyright anyway so its probobly best not to)

The most promising work is going on at www.openezx.org. People there are trying to make replacements for the motorola propriatory kernel modules and software bits as well as trying to reverse engineer the propriatory libraries motorola have used as well as trying to get motorola to release the code required under GPL (having the motorola version of BLOB in particular would be nice since it could lead to a better way to modify things on the phone without some of the hacks that are required now)

Thanks to the OpenEZX project for most of the information contained here.

Motorola.. one step forward, two steps back...

I was among those that bought one of the early Motorola Linux EZX phones.. the E680. It was a pretty cool device, with lots of features, and pretty decent speed. There was a growing user community [howardforums.com] based around it, who even went to some lengths to find the correct modem and bluetooth drivers to let us open a shell in the OS. It was unfortunate that Motorola never released a SDK for the Linux platform, as even a simple procedure such as changing the phone's icons took alot of hacking. Much of the early enthusiasm for the phone was lost when it was found that there wasnt much we could do could get apps to run on the platform (not sure if this is still true...). It would have been great to see the platform take off, but unfortunately Motorola decided to keep it closed. Since then, I've only used Microsoft Pocket PC based phones because its one of the few mobile platforms that meet most of my needs.

Same as their Land Mobile Radio products

This is no different than how Motorola conducts their business with LMR. Because of their "no can do" attitude (or "our way or no way") they have been losing a lot of public safety business.

I recently built a new 911 PSAP and dispatch facility and there isn't much Motorola product in there. It's not because of the quality of equipment, it's great stuff. But if you want to do anything at all with it that would be "custom", they won't support you one bit.

IMHO Motorola makes great stuff, they just need to learn to support their product with a "can do" attitude and try a little harder to make us WANT to buy it. (As opposed to trying to make you think that the choices are limited).

Symbian OS have similar problem

From TFA:

Contrast this with Symbian, who provides free documentation and software development kits for all of its mobile phone platforms, encouraging third-party developers.

Don't worry, that is not the case any more. From the version 9.1 Symbian with introduction of Symbian Signed [symbiansigned.com] Symbiam is not encouraging small/freeware/opensource developers any more. For small commertial developer sitaution worst - they have to pay for every binary release (good buy patches/expansions) around 400USD to testing house(and that is taking into account that symbian applications is not a big market). For freeware/opensource situation is little better - they don't have to pay for testing (if symbiansigned deside that application deserve to be freeware of cause - that is symbian to deside)but still, to test/debug application on the real phone they have to get developer certificate. For access nontrivial capabilities (freeware/opensource too), like multimedia drivers, they have to pay around 350usd/year and get phone manufacturer approval - taht is only to be able to test/debug applicatopn on the phone.

Absolutely agree - give us an SDK, Motorola

I absolutely agree with this. I work for a company that has obvious interests with phones, and we managed to get a Linux Motorola phone a few years ago from our office and contacts in China. It worked, and everything, and looked great, but we had no way to get to the Linux insides, which meant that it was about as useful as a chocolate fire-guard.
Unlike some Siemens phones we had - it's very cool to be able to get a phone# prompt, and run all the usual commands.

Have you used a nokia before???

I would rather buys SE/LG/Motorola than any nokia phones. They are made using the new BB5 locking system. Phones locked into networks on all new nokia phones are unlockable and become useless after their contracts are over.I know only too many people stuck with their old nokias which are dead weigths now.

Re:Second post

Wow. "You Fail it" doesn't even begin to cover just how bad you failed it.
What happened, you typed it out, went for a soda, and came back to submit?
Daym.