back to article How to stop Facebook and Apple taking over the mobile phone industry

At the launch of the Mobile World Congress earlier this week, the mobile industry begrudgingly accepted that tech giants like Facebook, Apple and Google were increasingly influencing its business. At the same time, a new report from the mobile industry pointed – with a degree of desperate hope – toward virtual reality, smart …

  1. artem

    I don't own a single Apple product and I don't have a single Facebook app installed on my smartphone. So, again, what's all the fuss about?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      So many people do that the future of the industry is being decided by them, and not necessarily in a way that is good for the public.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Me neither, I also don't have a Facebook account, I have no need for virtual friends, I have real ones.

      I don't think iPhones will be making any noise, marketshare is dropping year on year and now close to single digits.

    3. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
      WTF?

      A Fuss over nothing?

      but great clickbait?

      Lets start with a disclaimer.

      I admit to using some Apple gear. 1) a 2012 15in MBP and 2) an iPhone 6s (bought last week secondhand) but Farcebook? No way in a million years.

      As for Apple taking over the internet... Who is dreaming up this stuff? IMHO, it is Google that is more dangerous.

      With Android powering the vast majority of phones around the world and Chrome having almost a monopoly chare of the browser market then Google is far more of a threat than Apple who outside the US is often a bit player in many markets.

      Therein lies the crux of the issue. Most Americans do give a toss about the rest of the world. Many never travel outside their county let alone their state or god forbid abroad where they might not be able to get their fix of 30 different types of American fast food and they don't speak their brand of English.

      In essence, not news, move along, nothing to see.

  2. J. R. Hartley

    I can't lie to you about your chances but...

    You have my sympathies.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Streaming an operating system?

    WTF are they talking about? I assume they mean streaming the GUI.

    They are looking at it like "Apple and Google are making all this money we think is rightfully ours, we want someone to make an open source base we can take for free and put on phones, then we charge customers to stream the OS/GUI to them and collect all the ad money, app money, and oh yeah maybe we can block all the messaging apps so we can start charging for SMS again!"

    Yeah, like people are going to go for that.

    1. Lysenko

      Re: Streaming an operating system?

      Streaming an OS isn't that outrageous an idea. A common way to develop embedded Linux stuff is to have uboot (think of it as a BIOS) in EEPROM and use that to TFTP a Linux image over the LAN and then boot from it. You can do the same with Android so the only missing component is getting uboot (or whatever) to drive the RF stack and implementing a better protocol than TFTP.

      1. Bronek Kozicki

        Re: Streaming an operating system?

        The pre-requisite here is that you need to trust both the network and the server, because otherwise your OS image becomes untrusted. I am not entirely sure I would trust mobile networks more than I (have to) trust Google or Apple.

        1. Charles 9

          Re: Streaming an operating system?

          Wouldn't an encrypted connection established using a known public key deal with the network trust issue? Unless you're SO paranoid that you fear the government possesses a copy of Google's private key?

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Streaming an operating system?

            Sounds like you're talking about network boot of the OS. So if you're on AT&T and change to Verizon suddenly you have a new OS to deal with. If you travel and get a local SIM wherever you go to avoid getting raped by roaming fees you get a different OS every couple days?

            Sure, that sounds like something consumers want.

  4. Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge
    Holmes

    Wah, they're not using us

    Maybe Apple and Facebook aren't BFF with CloudFlare services for ethical reasons?

  5. The Original Steve
    Joke

    What will they think of next?

    "...a platform for edge clouds that pushes cloud computing closer to devices themselves..."

    That sounds amazing! Innovation at it's finest, what will they think of next?

    Running clouds in actual offices in small rooms maybe? Who knows?

  6. This post has been deleted by its author

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    'The looming power of these powerful digital dictators'

    Seems to me, we're At-War-On-Three-Fronts:

    #1. Tech Automation and job redundancy AKA 'AI killing jobs' by the dumb MSM, that can't tell the difference between self-aware Neural-Nets and Pattern-Matching-NN's. For sure, Bots scanning medical scans faster than doctors and self-drive cars & trucks are real. But that's all for now at least...

    #2. Lack of tech choice... The average family has no choice but to buy a Windows-10-home Laptop / PC, as there just isn't an alternative. Dell offers Linux in some markets, but the rest of the big names offer no alternative affordable choices at all. That means forced slurp is inevitable for most busy / modest families... That will inevitably lead to M$ becoming a big-player in Ads + Slurp rivalling Google & Facebook. Why? Only 30% of consumers use Win10's Privacy Controls! Plus, Mobile and Android slurp is at epidemic proportions, and that's without any regard to how much malware makes it onto Google-Play! Then we have the onslaught of Smart-everything from Smart-TV to IoT phoning home.. It all means, there's no escape now!

    #3. Constant slurping by Facebook / Google / Uber / Snap / LinkedIn, on 3rd party sites especially. Most users don't use Ad-blockers, especially on mobile. This is leading to the juiciest slurp of all... Overall, the 3 areas mentioned are converging already. Example: Google matches online search-n-slurp to real-world credit-card purchases & transactions. This says it all! And remember this is just the beginning folks... This isn't even the end-game! The irony is, the more time spent on Facebook, the more Ads that will pay for more research into AI, which will leave even more of out of work in the future!

  8. Detective Emil
    Paris Hilton

    Gnomic analysis

    1. Provide storage and compute power closer to the edge of the mobile network.

    2. ???

    3. Profit!!!

    The thing about Facebook is that it is a service that billions* of people want to use. There's no way that it's going to migrate its storage and smarts out of its own data centers to kit controlled by carriers who, given the chance, are every bit as rapacious at it is.

    The missing step is to replace those question marks with some killer app to supplant FB and capture those billions of users — and of dollars. The carriers' record of being able only to encumber phones with unwanted crapware does not inspire confidence.

    * Well, according to FB's reach figures [Reuters], at least.

  9. strum

    I don't much like the Apple/Android duopoly, but I don't think things would be much improved if I had to rely on whatever OS Vodafone (or whoever) deigned to put on my phone.

    The only upside would be, if Voda tried to use my data nefariously, they'd get my name wrong, my location wrong and the date wrong. (All of these happened, sometimes several times, during one day switching Broadband.)

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