Why Modular Smartphones Are Such a Nightmare To Develop 111
itwbennett writes: Last week Google postponed tests of its Project Ara until next year. Mikael Ricknäs has written about why developing such devices is particularly difficult. The biggest challenge, writes Ricknäs, 'is the underlying architecture, the structural frame and data backbone of the device, which makes it possible for all the modules to communicate with each other. It has to be so efficient that the overall performance doesn't take a hit and still be cheap and frugal with power consumption.' For more on Project Ara and its challenges, watch this Slashdot interview with the project's firmware lead Marti Bolivar.
Fragmentation is an issue? No shit! (Score:1)
Nobody who has done Android development is surprised to hear this.
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No one who has done any web development would be surprised either.
Fragmentation is a lesser evil (Score:2)
I always find it funny when people complain about the so-called fragmentation.
Imagine if every phone maker and their own OS. And a limited number of phone models. In short, they would all be like Apple.
There would be no fragmentation, right? Developers would instead need to develop for 10-20 completely different OS, in different languages. Because you know, every manufacturer would claim that they are the only one using the one true best language.
I think it's much better to have a single OS to develop for,
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I'm able to upgrade my computer to Windows 10 without Dell's permission. Until you can do that with Android phones the complaining shall continue.
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So was CyanogenMod, until Microsoft got in bed with them.
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I didn't ask for permission when I installed a custom rom on my old phone.
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As other users have asked me in comments to other Slashdot stories about Android: Why did you buy an Android device without checking first that its bootloader could be unlocked?
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that the smartphone world as a whole would be even less fragmented if Apple switched to Android too.
Talk about throwing the baby out with the bathwater. PCs would also be less fragmented if everyone gave up on using Linux and OSX and just used Windows.
Quality is lost when everyone uses the lowest common denominator. And Android couldn't be a better example of that.
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Of course quality would be lost. Choice brings quality. But choice brings fragmentation. With only Android, we would have less fragmentation but less choice.
I prefer choice. But I don't complain about the so-called fragmentation either.
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In 50 years I've never seen a scrap of evidence that choice brings quality.
Between companies, choice = competition and commoditisation, and that brings cheap - the opposite of quality.
Within a single company choice brings confusion and lack of focus.
Quality comes from people dedicating themselves to that target, rather than profits. And to narrowing focus down to very few projects/products.
Android's choice brings poor quality, partly because of that fragmentation. The only advantage is low cost.
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Then Apple should stop making phones at all. It would reduce both fragmentation and choice. Win/win, isn't it?
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There is very little fragmentation with iOS. You're muddling different platforms with fragmentation within platforms.
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There we go again. You missed my whole point.
Having many different non-fragmented platforms brings a lot more fragmentation than having a single, fragmented platform.
Each individual Android phone (hardware+software) isn't fragmented at all.
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I didn't miss it. I just rejected the idea assertion as the nonsense it is
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Then explain to me how having more completely different OS reduce the fragmentation from a developer's perspective.
Isn't it easier to make sure an application is compatible between two Android phones than an Android phone and an iPhone?
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Look your argument desn't even make sense within it's own assumptions. You say:
"Then Apple should stop making phones at all. It would reduce both fragmentation and choice. Win/win, isn't it?"
But of course that far bigger gain within your model would be for all the Android manufacturers to stop making phones.
Secondly just because large choice is the enemy of quality does not mean that reducing choice magically increases quality. Especially when you are removing the highest quality devices. As I said quality
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Let's focus on fragmentation instead of quality since that is the original topic.
Of course stopping making Android phones would reduce fragmentation. The problem is that all these manufacturers can't switch to iOS even if they wanted to.
Saying that the iPhone is a lot less fragmented is irrelevant. Of course it is. Every single Android phone is also a lot less fragmented. It's when you take them all together that you get a fragmented result. Adding a phone with a different OS add a lot more fragmentation to
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"The only advantage is low cost"
I like convergence. The fact that Android supports a mouse is a huge advantage for me!
With VNC or Remote Desktop my Android device is just as useful as a laptop. I have a pretty good app for that on my iPad. They probably do the best job possible to make an on-screen mouse. It still SUCKS!
USB host and the ability to install drivers for things the manufacturer did not intend... I sometimes use my phone with an RTL-SDR stick as a software defined radio.
I also use it now and th
On-device IDEs for interpreted languages (Score:2)
Finally.. in order to get that nice, on-device IDE.. they would only have to NOT ban compilers from their store!
There are on-device IDEs for interpreted languages for iPad. Last time I checked they were called "Codea" and "Pythonista".
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All the things you mention are features, not qualities, or quality.
Consider a multi-tool. It has a pen-knife, pliers, a saw, 2 screwdrivers, scissors, a corkscrew, etc. Lots of features. But they are all very poor quality tools. In preference you would always use a knife of a specific kind, a real saw, a real screwdriver, a real corkscrew.
The multi-tool is a best useful to keep for an emergency when you have nothing else. Because it's not actually very good at anything.
And so it is with all that you are des
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"The multi-tool is a best useful to keep for an emergency when you have nothing else. Because it's not actually very good at anything."
That's what Apple says. For their own users they prove it with their own products by crippling them. Of course a device without a mouse is at best an emergency last resort!
I don't need to clutter my life with 1000 computer tools, one for every situation. I've owned laptops and an iPad. I know how to compare them and I chose what works best for me.
For remote administration
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"All the things you mention are features, not qualities, or quality."
I quoted the part of your post that I was replying to.
"The only advantage is low cost."
A feature.. if you use it IS an advantage.
I wrote another big TLDR reply, mostly about how I believe that for remote adminitration Android does have the highest quality of any solution that is available. But.. that was never my point in my original reply to you. I simply pointed out a bunch of things where Android has the advantage for me!
Features are ki
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I think most of those a-holes ARE imagining 'every' phone maker having their own OS. It's their dream! Of course.. key to that dream is Apple being the ONLY phone maker. The whole concept of there being a world outside of Apple's walled garden is scary. It's far better for them if they can spread FUD until it is destroyed.
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Nobody who has done Android development is surprised to hear this.
I generally find the opposite, the ones crowing about fragmentation tend to be the ones who have no experience in development on Android (and indeed any non-iPhone platform) and handling perfectly pedestrian problems that we've been working with for all of programming history...
Different hardware and OS versions is standard standard, part of being a programmer...
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Well, either I'm an amazing programmer or I work with terrible iOS developers, but my experience (since Android 1.6, btw) has not been that. The teams have always been the same sort of size, and worked at roughly the same pace.
Re:Fragmentation is an issue? No shit! (Score:5, Interesting)
Nobody who has done Android development is surprised to hear this.
I generally find the opposite, the ones crowing about fragmentation tend to be the ones who have no experience in development on Android (and indeed any non-iPhone platform) and handling perfectly pedestrian problems that we've been working with for all of programming history...
Different hardware and OS versions is standard standard, part of being a programmer...
This.
If you want to avoid version issues with Android, target the lower API levels. Sure you miss out all of the newer features, but you dont need those for a fart app. Android itself handles most (or all of, in most cases) of the backwards compatibility.
Besides this, we've seen the problems inherent in monocultures in IT. Remember I.E. 6... This is why aged web developers never complain about writing compatibility layers for Firefox, Chrome and Webkit browsers.
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Except if you do need the new features then you're screwed.
I've been working with BLE, which is strictly 4.3+ only. The 4.3 stack was so buggy that Samsung for example had to put in a bunch of bugfixes. Naturally since there's no spec, just API documentation, the samsung ones behave differently from the Google ones in subtle but important ways, from what I can tell, the difference comes from wanting to fix the bug without replacing much more.
Note: the samsung one isn't correct, it's that the API is underspe
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Actually this is a reasonable point. Bluetooth has been a pain between versions - audio recording too. Basically anywhere they change the underlying OS implementation and try to cover it up in the API.
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I don't understand the huge rush to switch to BLE. So the software stack still has rough edges? No shit! It's new! Meanwhile regular Bluetooth chips and modules are available for pennies by the pound! If you are just a geek looking for something to play with yourself then by all means.. shiny! If you are developing a product though.. well.. would you install a 1.0 something on a production server?
Just stick with regular Bluetooth for now. These issues will be worked out. Can you really tell me that the
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Ah a typical slashdot post. You have no idea about the subject at hand, what I'm doing or the history of it, yet you wade into the discussion and arrogently tell me that I'm doing it wrong and should be doing it some other way. Out of interest have you shaved your neck recently?
I don't understand the huge rush to switch to BLE.
Because my sensors will run at full whack for 160 hours off a CR2032 coin cell, and sit in standby mode for about 6 months.
No shit! It's new!
No, it's that Android was super late to t
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Imagine having a phone where you can update to the latest OS.
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Now imagine being a developer if every company decided to make their own OS instead of using Android.
It already exists, and it's called video games on the TV.
Why so complicated? (Score:1, Interesting)
It is literally a circular network connected to one CPU and a bunch of dumb nodes.
Each node has a network ID. They can pass messages and only the nodes that are listening for it will get it.
High bandwidth data bus for it.
Why is that so complex? I'm really not seeing a problem from that angle.
This shits been done for decades.
Weak frame? Stop making shit thin phones then. Worst thing ever.
>70% of people put a damn frame around their phones anyway.
Just make the damn thing bigger already!
And maybe make i
Re:Why so complicated? (Score:5, Insightful)
It is literally a circular network connected to one CPU and a bunch of dumb nodes.
Each node has a network ID. They can pass messages and only the nodes that are listening for it will get it.
High bandwidth data bus for it.
Why is that so complex?
Anything can be made to sound easy by describing the overall concept in a few sentences. Devices are built in the real world, not on a whiteboard, and here in real world, the devil is in the details.
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What this guy said.
"Why is a high speed data bus so complex?". They evolve to be faster and more efficient each year. What's high speed today isn't in two years from now. So do you want to fast in two years, built on today's tech, so it's underutilised battery life is terrible? Or do you want to limit the efficacy of the new plug-in modules in future by having the bus under spec in two years? Or do you want to build it on something that doesn't exist yet, sooner than two years from now, so it costs a fortun
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It is literally a circular network connected to one CPU and a bunch of dumb nodes.
Each node has a network ID. They can pass messages and only the nodes that are listening for it will get it.
I'd put real money on betting you've never done anything near hardware development...
Re:Why so complicated? (Score:4, Insightful)
yeah I know, right!
Just make a high speed, low power, multi-point data bus.
Just use.... wait there isn't anything available that meets all of those requirements.
There are a lot of point to point high speed low power buses.
There a lot of low speed multi-point buses too.
High speed and low power means impedance matched differential pairs.
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It is not that difficult. The only issue is transmission line stub length.
Use current mode low voltage differential signaling to keep the power down with a termination at either end of the transmission line. Then every transmitter in the middle sees the transmission line impedance divided by 2 because it is driving two transmission line in parallel. The transmitters at the ends see the same transmission line impedance divided by 2 because they are driving a transmission line and an immediately adjacent t
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It is literally a circular network connected to one CPU and a bunch of dumb nodes.
No it isn't. You sound like executive management of the company that bought my SoC team.
Can you imagine dropping on of these phones? (Score:1)
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Yea, you'll only have to replace the parts that actually broke. What a pain!
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Unless you're good with a soldering iron, for many people a dead component means a new phone - much like with laptops & other integrated units (I hear Macs have also gone down this route...).
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It depends on how big those pieces are. The energy going into spitting the chunks apart would otherwise be damaging a chunk. Old nokia phones used to break when dropped, into four pieces: Front faceplate, rear cover, battery, remainder. You could snap them back together with your fingures.
Same reason crumple zones save lives.
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My old 3310 split in to 5 pieces. :(
Then the internal antenna panel comes off and gets lost. it's not a very good phone anymore
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The 3310 had an internal antenna.
It was on the back of a plastic panel above the battery, only held in by a few clips, with spring terminals pushing against it to make contact with the antenna element.
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The candybar phones that didn't come apart also tended to survive drops. Tiny screens, and rugged plastic. Nothing to do with shock absorption of instant dismantling.
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And like with the 'computer engineers' who plug together PC clones, all you will need to be a 'cell phone engineer' is a tiny little phillips screwdriver.
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It's a bus that connects a single device only and runs in a master-slave configuration.
There's no bus arbitration no multi-point support and no multi-master either.
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yeah connect your gpu with that, sure.
they're thinking it the wrong way.
it should only have one 'main' module that had the soc and a keepalive battery, then a case module that had screen and battery and maybe storage. then perhaps maybe camera module or rather have that be part of the case module. drop same main module into different size cases as you want during the week.
Dumb Idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry Ara team; but the whole concept is a fail.
I do lots of electronic product development, and this concept has so many problems
- Electromagnetic Compliance. Every time a new module is created, are you going to go through the expense & time of compliance testing.
- Where is consumer demand for such a device? Consumers are becoming dumber; they are flat out finding a power button, let alone selecting complex modules for a phone. This makes it a niche market device, thus low volume, thus expensive.
- Connectors in any design are one of the common fail points. In this design you have lots of them.
- There's a lot of effort just to reliably mechanically retain the modules.
- Having discrete modules makes layout inefficient, as you have to per-decide the size of a function.
- A lot of added complexity/power consumption, as each module needs a hardware/software interface layer common to all modules to abstract their native interface.
- plus all the other mentioned in the link
Now if Google has some spare cash lying around, I've got a lot great projects going on they could invest in!!!
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But it's the perfect companion for Google Glass!
FairPhone2 (Score:2)
And yet, the Fairphone 2 has been designed is currently pre-selling. The prototypes are working, they are just gathering money to ramp up production.
- Where is consumer demand for such a device? Consumers are becoming dumber; they are flat out finding a power button, let alone selecting complex modules for a phone. This makes it a niche market device, thus low volume, thus expensive.
Modular design, means easier to repair just by swapping modules. (And ease to repair is one of the main argument for FairPhone 1 & 2).
- Connectors in any design are one of the common fail points. In this design you have lots of them.
As opposed to the ribbon connector of which you're going to have plenty in modern smart phone ?
At least the interconnects of module phone currently being produced tend to be sturdy.
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All these points apply to PCs as well.
And while all-in-one integrated machines are popular, and tablets etc are taking on the low end of usage, the familiar modular PC is still massively useful and very necessary for a large part of the market. There are extra challenges in doing this in a mobile device, but none of what you said is a dealbreaker.
There has certainly been interest in modular phones, and while they will inevitably require tradeoffs, whether those are insurmountable or how much they reduce its
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Modular is practical in PCs because there is s much extra space it's easy to fit things in, there are few structural loads, and power is almost never a limiting factor. The modular laptop market, where these things matter more, the options are fewer. Move into ultra-books and your options shrink again. Tablets even more. Phones - well, up until smart watches came out, phones were the end point for miniaturization of portable computers in mainstream usage.
Interest will always be there, but the need/desire fo
Man I want this (Score:5, Interesting)
I want a modular device like this so bad.
I plan to buy five of them. Me, my wife, and each of my kids.
I'm hoping tablet and laptop versions soon follow so I can mix and match more modules over time. and I'll get multiples of them, too. it just makes sense to be able to repair them year after year, instead of buying another bloatware crap machine.
Even later I'm hoping I can use the modules for other projects. using the same standardized data bus for a huge variety of things. wearables, pet projects, maker movement stuff.
This is grownup LEGO.
AND a way to save money over time,
AND a way to escape the damned branding going on.
I'm not going to buy a phone until I can get something like this, and I don't really care if it's made by google or someone else.
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So how old is the oldest part in your desktop PC? (I presume you never moved on to a laptop.)
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heh, my oldest part is the case. I think I bought it in 1992. Power supply replaced around '98 swapped motherboards three times, put in and took out wifi access. Ethernet currently better. Haven't modified much this decade, Haven't needed to. Swapped out modems and routers this year. I don't think it was an improvement, so reading up on Open WRT.
Running windows seven now with a Ubuntu backup. Three monitors.
I have several laptops. not surprisingly, my desktop is far more robust and useable, and I hate using
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"Haven't modified much this decade, Haven't needed to."
And that's it right there. Things won't get outdated, they'll wear out. The problem is The first thing to go will be the connectors that hold the modules together. Then what?
I've never had a CF card break but have had a card reader jack break 3 times. Never an SD card, but a reader. Never a Nintendo rom, but the card slot. Never a monitor but a VCA cable, same for DVI and HDMI. Never an Ethernet chipset but many jacks and cables. Never an iPod but the c
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Daddy!
Junior has two radio modules and I only have one!
No fair! No fair!
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Junior bought the second one himself. quit yer bitchen'. got some chores if you want to earn the money.
FairPhone 2 (Score:3)
I'm hoping tablet and laptop versions soon follow so I can mix and match more modules over time. and I'll get multiples of them, too. it just makes sense to be able to repair them year after year, instead of buying another bloatware crap machine.
You should definitely check out the FairPhone 2 [fairphone.com].
Ease of repair has been one of the main argument for FairPhone 1 & 2.
For the second model, they are currently going to a a modular design to make it even more easy to fix, and to give the possibility to swap module in the future for added features.
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This is grownup LEGO.
No, it isn't. It's an attempt at a shunk down, big-box PC. You know, the boring beige boxes that nobody buys any more? I see no way that this saves money over time. The branding is in software, which this doesn't fix. See: Cyanogenmod which works with many already existing phones. It's highly impractical, expensive, and architecturally prone to failure, as you have a mobile, device commonly subjected to strong impacts, which is exactly when you don't want removable, (flimsy) interlocking pieces.
> I'm not
Standardization first (Score:1)
* The touch-screen, lcd and backlight need standardized connectors.
* Speakers and microphones need an interface that supports sufficient current with minimal noise
* SOCs need a standardize pinout for common components so that sets of commonly un-included component groups can easily be set up off chip without a lot of circuitry while also functioning on chips with the kitchen sink.
--- GP
The whole concept is a "Rube Goldberg" contraption (Score:2)
The whole concept smacks of being a "Rube Goldberg" contraption to me. While I could see a very small segment of the market liking the idea of replacing components and doing partial upgrades, I'm pretty sure that the mass market will stick with integrated one-piece units that don't fall into a pile of blocks when dropped.
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I worked for Qualcomm for years (Score:3)
The display, keypad, battery were generic, use whatever you want. QC didn't make displays, nor keypads, nor batteries.
They also had a single chip line (SC1x/SC2x if memory serves), they took 3 dies (baseband, RF, PMIC) and stacked the dies atop each other in a single package. The idea was to sell them for, I think, $6 each for low cost phones. Add a display, keypad, battery, and case and you've got a cell phone.
I retired when Snapdragon was showing up on my "upcoming stuff" memos.
/ this is greatly simplified at the chip level (e.g. the PMIC let the phone vibrate)
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Stop already (Score:2)
Stop trying to make "modular smartphones" happen. It's not going to happen. Ever.
The market is too cramped.
Lots of new "standards" will segment the market to death.
The margins are too low.
The pace of development for new phones is too fast.
The market is too small.
By the time someone "successfully" develops a modular phone, it'll be too old, too under-powered, and still too expensive. All of the cool whiz-bang modules will have to wait until the phone is accepted before they're developed and the phone won't b
I'm pretty sure the interconnect bus is not the is (Score:2)
I'm pretty sure the interconnect bus is not the issue.
The thing that slows down most ARM devices is the memory controller, which is why iPhones are such a win: the PA Semi folks were able to speed up the memory controller considerable, but only for Apple's chips. The nVidia people have made some forward progress, but the bottleneck is still the memory bandwidth making the graphics (among other things) pretty crappy. They are almost an order of magnitude slower than the A9. If you had an A9 at the core of
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A lot of this has to do with carrier certification
Why would an individual carrier, not the governing body of GSM, UMTS, and LTE, need to certify individual phones?
for the combinations of components, which go up by a power of two for each ne possible module you can plug in.
And why would they have to certify anything but the radio module?
And TV (Score:1)
Modular cell phones. It's only missing an AM/FM receiver and it's a tricorder.
No shit!? (Score:1)
I guess that tells us something interesting about the power of bullshitting on kickstarter-like websites. I remember seeing this project a few years ago and it had this "social crowdfund" aspect to it, where it had to get a certain number of shares/likes to be "considered", or something.
I laughed a lot when Google aquired the project. I'm laughing even harder now.
Depends how modular you want to go (Score:2)
Separating out everything into modules is going to be hard. Even PCs which have no space/weight constraints are not fully modular. Much harder for a phone where things like the CPU and RAM are typically soldered on top of each other.
But you can take a more modest goal of making the major components replaceable, repairable and upgradable, for example, https://www.fairphone.com/2015... [fairphone.com]
I want this thing so badly (Score:2)
... I would be very happy to be an early adopter here. If it is not 100 percent perfect is fine with me.
Offtopic: Coolest and Badass Name! (Score:2)