ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Robert Bruce Park <robert.park@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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On 13-03-18 06:16 PM, ɈɐȿϞƐęţ ṧḯṋפԋ Ҝалɗɧɑɤɨ wrote:
> I would like to put across a different view point, show the masses 
> something which is even better than the default app, and they will 
> migrate before you know it.

Unfortunately, you're wrong.

> If they need facebook app , let facebook work on it...

We absolutely can not wait around for Facebook to develop an app for
our platform. Think about it from their point of view. Why would they
spend any resources at all trying to support a platform that has
literally zero percent market share? To them, it's a lot of effort for
nothing. And if we release a phone that can not access facebook, then
our phone is utterly irrelevant in the modern world of social networking.

The indisputable fact of the matter is that we *have* to have Facebook
(and Twitter, etc) apps on launch day, and nobody is going to make
them for us but us.

(Thus far we've been very fortunate that the "us" I reference above
has been "us, the Ubuntu community" and not just "us, Canonical",
although we are eager to see increased community contributions)

It seems like a good deal for Facebook. "Hey, we want to write your
official app for you, and we want to pay you to do it." Obviously
they'd have to exert a little bit of quality control in order to
ensure that we are representing their brand properly, but it's much
better than asking them to write the app themselves.

> For all Ubuntu Desktop Users everyone seems to be comfortable with
> Gwibber ( I am not promoting Gwibber nor restricting the scope to
> Gwibber also ) but only suggesting why not enhance, reduce time
> complexity of app and fine tune it and enhance the UI of what is
> already present. Inturn who knows destop version might also get a
> overhaul.

Yes, that is the current plan. Gwibber has been rewritten from the
ground up, features have been added, functionality has been
modularized. Currently, the Facebook and Twitter apps are thin
wrappers around the new gwibber code (which we are calling Friends, btw).

So we have one core backend that is responsible for sending and
receiving messages from basically any social network, and then there
are some different GUI apps that provide frontends to this: Facebook
app shows only Facebook messages, Twitter app shows only Twitter
messages, and Gwibber app shows all messages.

This does not change the fact that users are going to be expecting to
find "the Facebook app" and "the Twitter app", and they will end up
being disappointed and angry if those features are only available
under an unfamiliar name (because they won't know the unfamiliar name,
so they'll just assume the features are missing).

People have been shouting this at us for *decades*. "Linux has no
apps!" "Well, we do, kinda, but they have different names!" That is
just not going to fly on launch day, I'm afraid.

If we can't learn from our past, then we've already failed. And the
lesson is "have brand-name apps."
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