The mobile world has been good to Linux, whose Android derivative has enjoyed a success that few could have predicted just a few short years ago.
That’s why this year’s Mobile World Congress has been so striking. Announcements coming out of the show have made it perfectly clear that mobile Linux’s days of being more or less completely dominated by Android are coming to an end.
Android is still going strong, of course–maybe even stronger than ever. But we seem to be entering a new era in which Linux is everywhere in the mobile world, including numerous non-Android alternatives. Here are three key examples.
1. Boot to Gecko
Perhaps most notably, Mozilla–maker of the popular Firefox browser–announced this week the new Open Web Devices platform for smartphones based on its Boot to Gecko (B2G) project. With Boot to Gecko, Mozilla aims to build a complete, standalone operating system for the open Web, and it has put Linux at the heart of that. While B2G uses some of the same low-level building blocks that Android does–including the Linux kernel–it is not based on Android, and deliberately so. With support from Telefónica, Adobe, Deutsche Telekom, and Qualcomm, the Open Web Devices effort promises to bring a new kind of Linux to the mobile world.
2. Tizen
3. Ubuntu for Android
Then, of course, there’s also Linux-based webOS, which appears to be marching along nicely, with a brand-new browser being added earlier this month. I haven’t heard any webOS news coming out of Mobile World Congress–it won’t be fully open sourced until September, after all–but it’s another one that’s definitely worth watching.
Either way, I think it’s really interesting to see how Linux is spreading throughout the mobile world.
Apple’s iOS currently accounts for 54 percent of the mobile/tablet operating system market, according to Net Applications’ January data, while Android claims 18 percent. I can’t wait to see how things look in another year or two.