That’s not true but don’t let it stop you from demanding phone makers make custom models for every handful of people who want unique features.
Of course if you believe your design actually has a market, it’s never been an easier time in world history to manufacture your own smartphone designs with easy availability of parts, android, Kickstarter, Chinese contract manufacturers, etc.
Are you are the type of person who complains but never does anything about it?
If this thread proves anything it’s that there is huge demand for customizable phone designs. Currently, there is total reliance on economies of scale to make standardized SKUs affordable.
Imagine if you could figure out a way of manufacturing a phone with design on demand… imagine a configurator website where you adjusted sliders and tickboxes. Headphone jack here, screen size slider all the way to the left, battery size all the way to the right, pick your color, oops you can’t have IP68 because you selected the pop-out camera…
Like variable fonts, but for hardware.
Frankly I’ve no idea how you would do it.
But that’s the level of innovation required to unlock this market.
The smartphone manufacturing industry is super competitive. Many of the largest phone manufacturers didn't exist a decade ago. I guess you got a billion dollar startup idea in your hands, go ahead and create that phone company. Personally, my hunch is that you're not the first to have this idea and a phone like the one you described is either not commercially viable and/or there isn't real demand for a phone that lasts 20 years.
You really only get to have one obscure requirement. If you want a small phone, the mini exists. If you want a phone with a headphone Jack, those exist. Once you start stacking up two, three or four odd requirements, you’ll never get what you want.
The problem with targeting small markets is almost everyone in the group wants absolutely everything the way they expect. There isn’t a “small phone market” there is a “small android phone with removable sd card and 3 cameras” market and a “small android phone with one camera but a replaceable battery at $400” market.
And then it just becomes literally impossible to make work so we have mass market products only.
Even Android phones have logistic problems with this. Many of them use similar vendors. Creating a phone with vastly different size and components means a lot more sourcing and upfront cost.
This is a good thing if you want a truly open source phone.
Smartphones have become a commodity. Yet the solidarity among fabricators against a { us: hardware, you: software } business model has been remarkable.
Margins have been razor thin for awhile, the business is incredibly cutthroat. Though it might come from Taiwan, I hope this is the straw that breaks the camels back.
BTW I'm talking on the low end here. It's already being done on the high end by Fairphone, and a few others.
Er, no. You bought a bunch of silicon off the shelf, and you had to integrate it. Several orders of magnitude less work.
Fifteen developers, and two years? Not mentioned, but this means you didn't write the telephony stack either.
iMX8M bringup, driver development, software integration. This is real work, but it's a tiny fraction of what goes into making your own phone.
Hoping you sell enough of these that you manage to attract adversarial attention. Because how you deal with that will be the true test of your commitment...
Absolutely -- go push other companies to make an alternative. Or even better, go investigate how to build a phone and its software, in a way that gives you all the control and repairability you want.
Maybe you'll find that it's harder than you think (as well to turn a profit) and there may be reasons why things are the way they are?
Otherwise they're competing with a lot of other people interested in what the phone should and should not do.
If they own a hammer, they can do what they like with a hammer, but a phone is not a hammer. It's a complex arrangement of molecules, licenses and competing group interests.
Amen. I mean, creating apps for your phone if you have unique ideas is one thing (and I think you'd want to sell that on the market to your competitor's phones too!) But if you can spend that r&d on making that phone survive a fall from two feet higher, or making the battery last three hours longer? You probably just got me as a customer.
Yes, but it's relatively cheap to create a new phone especially if you don't need the best specs (see all the cheap Chinese brands). The main feature of the phone needs to be that it is standardized and open. The initial market could be large.
The bigger issue is that the nature of smart phone releases is that each time you want to bring out a new model, you need to employ a few tens of thousands of people for a relatively short time to assemble them. This isn't possible in most countries due to labour laws and/or shortage of workers.
Yes, building a cell phone is simply something a small group of people cannot do successfully. I used to develop software for Openmoko phones, the N900, and other early Linux phones. Those projects had several decedent projects, all of which failed. There are several show-stoppers: 1) chip vendors won't talk to you if you are proposing to build a few thousand phones. 2) These projects never produce several iterations of prototypes that are tested by a significant number of users, so if they ever do ship a phone, there are terrible hardware faults. Fun fact: end users are not good at adding additional surface-mount components to cure these problems. 3) Unless you are making an Android phone, or at least an Android-compatible phone, none of the major apps will be available, and your customer base will be limited to the small fraction of the population that cares about privacy. So you'll never see economies of scale. 4) It will take longer than expected to bring the phone to the market, so even if you manage to build something, the hardware will be several generations behind what consumers expect. 5) Power management is hard.
It's probably coming for us all. The increasingly saturated smartphone market will not provide the sales that manufacturers need to maintain the current economies of scale. That is, unless they perfect the art of phones engineered for a very particular lifetime.
I feel like this is a niche that smartphones haven't hit. Perhaps we'll have to wait until it's 'easy' to manufacture phones, but I would be extremely interested in something more customizable on the hardware and/or software side. I'm aware about the downsides from a performance and/or cost perspective, but having something of your own makes a difference (I can't find the word to describe it) towards loving it.
I understand your point of view, but from a market standpoint you're a niche of a niche of a niche.
I feel you, because I have the same feeling about many mass produced products. I find that the real problem with phone and electronics is that their nature prevents the development of "artisanal" alternatives, which, market-wise, are the only option that can takle the need of a small pool of users like in your case.
Of course if you believe your design actually has a market, it’s never been an easier time in world history to manufacture your own smartphone designs with easy availability of parts, android, Kickstarter, Chinese contract manufacturers, etc.
Are you are the type of person who complains but never does anything about it?
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