End of the Line For Remix OS as Jide Shifts Its Energy Towards the Enterprise

An anonymous reader shares a report: It was only in July last year that Remix OS, an Android-based operating system for PCs, was bumped up to Version 3.0, which featured Android 6.0 Marshmallow under the hood. In fact, news of the upgrade came hot on the heels of an announcement from Chuwi with regards to the release of its $239 Vi10 Plus tablet that dual-booted Remix OS and Windows 10. A little over a month later, Jide Technology then followed up with a "developer preview" of the OS leveraging Android 7.0 Nougat. However, after a somewhat brief period of existence of just a few years, the company has announced that it is shifting its focus away from the consumer segment to the enterprise. In a statement on its website, Jide stated that: "Over the past year, we received an increasing number of inquiries from enterprises in various industries, and began helping them build great tools for their organizations by leveraging Jide software and hardware. We see huge potential in the role that Jide can play to revolutionize how these businesses operate. And given our existing resources, we decided to focus our company efforts solely on the enterprise space moving forward."

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[unixisc]

Particularly w/ ChromeOS being rigged to be able to run apps available on Google Play. Better focus would be making more fully featured Chromebooks: not all of them have to be barebones netbooks based on Atoms & w/ 1GB RAM and 4GB storage.

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[luther349]

remix isnt hacked up. its andorid x86 with a nicer desktop friendly ui.

Oh well

[norweeg]

Honestly I think the future of android on the desktop is a containerized runtime like Anbox https://anbox.io/ [anbox.io]

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[norweeg]

Ah true. With ChromeOS picking up android compatibility, that basically makes it a desktop version of Android. I still don't get why there's a distinction between ChromeOS and Android

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[jawtheshark]

I happen to have a Chuwi Hi10 Plus which has both Windows 10 and RemixOS on it. I expected Windows 10 to work best on it, but as a matter of fact, it's horribly slow and the UI experience in touch on Windows 10 is pretty suboptimal. It works, but it's a pain. Granted, you don't expect much of an Atom x5-Z8300 and only 4GB RAM... but RemixOS works admirably on it. No slowdowns, snappy all the time, the interface is clearly made for touch and much less resource usage.

All in all, Android is a better exper

But remember kids, the GPL is cancer!

[Shane_Optima]

Question: if the GPL "viral" or "cancerous", what do you call this, this son-of-Apache closed source freeware license that Jibe used for Remix OS ?

Because if the GPL really is those things, then non-OSS freeware must be "toxic" (and by extension, "permissive" licensed software is "permissive" only of various forms of toxicity.) I briefly played around with RemixOS because it would be handy to have it available, preferably running in a VM, as a handy to use Android-only applications. Spent a couple hours

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[Kjella]

Question: if the GPL "viral" or "cancerous", what do you call this, this son-of-Apache closed source freeware license that Jibe used for Remix OS ?

The "viral" nature referred to the need to release source code so it would be "non-contagious". If you want a better genetics-style analogy they're like a ship that left Open Source Island, settled on their own Proprietary Island and went extinct so whatever unique traits they had became dust. Other Proprietary Islands like macOS still thrive, but they only allow a few carefully selected people to return to Open Source Island. The Free Software Islands is like a federation, they'll let you travel to any isl

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[Shane_Optima]

I'm not sure I follow your analogy. You don't seem to be properly differentiating copyleft open source (GPL) from permissive open source (BSD / Apache / MIT / public domain), which was a central point of my post.

Let's see if we can clarify this a bit more: what happens if proprietary source code is discovered in another project, be it OSS or proprietary code from another company?

Now, why isn't "toxic" a perfectly apt response to the "GPL is viral" claims? Unauthorized use of proprietary code, such as

PhoenixOS

[emil]

I haven't tried PhoenixOS [phoenixos.com] yet. They've brought out Android 7 Nougat since I last browsed their site.

I wonder what will rise from the ashes of Remix?

Note this is a Chinese company...

[emil]

...and Lenovo is a customer. [phoenixos.com]

Beijing Chaozhuo Co.,Ltd. - appears to be a startup and mentions an angel investor.

What about...

[puddingebola]

What about these dudes? http://www.android-x86.org/ [android-x86.org]

android-x86 was upstream from Jide

[emil]

I'm not sure if there was a division of labor between the projects - if so, then the parent will suffer.

Right now on android-x86 home page, I see:

2016-10-12: Remix OS for PC version: 3.0.206 is available for download.
2016-08-17: Remix OS for PC - Android M rc2 (version: 3.0.201) on Android-x86 project is available for download.
2016-07-26: Remix OS for PC - Android M Version on Android-x86 project is available for download.
2016-07-06: Remix OS for PC - Latest version built (version: 2.0.402) on Android-x8

Why do companies do this braindead manoeuvre?

[Anonymous Coward]

They make a great product, and build great in-roads to it.

Then enterprise comes along. 'woo enterprise'.

Then dump their great product X, and burn the inroads.

Forgetting how it was that the enterprise discovered them in the first place.

Then cease growing.

There's a haiku there somewhere.

we can't make money on "consumers"

[Anonymous Coward]

so we're going to try to fool some ignorant corporate executives next.

come on, they *could have* pursued that while also having a product for lowly end users.. but there's no big pay day in that plan.