Motorola brewing up its own Web-based operating system, report claims [updated]

By on Mar 24, 2011 at 8:50 AM
mobile March 24, 2011

Despite its success with Android, Motorola Mobility has reportedly hired a number of engineers, some from Adobe and Apple, to work on a brand new web-based operating system. “I know they’re working on it,” Jonathan Goldberg, an analyst with Deutsche Bank told Information Week. “I think the company recognizes that they need to differentiate and they need options, just in case. Nobody wants to rely on a single supplier.” Sources speaking to Goldberg and Information Week suggested that Motorola Mobility was building the OS as a possible alternative to Android, and while Motorola Mobility didn’t deny that it might be working on something, it has reaffirmed that it’s committed to the platform. It all sounds a bit strange to us, especially since Motorola helped kick off the Android craze in the United States with the DROID, DROID 2 and DROID X on Verizon Wireless, among others. It seems more likely to us that Motorola Mobility is working on a Web-based operating system to compliment Android, instead of one to compete with it, but we’ll have to see.

UPDATE: A Motorola spokesperson reached out to BGR with the following statement: “Motorola Mobility remains committed the Android operating system. We have hired employees with HTML skills to enable the best browsing experience to consumers and our strategic focus on the Android platform has not changed.”

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  • Anonymous

    Yes, because webOS and Meego are just killing it nowadays.

    Motorola, you can’t even use someone else’s software without fucking it up and adding unintuitive features that slow things down. What in the world makes you think I want to be neck deep in your ecosystem with no way out?

    • Anonymous

      Agreed!

    • Anonymous

      Don’t forget Bada in that list.

    • Anonymous

      a-fucking-men!

  • Chut Pata

    Will it meet the fate of symbion? Time will tell. LOL.

  • Anonymous

    The beginning of the end of Android. The bubble is leaking. The dome has chromed.

    • http://ocentertainment.net ocentertainment

      This past weekend, I was giving a friend of mine advice on getting her first smartphone. She was asking about the Thunderbolt and I showed her some of the features that it would have on my Evo. I demonstrated voice transcription, Navigation, and even Google Translate, with the ability to translate between English and Spanish speech-to-speech. She, and everyone else in the room, was blown away.

      As long as Android keeps rolling out unbelievable features like this, one little rumor rolling over the mill isn’t going to be the end of Android. Not for a long time to come. Folks like you would love to believe that every time a story comes out that paints Android in an even slightly negative light, it’s the end. It’s not. Innovation always wins.

      • Booboolala2000

        And Motorola is not the most innovative when it comes to software, just look at blur versus sense. They should save their money. Its like the XOOM, thank God they weren’t allowed to fuck it up.

    • http://www.absolutefiction.com Jed Tylman

      LOL
      Right.

      WP7 is going to have an uphill battle to gain a stable single digit market share. iOS is slowly going to lose to Android. Symbian and the others will simply die off in 2 years or less (maybe not for people looking for a cheap dumb phone; anyway no one ever asks for them by name).

      Any other OS wants to start now, will need to be more amazing than Tony Stark’s utopian Jarvis OS.

      Let’s face it. Android is a name everyone knows now.
      Probably the reference most people will use from now on.

      Apple still has a chance to stop losing market share if they come up with something new. Completely new. Otherwise, the android flood will render everything else irrelevant within a couple of years.

  • Vanilla Ice

    Yay, Sanjay is the new Steve Jobs! Locking bootloader Nazi.

    • Vanilla Ice

      Vanilla Droid Bionic with no blur = Best phone. More sales. Happy customers……. Its just that easy. I swear, LG Revolution will be my next phone if the Bionic has blur. So what if its not dual core. 1GHz Vanilla Android is better than Dual core motoblur.

      • Scorp

        Most customers don’t even know what Vanilla Android is, let alone Android period. They just know the manufacturer of the device. But I do agree with you. Vanilla Android is the best since you will get the best support and fastest updates.

      • Anonymous

        People…. you do not know what you are talking about with “Vanilla Android.” The only “Vanilla Android” is the Nexus lines of phone.

        It doesn’t matter of the OEMs “skin” their phones are not.. they are making changes either way. For example, ActiveSync support on Android is very shitty. (it’s getting better.) HTC and Motorola (and probably Sammy) modify the email client with it’s own ActiveSync support. That’s why some phones were able to be locked down with passwords and remote wipes and some phones were not.. because the OEM’s added those features because Google was so far behind. (They are catching up…)

        So even if you think your phone is “vanilla”, it probably is not which means your updates will always come slow, plus the carriers give the final permission anyway, which slows things down.

  • Bullet Tooth Tony

    This makes sense… Android, through Google and Verizon’s specific direction, you gave us the gift of the DROID… and you rescued us from obscurity and ultimately bankruptcy… now that we have legs, piss on you. We’ll go it alone. I understand the custom skins, it’s a way to introduce some product differences beyond who puts out the phone with the fastest processor, best camera and most memory for the lowest price… but hell, Blur sucks. Maybe the new Blur on the Bionic will be an improvement… but even then, why would someone want to invest in yet ANOTHER app ecosystem if there’s currently a market where one can easily transport what they’ve paid for from device to device? Because you can get an M logo?

    But then again… maybe reports of this are exaggerated. We see how well Bada’s going for Samsung. Maybe this is just something they want to add to Blur.

    • Anonymous

      My Droid 2 has two contact lists. It has the proper one that syncs from Google, and then some arbitrary one that’s stored on the phone and does… Cthulhu only knows what. I know that because, periodically, I will type someone’s name and they will show up twice. With the same number.

      Motorola considered that an improvement over stock Android. HTC had a better handle on things back when I was using WinMo 6.1 I’m no longer interested in what they think or what they’re going to try. Motorola has lost my money by butchering good hardware with bad software, and that’s that.

      I’ll be going to HTC (easily rooted) or LG (stock out of the box) from here on out. Please don’t suck, LG. Please don’t suck.

      • Bullet Tooth Tony

        Out of curiousity… are you sure that it’s a Moto thing and not VZW Backup Assistant? I’ve noticed its existance on my Thunderbolt… which is absolutely infuriating…

      • Anonymous

        VZW Backup Assistant is strictly one-way, from what I can tell on their help site. You have to log in to the Assistant in order for it to restore your contacts.

        I’m looking at the contact who showed up twice on my phone, and here’s what it says under their name:

        Linked profiles (2)
        Google:
        Phone Contacts:

        In other words, Motorola doesn’t think that syncing with your Gmail account is good enough. They have their own local contacts that… I don’t even know what the fuck the local contacts do. Why in the hell would I want to bother with an OS that they create? Why would I want to lock myself in to their illogic?

      • Bullet Tooth Tony

        Well… I’d try the following to see if it works, or if some of the steps can be used to accomplish the same end goal:

        -Log into your My Verizon account. Go to the contacts tab, sort by list view and select all contacts. Delete the entire list. There’s a deleted contacts tab as well. Select that and delete anything that’s in there.
        -Go into your settings tab, select applications, manage applications, All. Do not sort or filter, allow list to populate. Select Sync Service, (icon resembles backup assistant icon) select clear data.
        -Also in manage applications scroll down to backup assistant, select clear data. This should do it.
        -To verify backup assistant is now disabled, select settings, accounts and sync, then under manage accounts, select backup assistant. You should be looking at a license agreement screen.

        I know you said it appears to be Moto’s own service, so maybe there’s some equivalent task you can kill off this same way. I am an HTC user, so I can’t verify the exact naming of any apps that may do this, but it may still be worth the shot.

    • Anonymous

      This is exactly why I’ll pay my hard earned money to the next manufacturer who gets this right and adds the option to turn off the custom skin entirely!

      Give me my vanilla Android and keep that custom skin nonsense to yourself!

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_GP2WYAHXS6CRUREISWBGPUSUGE Michael

    Yep this will be a serious player in the game. just like MotoBlur was a major player in the Android game.

  • Scorp

    If Moto was going to go in the direction of their own full-fledged OS, I’m not sure how successful it would be but the truth is none of know what platforms will be great in the next few years. Earlier this decade it was Palm OS and Blackberry, now it’s Android and iOS, who knows what Windows Mobile and WebOS will end up being but I’m sure it possible. Maybe not probable though.

    But here’s the thing maybe Moto isn’t making a lot of money like people seem to think they are. Sure Android OS may have helped bring them from the dead but that was then. It doesn’t mean it’s being as profitable for them now especially with everyone manufacturer in the world that is not Apple, RIM or Nokia slapping the OS on their devices. Now Moto has to compete with all the cheap Android devices while trying to differentiate themselves from the high end ones like HTC and Samsung. And it’s hard to differentiate yourself and still get the same support. We all see how long it takes for some to get updates. May not be right but necessary.

  • Anonymous

    It’s all about greed. Moto doesn’t feel comfortable just making and selling phones, they want a bigger piece of the pie. Even cell carriers think it’s ok to strip google search from Android devices, they’re all getting greedy. Steve jobs might be a ass but he does know how to put these companies in to place.

    • Scorp

      I agree. It just seems in the mobile space that to really make money you have to do both software and hardware. If you are only doing hardware, and for a platform that every manufacturer has access to it greatly diminishes your chances for increase profitability. So I agree it’s greed but at the same time, if they aren’t making a lot of money because their devices are sitting on shelves, what should the do? When the Droid came out, what other major Android device was on Verizion? Exactly.

  • Anonymous

    Moto, stick to hardware. Android was the reason why you don’t suck anymore.

  • http://ocentertainment.net ocentertainment

    Sounds a lot more to me like they’re developing for their WebTop service than an entirely different phone OS.

    While it’s true Motorola’s been bleeding marketshare overall in the cell space, their smartphones have been doing comparatively well. And near as I can tell, selling Android smartphones is what brought them back from the brink of bankruptcy to begin with. Unless they were beginning to see a decline in their smartphone sales, I can’t imagine they’d outright abandon Android.

    The flip side, of course, is that even if this rumor’s not true, there’s still a point to be made here. Motorola, with their latest round of smartphones, have been reduced to adding a fingerprint scanner and option $300-500 netbook dock to differentiate. As much as they’d like to believe multi-hundred dollar accessories and needlessly complicated security measures on a device that already has several are hooks that will get the buying public’s attention, they’re not. A few, maybe, but they’re not going to bring in the crowds like the original Droid did when the only other Android handset out there worth noticing was the HTC Hero.

    They’d be smart to diversify their products a bit, and I can’t imagine that any handset manufacturer isn’t considering that possibility right now. But I’d sooner suspect Motorola would start making a WP7 handset, or hell even a Meego handset, before they start building their own OS from scratch.

    For what it’s worth, if Android gains a significant level of marketshare, it won’t matter. HP, Dell, and Toshiba don’t develop their own desktop OSes in case Windows goes under. Right now Android’s future is not quite so secure, but their growth, both domestically and worldwide, doesn’t show any signs of stopping. Motorola has to be considering that possibility as well: that they may simply not have the option of not developing Android handsets.

    • edoug

      Don’t tell Nokia! They (like Motorola) can’t really affford the short-mid term gamble that diversification will bring.

      • Scorp

        Which is why they are focusing on Windows Mobile devices. That will work for them as long as they are on the main ones doing it. The same isn’t here where there are clearly too many companies making Android devices with Samsung and HTC on the level of Moto in terms of hardware.

    • Anonymous

      I highly doubt this is only for webtop. The problem with webtop now is the fact that it doesn’t work well with the phone now. It would be wise for Moto to add a version of Android to webtop so that there could be some seemly recognition between devices, but they won’t do that. Plus I wouldn’t be surprised if this new web based software is an attempt to make Blur more web based. If that’s the case then it’s going to chew up your data each cycle. So solve one problem by creating another. Great!

  • http://twitter.com/whemmingway William Hemmingway

    Motorola – are you a hardware company or a software company? With the market showing progress due to consolidation of OS, why try to create a new one? Perhaps this is just a ploy to gain leverage of sorts from one of their relationships…

  • Anonymous

    The real money is in your own OS, but ask Samsung and Nokia how easy that is to pull off. Good luck Moto, your gonna need it.

    • Scorp

      Exactly. That’s how you remain a major player. Have your own software OR be like HTC and make devices for any OS that will let you. But strictly making devices for a crowded platform won’t help your bottom line.

  • Generatione

    Motorola: please make phones with lower SAR ratings! I don’t want o get cancer from your products!

  • Anonymous

    Doesn’t it already have an OS that it uses for the Atrix lapop dock?

  • Anonymous

    One can only hope Motorola wouldn’t make the same mistake as Palm, then HPQ, with a proprietary OS when all they need is a UI they can call their own built on top of a standard such as Android.

    Has everyone forgotten the uSoft history of building UIs on top of…gack!…DOS? that worked great for a long time.

  • Anonymous

    Lets see…. moto u suck making stupid blur…. i mean u suck balls in a bad way. What makes you think you can do the whole thing. There goes another chapter 7 filling in the near future

    • Scorp

      Maybe they’ll hiring people who know what they are doing, no? Is that a possibility?

  • Napleszen

    Funny how Motorola was in financial disarray prior to their android phone releases, yet after a few good quarters have decided they can do it better themselves. Good luck with that.

  • Bs_thinker

    Motorola isn’t happy with providing a quality handset. Which they have up until now. Now they want to control the entire experience. I like having the ability to customize MY phone and resent having to deal with bloatware and I insist on being able to choose my home screen/launcher if the stock launcher doesn’t provide the ease of use and functionality I desire.

  • Anonymous

    Mototola needs to focus on the devices and not get tangled into making an OS for their cell phones. HTC, Samsung and LG appear to be doing quite well making handsets for Android and WP7. If they proceed in the OS direction this will fail just like the Xoom.

  • Booboolala2000

    Probably so they would have an excuse not to update their phones. Mixed feelings about Motorola right now.

  • rudyy50

    since motorola has freely chosen to lock its phone despite repeated requests by its customers to unlock the phone, this customer will freely choose to ignore any online effort by motorola. rooted, on liberty 1.5.

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