Google is building its own DeX: First look at Android's Desktop Mode

This is the thing that bummed me out the most about Microsoft exiting the phone market.

I know Windows isn’t super popular around here, but the idea of carrying one device that I can just dock to work on always intrigued me.

There’s just no way this is taking off with any significant market share in the business world anytime soon being android only, and Apple will never adopt it because they want you to buy 3 different devices. Such a great concept, and with the performance of mobile chips getting so good, very viable.

The problem with this idea is that it's unattainable.

Let's start with something simpler: a living room. There's no universal design that would fit just any living room. The layout and the set of furniture that would work for my living room will not work for yours. Size, shape, windows, doors, connection to other spaces - everything matters. If you want a great design for your living room, you literally need to start from your specific living room.

There's a great idea -- why don't we come with a resizable (reflowable?) design that could fit any living room in the world? While this idea might be entertaining for an engineer's mind, it doesn't work in practice, unless you can settle for just a mediocre design.

Also, being intellectually honest, we need to attack the strongest Apple we can imagine, not a weak Apple that's easy for us to attack. And that strongest Apple will never adopt this idea because they aim to design the best computer/phone/tablet that they can, and in order to design that they need to start with the computer/phone/tablet.

The idea of a phone connecting to a display/keyboard/mouse and becoming a computer has the problem that you could either optimize your design for what you have with a phone, or for what you have with a display and peripherals. It will never be as good as the system designed from the ground up to be just a single thing. It's always nice to have options, but there won't be any mass adoption for the mediocre combo. It was dead in the water with Palm Foleo in 2007, it's just as dead in the water 18 years later.

I'm not so sure about unattainable. Many programs exist that serve the user in very different contexts, for example responsive websites, web apps. Or games that work on console, like Steam Deck, and PC. Or the Nintendo Switch, which can be used in handheld mode, with a small screen and battery, or docked, connected to a TV. Controllers attached or unattached.

Now, I can see problems too: docked and portable modes need very different performance optimizations. But I'm sure that software can handle this, for example, IDEA IntelliJ has power save mode, and OS-es also demonstrated that they are fine on portable and connected systems alike, like MacOS, Windows, Linux.

It's also not a problem that some things are not available in both modes. For example, Switch has games that explicitly need docked mode, for example, Super Mario Party. Yet both the game, and the platform is popular.

I see no reason why a phone couldn't be a mediocre, or better PC.

A phone could be a mediocre PC. In my opinion, it will not gain any significant market share competing against other PCs -- mediocre ones, good ones, great ones, and "insanely great" ones too.

I don't think we can fairly compare a phone pretending to be a desktop against other desktops.

It would be more fair to compare a phone that has desktop features, to a phone that doesn't have desktop features.

So let's compare the best Apple phone that refuses to have a dex like experience; to a Samsung that has had a dex experience for about 10 years, or to a Google phone that is now adopting desktop experiences.

If the future is anything like the past, in 5 to 10 years from now we'll see a desktop experience on iPhone and they're going to be snobby about it.