{"id":337714,"date":"2017-04-06T02:32:01","date_gmt":"2017-04-05T18:32:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/techcrunch.com\/?p=1473252"},"modified":"2017-04-06T02:32:01","modified_gmt":"2017-04-05T18:32:01","slug":"canonical-ends-development-of-its-phone-to-focus-on-cloud-and-iot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/canonical-ends-development-of-its-phone-to-focus-on-cloud-and-iot\/","title":{"rendered":"Canonical ends development of its phone to focus on cloud and IoT"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

Canonical<\/a>, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux\u00a0distribution, long had aspirations to become a player in the mobile phone and tablet world, too. You can\u2019t easily buy<\/a> an Ubuntu-powered phone today (at least not in the U.S.), but over the years, a few have come and gone<\/a>. As Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth announced today, however, the company will end its investment in the phone business.<\/p>\n

In addition, it\u2019s also going back to the GNOME desktop<\/a> and dropping the development of its own Unity8 desktop environment<\/a>, starting with the Ubuntu 18.04 release.<\/p>\n

Instead, Canonical is going to focus on the cloud and IoT. \u201cI\u2019d like to emphasise our ongoing passion for, investment in, and commitment to, the Ubuntu desktop that millions rely on,\u201d Shuttleworth writes. \u201cWe will continue to produce the most usable open source desktop in the world, to maintain the existing LTS releases, to work with our commercial partners to distribute that desktop, to support our corporate customers who rely on it, and to delight the millions of IoT and cloud developers who innovate on top of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The majority of public and private clouds run on Linux, and many of them use Ubuntu (though there is also competes with RedHat and others, of course).\u00a0Indeed, I don\u2019t think I\u2019ve been to a recent cloud-related conference that didn\u2019t feature some kind of Canonical presence. While the company is best-known for its distribution, it\u00a0makes its money<\/a> from supporting large enterprise customers<\/a> that want to run Ubuntu, OpenStack or containers (most often with the help of Kubernetes) in their data centers. That, to a very large degree, is where Canonical makes its money and\u00a0while it doesn\u2019t release any numbers, this is clearly a fast-growing and profitable business for it.<\/p>\n

In the IoT world, Ubuntu Core and the company\u2019s concept of Snaps<\/a>\u00a0(which\u00a0allow you to install and run a sandboxed application on top of any Linux distribution) are also seeing some growing traction. At MWC, for example, Shuttleworth gave me a tour of Canonical\u2019s booth and all\u00a0of the third-party exhibitors there used Snaps, something Shuttleworth himself seemed to be rather excited about.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe choice, ultimately, is to invest in the areas which are contributing to the growth of the company,\u201d writes Shuttleworth. \u201cThose are Ubuntu itself, for desktops, servers and VMs, our cloud infrastructure products (OpenStack and Kubernetes) our cloud operations capabilities (MAAS, LXD, Juju, BootStack), and our IoT story in snaps and Ubuntu Core.\u201d<\/p>\n

As for Unity8, it\u2019s probably fair to say that many Ubuntu users won\u2019t be all that sad about this. While there are plenty of users who prefer it, Gnome has long been the most popular desktop environment for Linux (and it\u2019s come a long way<\/a> over the years) and less fragmentation here is probably a good thing as it will focus development resources on fewer platforms.<\/p>\n

Featured Image: Manuel Blondeau\/Getty Images<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"\" Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux\u00a0distribution, long had aspirations to become a player in the mobile phone and tablet world, too. You can’t easily buy an Ubuntu-powered phone today (at least not in the U.S.), but over the years, a few have come and gone. As Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth announced today, however, the company will end its investment in the phone… Read More<\/a><\/p>\n

\n<\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a>\n<\/div>\n

\"\"\/ <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5817,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[59,66,26],"class_list":["post-337714","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-media","tag-techcrunch","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/337714","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5817"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=337714"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/337714\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=337714"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=337714"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=337714"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}