Qualcomm, bleah. When they were the big cheese in feature phones they had a JAVA style operating system they called BREW. Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless. It was completely locked down. The SDK cost money. All BREW apps had to be submitted to Qualcomm, the phone manufacturer, and the cell service provider. All had to approve the app. Apps were only downloadable from the service providers, for the phones they approved them to be installed on. Thus the only way for there to be free BREW apps was for a service provider to pay for the cost and offer it as a free download. Extracting apps from phones to sideload to another was pretty much impossible, except maybe to another phone of the exact same model on the same provider.
Of course iPhone and Android ate BREW's lunch, dinner, and next day's breakfast. If Qualcomm wanted to make it big in the cellphone OS market they should've had a free SDK and made the OS and apps designed for portability using a scalable interface so an app could be written once to run on a lot of phones. They could've had an app store not tied to any phone manufacturer or service provider. But instead they tried to act like Nintendo and other videogame companies with total control over their platform. Not a new thing, Texas Instruments foolishly tried to control all the software for their 99-4 and 99-4A computers until shortly before they ended it. On Wednesday, October 8, 2025 at 08:02:40 AM MDT, Marius Liebenberg via Emc-users <[email protected]> wrote: It is less capable than the Rpi3, and the core code is not open-source. You run the apps through a framework. I am of the opinion it's Qualcomm's bid to monopolise the high-end Arduino market. They have done that with the GSM market very well. It's not a very good option in my opinion. There are reviews that will explain just that. _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
