The Simple Phone should have rung alarm bells to Simple Mobile Tools' future

Simple Mobile Tools are a set of open-source “shareware” apps. Examples of applications included in the suite include “Simple Gallery”, “Simple Calendar” and “Simple Contacts”.

While the applications are open-source, the developer made money through proprietary app stores versions. From the Play Store, the Gallery is only free for 14 days, before you are required to buy a license. F-Droid and GitHub were options for acquiring fully-free binaries, but not often used by regular users.

My personal experiences with their products have been fine. They aim to provide the essentials, but not much else. To Android aficionados, this is valuable.

This month, it was uncovered that they were acquired by Israeli app developer ZipoApps¹. From their website² and Play Store page³, ZipoApps’ business model can be deciphered: acquire existing apps that are popular, and then load them full of ads and expensive subscriptions to extract as much value from the user base they already have.

Alarm bells have begun screaming within the user base.

The alarm bells should have been ringing a year ago

In 2022, the project announced a bizarre pivot: they would be creating a phone, that would be powered by the Simple Mobile Tools set of applications⁴⁵.

Nothing indicated that this would work. For a start, a phone consisting of Simple Mobile Apps, microG and F-Droid (i.e. no Google products) is a hard sell, even to the extreme enthusiast user base. Regular users are entirely out of the equation, as getting apps would be much more difficult for them.

The device itself was made using budget components from 2018. Looking at the pictures, it appears to be a rebadged Coolpad Cool S ⁶⁷. As a company, Coolpad don’t have the greatest record, having shipped phones with malware twice ⁸⁹. Given that this is the ODM who are likely providing the firmware, this should be a point of concern.

Simple Mobile Tools are user-mode applications, with the majority of work being done by a lone developer. Nothing indicated that the company had the requisite expertise to provide a version of Android for the phone. This is a task that major companies struggle with ¹⁰.

The device contained the software package “Simple OS”, itself based on a platform called “Lunar OMP”. Nothing is clear about what Lunar OMP actually is. Their website consists of vague marketing material ¹¹, with broken links to both their documentation ¹² and Gerrit ¹³. The linked GitHub account contains nothing of note¹⁴. Lunar OMP may have had more information accessible when the Simple Phone was being promoted, but it has not lasted the year.

In the end, while the product page indicates there were some sales, the project was marked as discontinued within a year¹⁵¹⁶ by the lead/sole developer.

What this means for long-term support of the phone is unclear, especially with the sale of the apps.

This was always going to be the outcome

Simple Phone never made much sense, outside of the decrepit product it produced.

For people focused on privacy or security, there has always been a much better option. Buy a Pixel, and install GrapheneOS on it. GrapheneOS is a serious project, with endorsement from Snowden amongst others. The project has had a laser focus on being secure, and outsteps Google here. Even price wise, a 2nd hand Pixel 5a and Graphene is the better choice. If you really wanted Simple’s apps, one could download them from F-Droid.

The phone, and more deeply, the project, faced a more existential threat.

In the 8 years since Simple Gallery was created, Android OEMs became adept at producing software, to the point where most people would not seek out an alternative. Samsung, for example, abandoned the lacklustre TouchWiz, for OneUI, abandoning the noose they had placed on the performance and usability of their phones.

Not only does this inhibit sales of the phone, but it reduces the marketshare for the apps themselves. Furthermore, as the apps are one-time purchases, the reduction in interest likely caused revenue to dry up. As time drew on, it must have become clearer that the future is small for the set of apps, and it was time to let go.

Was the phone an act of desperation

From that lens, the phone might have been a last ditch effort to create a valuable ecosystem around his apps. While it is a bold play to say the least, it might have been one of the few, ethical ways for the enterprise to not stagnate.

Once it failed, the project was doomed to a slow death. The final act, where the corpse is scavenged by predators, was inevitable.

What’s next

While the total addressable market is small, the enthusiast nature of the apps’ users will keep it alive. The zombie of QuickPic, purchased by ad fraud company Cheetah Mobile¹⁷, has been kept alive for the near decade it has been under their control¹⁸, without any access to the source code.

Simple Tools are open source, so forking is trivial, and at least one fork¹⁹ is already in progress. Given the deliberately minimal nature, this fork can take on a maintenance role: ensure it continues to work, but do little else. While the compatibility of apps across Android versions is good, breaking changes, such as the axing of 32-bit apps, do happen.

For phone users, one can expect the experience to atrophy.

For many, this app will serve as a continued warning against closed source apps, especially ones owned by smaller enterprises. All it takes is a change of heart by a single person, and the footing under these apps can disappear. The temptations of Chrome extension developers are well known²⁰. Without a shadow of a doubt, Android app developers get the same emails. Were it not open source, users might have been marshalled into the ad filled future. Instead, they have been given a ray of hope to move onwards.

Sources/footnotes