If it had worked on Google Play then there would not have been any point on Amazon selling it. The phone was to get people using all Amazon services.

Funny how this has cropped up for me since I've just moved to a phone that uses Symbian!

The main problem ATM is that over the last few years there hasn't been a phone on the market that you could say is truly revolutionary, anything that is regarded as new to the table is very quickly picked up and added by other manufacturers or developers. The original iPhone was in terms of specifications quite a lightweight but it was its usability on a touch-screen phone (an idea that had already existed but not really to a mass-market scale) and that near enough changed the way many mobile phones looked and operated overnight. It's going to take something like that, a disruptive game changer, to make a significant difference.

That will never happen, law dictates in which ever country they are operating in has to apply so ultimately a court order they'd have to. That said iMessage etc is already fully encrypted end to end.

No problem with acquiescing to a legally issued court order to allow access. That does not mean having innately broken security protection with government mandated back doors or just plain badly programmed, broken systems. Even if you think your government, or all governments wear white hats or even slightly grubby grey hats there are plenty of black hats out there more than willing to take advantage.

You can't really do much about Govts tapping your links between servers etc though.. As was the case.

True. That is the bigger picture. But much more important than having a different flavour of OS for users to suck on.

I read an article how it is possible to anybody with enough computing power to listen to encrypted communications en masse. Apparently the existing encrypting solutions only use a couple of prime numbers, so you can prepare for those which takes about two weeks and then you can just sit and listen

http://arstechnica.com/security/2015...n-connections/

Also.. IOS is already what you asked and Apple does not unlock. http://www.macrumors.com/2015/10/20/...ryption-ios-8/

They should advertise it more, "9 out of 10 terrorists use iPhone" Should this come to Android the officials will love the fragmentation.

Android also encrypts with newer versions - and now it's becoming mandatory for manufacturers to set it to encrypt as a default.

The question is if the keys are stored anywhere outside of the devices. That's what Apple is saying they stopped doing, they do not keep the keys so they cannot decrypt.

Could a new os topple the big 2?

Unlikely is the probable answer to that one and that includes Windows Phone, Firefox OS and Ubuntu Phone no matter how technically proficient they may be (or not).

https://www.netmarketshare.com/opera...=8&qpcustomd=1

I think only Microsoft has the resources to break in and become a third major mobile OS.

The missing functionality/features to get on par with IOS and Android has now been added to W10 Mobile so the only thing holding it back is the APP gap. It`s a chicken and egg situation as without hundreds of millions of users Devs will not convert their APPS to Windows.

To jumpstart W10 Molbile I would open the OS up completely and allow Android APPS to be sideloaded. Obviously APPS that required Google services would still not work but you would vastly increase the number and quality of available apps in an instant. If this were to happen you could see w10 Mobile market share jump to say 15% from 5-8% currently ..

At a 15% market share for mobile added to perhaps 300 million W10 Desktop users you could see Devs start to convert their APPS from other platforms as below..

Windows Bridge for iOS: This toolkit enables iOS® developers to build Universal Windows Platform apps using their existing Objective-C® code.

Windows Bridge for Android: Android™ developers can use this toolkit to bring their app to Windows 10 Mobile, using their existing IDE.

Windows Bridge for WP Silverlight: We will be providing guidance and migration toolkits to help Windows Phone Silverlight developers update their Windows Phone
apps to take advantage of the Universal Windows Platform.

"Project Centennial": This toolkit will enable desktop developers to package and publish their existing .NET and Win32-based Windows applications to the Windows Store. Developers can also use Centennial to call common UWP APIs and services.

In my view if W10 closed the APP gap significantly its market share would easily reach 25% world wide