No OSGi on your phone

OSGi was initially created for mobile and embedded world. I think it is the dream of an every OSGi geek dream to develop applications. for a cool OSGi engine that is bolted together with the operating system of your phone. An OSGi phone that would provide access to everything your phone can do together with all the goodness that comes from OSGi. A dream phone that would allow you to bring in your OSGi service that integrates with your cloud service, over the air when declared as dependency. Although, OSGI had a few attempts to really break into mobile phone world it is unfortunate that OSGi phone will remain a dreams for foreseeable future.

Nokia did work on an OSGi based Java environment for Symbian phones. Nokia even went to the trouble to create a JSR for it. It established a pretty ambitious R&D program around OSGi. It was actually these ambitious goals that eventually caused it to fail. The R&D program was ambitious because it not only promised to provide OSGi but it also tried to get Midlets to work together with the OSGi engine. However, OSGi aware midlets model especially the MIDP security did not fit to OSGi and the R&D effort was never able to deliver a solution that was acceptable. In my personal opinion the main flaw was on the effort was treating OSGi as another runtime on the device rather than the main engine.

Most of the effort did not get wasted on Nokia's effort though. On the older MIDP environment all the pieces of the Java environment (all JSR implementation etc..) was compiled into a single binary together with the VM and was loaded together with it. OSGi model required a flexible architecture so almost all the pieces of the Java environment was re-designed for it so that they would be separate libraries consisting of a jar and possibly a native dll. These pieces are compiled separately and are loaded on demand by VM. This architecture later converted into MIDP environment as well. The Java environment of S60 3.2 and later devices and the Java environment currently available as part of the Open source Symbian foundation code carries this architecture. A few advanced APIs such as eSWT was also created in this era.

A second opportunity was when Google started working on Android. The goals of the Android was almost a perfect match with OSGi. And this time OSGi would be the engine that runs all the services and applications of the phone which lacked on the earlier Nokia attempt. It is also known that there were members of the Android team who did know well about OSGi. It is hard to know as an outsider what really went but Android did not use OSGi and build its own version of concepts to provide similar functionality.

Although there were later attempts like the Sprint Titan platform to bring OSGi to mobile phones, they also failed when the smartphone market changed rapidly to different directions. Unfortunately, in the current climate it looks very unlikely that anyone will bother to spend the time and energy to make OSGi part of mobile phones.