I'm still sad to this day that FirefoxOS got axed. Doubly so now since I'm trying to find a new phone after my Nexus 5X stopped getting official builds of LineageOS.
I really hope that there's some diabolical plan within Mozilla to bring it back once the wasm world is more established and makes having a fully browser based OS less of a performance hit.
I mean, that's probably true. But if I tell myself that the problem was technical I can still hold out hope that they're secretly solving those problems and will try again. :P
I've still never seen a good retrospective on what went wrong, do you happen to have any links/stories?
tl;dr: we could not get some apps officially supported. This creates a chicken and egg situation where app editors wants to see market traction to invest in your platform, but users are not buying devices because their must-have app is not available.
KaiOS managed to break this cycle thanks to the large device shipments sold by Jio in India.
I think a big appeal is having a second vendor to keep the market leader honest.
Google selling their own hardware and trying to stiffen requirements on Android devices are probably making most vendors feel a little nervous. Not necessarily that they'll be driven out of the market, but more that it will be ever harder to differentiate via software. App developers are clearly champing at the 30% tax bit.
So I'd expect the push to come from manufacturers and devs first, dragging consumers along. They might pick niches like low-cost devices where it's "this or a flip phone", like when the cheap Lumias outsold the entire rest of the Windows Phone market.
Comparable would be Samsung's tail-chasing with Tizen and Huwaei's forced embrace of its own OS.
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I'm still sad to this day that FirefoxOS got axed. Doubly so now since I'm trying to find a new phone after my Nexus 5X stopped getting official builds of LineageOS.
I really hope that there's some diabolical plan within Mozilla to bring it back once the wasm world is more established and makes having a fully browser based OS less of a performance hit.
It still lives on as KaiOS. My old flip phone runs it.
what model? How did you manage to install it on an old device?
Shamless plug: I provide heavily patched 8.1 builds for bullhead with over 250+ kernel CVE patches.
https://divestos.org/index.php?page=devices&base=LineageOS https://github.com/Divested-Mobile/DivestOS-Build/blob/maste...
Performance is not on the top 5 list of things that killed FirefoxOS...
I mean, that's probably true. But if I tell myself that the problem was technical I can still hold out hope that they're secretly solving those problems and will try again. :P
I've still never seen a good retrospective on what went wrong, do you happen to have any links/stories?
tl;dr: we could not get some apps officially supported. This creates a chicken and egg situation where app editors wants to see market traction to invest in your platform, but users are not buying devices because their must-have app is not available.
KaiOS managed to break this cycle thanks to the large device shipments sold by Jio in India.
What would FirefoxOS have brought to the average consumer or phone manufacturer?
If your selling points are “it’s all web apps and open source, isn’t that great!”, that is a…marketing challenge, to be sure.
I think a big appeal is having a second vendor to keep the market leader honest.
Google selling their own hardware and trying to stiffen requirements on Android devices are probably making most vendors feel a little nervous. Not necessarily that they'll be driven out of the market, but more that it will be ever harder to differentiate via software. App developers are clearly champing at the 30% tax bit.
So I'd expect the push to come from manufacturers and devs first, dragging consumers along. They might pick niches like low-cost devices where it's "this or a flip phone", like when the cheap Lumias outsold the entire rest of the Windows Phone market.
Comparable would be Samsung's tail-chasing with Tizen and Huwaei's forced embrace of its own OS.