I'm unreasonably excited about Firefox OS. Android really isn't open enough for my taste, and my trust of Google has diminished over the years, as they've encroached on more and more of the web and my data on that web. Apple has always been awful for the open web. And I'd rather write JavaScript and HTML than Java.
Android's open enough for me, but what I find unhappy is that Google seems intent on tricking people into revealing more and more information. It often reminds me to turn on history tracking, despite having said no many times.
Every time I use the Play store, it tries to get me to enter a phone number. The way it does this is by popping up a dialog, with no buttons except continue. It makes it look like you MUST do this (there's no indication you can back out), even though it's optional. That's deceptive.
And of course, the idiotic permissions system. Want to check to see if a user's on the phone? Gotta also get access to who they call and their IMEI and other permanent identifiers.
Basically, all the time I'm on my Android device, I feel like I've gotta be extra cautious, that Google's out to screw me over. Unfortunately, MS is just flubbing their system by pumping it full of crap. (They were paying devs in 3rd world countries $2000 to push out junk apps. They refuse to take down garbage/scams. They even published fake Windows Updates on the store, and other stuff that falsely claims to be by MS.) MS could fix it all immediately by offering Android app compatibility. I'd switch in a minute.
I use Firefox as my browser, mainly because of this. I wish I could switch to another smartphone platform.
I like Android (the AOSP) in itself, but I very much dislike how Google ships it with a lot of their own (proprietary) apps that can't be uninstalled (the usual way).
Some of Google's features may be nice, but I don't want them to track me and get all my private data from my phone.
I'm using CyanogenMod without all the Google apps. It's nice, but the experience just isn't as nice as you have it with Google-Android. Most of the features could be done without tracking users, however.
With Firefox OS you could also write C or C++ (possibly Rust eventually) thanks to emscripten and asm.js. But, crucially, asm.js makes them portable. No compiling for different architectures.
I like that they are targeting the low end, both in developing countries and now in the US. I need a phone for email/sms/phone, and I use the browser, calendar, calculator, and authenticator, but really that's about it. I don't want a 5-inch device in my pocket for this use case!
Apple played a massive part in the success of the mobile web and responsive design. The release of Mobile Safari and WebKit was a watershed moment. Before that point, the mobile web largely consisted of separate, pretty awful sites on WML. Afterwards, most mobile platforms had a default web browser based on WebKit, and the mobile web transformed as a result.
I'm not saying Apple are perfect, but saying that they've "always been awful for the open web" is grossly overstating things.
Is it possible to write good mobile apps in JS and HTML, compared to Android or iOS? I don't know much about mobile programming, but it seems much harder for JS to compete with native apps, no?
I help a lot of middle aged and elderly people who are not all that tech literate, and get asked a lot for recommendations, and I definitely think there is a niche for something between feature phones and smart phones. A lot of people are not interested in putting in the investment of time and money to get up to pace using Android or an iPhone. There's quite a big step to using those devices, for instance in managing data use, or in the way that phone functions recede amongst new smartphone features. With Android as a new user you can even for all intents and purposes lose your dialler, by pressing and holding the icon incorrectly.
iOS isn't interested in meeting that market, because of low cost, and if they did attempt it both Android and iOS might well suffer in trying to alter and dilute their brands and the unity of their interfaces.
It also works quite well as an target market, because a lot of the apps that would be expected are quite simple, and shouldn't be too difficult to create using web technologies - maybe news or magazine apps, cinema or TV listings, weather and so on.
Combine the right interface with a price of £50-£100, a good battery life, and a credible promise over security and privacy, and it definitely seems like an option which could get into the retail stores, and a place in the market of perhaps 2-3%, which is a good place to start.
By some definitions I'm "elderly", but I can read small print, operate tiny buttons on devices, and think abstractly just fine. I do my best, keeping up with technologies is hard, but doubt I'm alone in that respect.
In any case, I'm excited about the Firefox OS not because I'm old but because I'm interested in a technology that holds a lot of open-source promise: lower costs, non-coercive apps, respect for user privacy, among others. The app (and OS) development model encourages transparency (promotes security) and with a "lower bar to admission" invites wider participation among users.
Since I'm pretty familiar with web programming I think it will be great when FOS devices become available in N. America. I think it will attract many people looking for the alternative it offers.
Us elderly folks tend to value simplicity and utility over bells and whistles, after all, by default a senior's life is complicated enough. We're old, we don't have time to waste, we see through a lot of the marketing hype and unnecessary crap. When there's a task to do gimmicks are just a hassle--making a phone call should be simple, sometimes it's all a person is aiming to do.
I agree there's a good opportunity for simpler phones that still get some of the benefits of smartphones rather than a 10 year old Nokia.
That said, I don't see much in the article to suggest this is what Mozilla is going after. Yes, some of the devices will be cheap, but there are plenty of cheap Android and Windows phones too.
Even if an OS did target just this market, the problem would still be a lack of apps. They might not be the kind of users who install 10 home screens full of apps, but many of them will be interested in a handful of apps in different categories, so the long-tail marketplace still matters. That's where there's an advantage to an Android phone customised for simple usage, but still with the ability for a user (or their tech-savvy friends/family) to install a wide range of apps if/when they want to.
OT: Do you have any recommendations for elderly users? Any resources would be great, too. I've looked around but it's hard to find current, reliable information on a somewhat unusual topic.
The specs I find myself dealing with are the following, which I think are typical:
* Very little knowledge of mobile computer conventions, or any computer conventions: Icon literacy, swiping, tapping, home screens, etc. Some don't understand what a web host is, or the difference between a browser's search field and its address bar.
* Constrained physical abilities: Vision to see small print, dexterity to swipe correctly, etc.
Man, webOS ruled in this market before the epic journey that was its downfall. I had to drag unwilling family members kicking and screaming to iOS, unable to give a good explanation for why it was missing so many conveniences webOS had.
It would be nice if another OS could be as instantly familiar as it was, as willing to be as simple or as complex as its user asked it to be.
It's funny how even today iOS and Android are just catching up to some of the beauty of webOS. Pieces of it live on in blatant (sometimes poor) rip offs, but even today I still miss it.
Got to try a Firefox OS phone (or three) last week at a short hackathon in Telefonica Digital's offices in London.
The first device I tried (and apparently the one with the beefiest hardware) was an Alcatel One Touch Fire. My enthusiasm took a sharp turn downward from the moment I unlocked the device; accomplished by sliding the screen left to right, the animation was jerky, did not track my finger accurately, and skipped to the end when I let go of the screen halfway through the width of the screen.
One of the hosts was quick to point out that the lock screen interaction was actually custom programmed by Alcatel, and so is the rest of the user interface, at which point he pointed to try a different device running something closer to "stock Firefox OS."
I'm enthralled by the promise of helping the web win by creating a device category where the web is a first-class citizen, but I'm doubtful it will happen if manufacturers outsource their tasteless UI customizations to web dev interns.
Sunspider came out at roughly 1600ms, which places the mid-2013 Alcatel somewhere in the performance bracket of an iPhone 4 (mid-2010, flagship device). Despite the rough benchmarks, I ran some Famo.us demos and they were surprisingly usable, and I could easily get a physics-backed drag interaction to run smoothly inside the browser.
I'm waiting to try out a Firefox OS phone with cutting edge hardware.
It has definitely been an up-hill battle for Firefox OS trying to gain market share, but I think everyone (including Mozilla) expected that. Having played with one of their earlier test units and the newer Firefox Flame with FFOS 2.0, it has come a long way. Even our Android-obsessed designer loves the Flame.
It's a tough situation to be in where they need to improve the quality of the ecosystem, but need users to convince the big-wig devs to developer for the OS. The total user numbers we've seen from them is certainly better than we expected, but still too small to convince a major developer to build for Firefox OS on numbers alone.
If their platform wasn't the web, I'm not sure they'd have much of a chance at success, but being able to convince a developer the values of building for the web is much easier than building for a fairly new mobile OS.
What is the official way to learn about Firefox OS releases? I can't figure out which version of FxOS has which status, despite being subscribed to mailing lists.
Flame update page [1] has images for 2.0, 2.1, 2.2 and 3.0. LG/KDDI Fx0 has apparently shipped in Japan with version 2.0 [2] on December 25, 2014. All this suggests that at least version 2.0 has been released. Yet Wikipedia page [3] doesn't have release date for version 2.0 onwards, and I don't know where else to look.
The release management page is https://wiki.mozilla.org/Release_Management/B2G_Landing. You can probably think of the code complete date as the lower bound on a production device shipping with that version of the software.
Firefox OS, being based on HTML/CSS/JavaScript, sounds a lot more hackable than Android to me. Well, you can hack Android pretty heavily - forking CyanogenMod, writing Xposed plugins, etc., but Java is just obscure and the compile/deploy/debug cycle is too cumbersome for casual hacking.
Hence I look forward to Firefox OS as platform I can easily hack, but I am not sure whether it really is. Could someone with experience tell me:
* How easy is it to deploy a FxOS app? How is the remote debugging experience?
* How easy is it to hack the core apps (e.g. phone, SMS)?
* How easy is it to hack the "framework" (e.g. window manager, status bar)? Is it even written in JavaScript?
* deploying apps is super easy - either host them on a web server or push them from firefox's webIDE, and remote debugging using the firefox devtools just works.
* hacking core apps is totally doable. You need a rooted device to update them though. Currently the best ones would be nexus 5 or sony z3(c).
I really wish to see a great third mobile OS with a marketshare in the two digits.
I appreciate the spirit behind FFOS, so I would like to see it take that place. I am not sure of how they want to achieve that though.
However, AFAIK, FFOS does not really bring anything new to the table, so I have trouble seeing how it could make an impact in the first-world.
Here's what Mozilla needs to "fix" in Firefox OS IMO:
- have real browser. Seriously. Firefox on Android is a much better browser.
- handle the software, and the updates, Microsoft-style. Maybe have OEMs pay for this service, maybe involve the community. Seriously, all Firefox OS devices sold have an ancient version of the OS. It means I'm safer when I'm using Firefox on Android than when I'm using a Firefox OS phone.
I understand the tradeoffs that led them to this decision (their dependency on the Android stack for example), but they seriously need to rethink it.
- allow for native code to run. I know it's hard. Even Google with it's uber-optimized (or so they thought at the time) Dalvik (for small phones) understood the need for the NDK. I'm not sure asm.js can cut it, as I've yet to see console-class games on Firefox OS like there are on Android and iOS.
- Of course, they need to continue their groundwork on APIs. There shouldn't be a thing you can do on say, iOS or WP and not in Firefox OS (and I'm not saying Android because it gives a lot of power to developers).
- They need a flagship phone, for everyone. Not a "developer phone" (although it can act as one), but a real flagship.
Firefox OS is a great idea, and if it was 2010 it would probably stand a good chance at succeeding with the correct launch strategy. But its not 2010.
This weekend I had a chance to play with a Jolla smartphone. Hardware wise it pretty good, and had some really good ideas, but the software was half baked. While in time both Jolla and Firefox OS could become great products, but time ran out a while back.
You now have to come to market with all the pieces (and then some). You can't adopt the "build it and they will come mantra" because unless you can give users a compelling reason to switch without losing functionality they won't come. The hardware wars are long gone. The app wars ended a few years back. We are now in the ecosystem wars and Mozilla (and Jolla) appear to have no answers for this (or have answers "coming soon").
The sad fact is that from here on out it's iOS and Android in a tussle neither can win, and unless the phone market resets itself like it did in 2007 there is very little anybody else can do.
There are a lot more people who can write a web app than a mobile app, by a factor of 10 at least. Give them a platform where it's trivial to make an app (easier than, say, Cordova/PhoneGap), and make it free, and you could easily disrupt the mobile market to a small degree.
If FirefoxOS is a success the next challenge will come from the fact that iOS and Android could easily have HTML5 apps too with a native WebviewUI 'player' app, and if FirefoxOS gets any traction their respective developers will add that functionality quickly. Hopefully, for consumers and developers alike, they'd all have compatible APIs so mobile apps would be truly cross-platform, but that's not very likely.
Is there perhaps a market for Firefox OS among the few who care about privacy more than app availability? Or are they all happy using Cyanogen?
(Obviously it would be great if OSs were properly decoupled from hardware like in the old PC days before UEFI, but I can't see any way of getting back there other than a very long political slog. Title II gives a small amount of hope for that.)
I was given a Firefox OS phone at Mozfest last year. I lost my other phone earlier this year and so used it exclusively for four weeks. I'm sorry to say it's pretty terrible at this stage. I was using v2 of Firefox OS.
The problems are broadly that it was slow, unreliable and poorly designed. It would just become completely unresponsive a couple of times a week, requiring the battery to be removed to restart. There are very few well known apps. Twitter seems to be the only one, and it was so slow for scrolling that I gave up using it. The included apps were just placeholders to install apps, almost all of them only worked online. I wouldn't recommend getting one to anybody. I'm sure you could buy a cheap secondhand Android and have a better experience. It was worse than Android 1.6.
There's such a huge mountain of work for the Mozilla developers to get this to be in anyway competitive to Android. I think Mozilla would be better to concentrate their resources elsewhere.
>programmers could write an app just once with Web technologies that span not just iOS, Android, and Firefox OS, but also Windows Phone, BlackBerry OS, Tizen, Ubuntu and any other mobile operating system that arrives tomorrow.
This, to me, is the most powerful prospect of Firefox OS.
I have been "writing apps" in HTML, Javascript and PHP ever since I can remember.
They are just as responsive and useful as any app I have ever used on my Android. Which works fine, but had recently been creeping the heck out of me because it's distributed by Google.
Every app is virtually a simple website imho. Look at google docs, for example. Angry birds could easily be written in javascript. As could flappy bird, and virtually every game I can think of.
I see no reason to bother writing a piece of software that can only be used on Androir or iOS, except for sheer greed, so I haven't. It's worked out well for me so far.
Here's to hoping Firefox OS comes to the first world sooner rather than later.
I hope Mozilla make a phone aimed at tech first movers (hacker news crowd etc), we seem to be the most likely to support attempts at openness. It would have to be high end though. A bit like Ubuntu tried to do with the Edge.
I'd rather they'd push Firefox on Android more. Firefox OS seems stillborn, but Firefox/Android is a good product and mobile could need more browser competition.
I feel like one thing they could do to promote Firefox OS would be to make it possible to run Firefox OS applications on Android; create an installer/app store that would allow you to install them as if they were native apps, but they would be using a shared runtime.
That would really help to make it worthwhile to develop FxOS apps; actually having a large installed base of phones that they could be used on, in order to help bootstrap the ecosystem up.
I really respect Firefox OS for being fully open, but I dislike the lack of native applications. I wish normal glibc Linux mobile distros (not Android) would gain more traction. Sailfish OS is great, but they don't seem to be interested in opening up the UI and most of the core applications.
If you want to improve the quality of Firefox, there is a simple way to do it, just download Firefox Beta for Android and Firefox Beta for your computer, it's helping them to improve the quality of the stable releases.
It's a really easy step to help Mozilla without changing anything to your habits.
Verizon seems like an odd choice in the U.S., to me they seem like a 'premium' brand somewhat more expensive than their competitors, while Firefox OS, at least prior to know, seems to have been positioning itself as a budget option.
Verizon has the best coverage in rural areas, at least where people I know live: southeast Minnesota, western Wisconsin, and Iowa. Many of my (and my friends') relatives in these areas still use flip phones or have reluctantly upgraded to iPhones or Android. Verizon is wise to have an option that's not a smartphone and not total junk.
I just upgraded my ZTE Open C to FxOS 3.0. This phone is similar, but worse, in specs to the original Moto E. It runs well, as long as you are using it for basic purposes.
For people in cities or inner suburbs, you may see it as a premium brand, as it does tend to be more expensive than the competition.
For people living in further out suburbs, exurbs, and rural areas, Verizon is pretty much a requirement. None of the other carriers have coverage that is nearly as good; you actually want your phone to work outside of a thin strip around the interstates, you buy Verizon.
It's also worth raising an eyeball over (but probably not dropping a monocle over) Mozilla being one of the strongest proponents of strong (e.g., Title II) network neutrality regulation, and Verizon being probably the telecoms most opposed, and like the one that will put the most effort into lobbying and using to overturn net neutrality.
Firefox is going to have to fight to get any kind of market share. As Microsoft has shown, you can have great hardware, great interface and tonnes of money behind you, but it does not buy you market share. As long as Mozilla is prepared for the uphill battle they are about to fight, I think they might have a chance.
They really need to carve out a niche like they've done in non first-world countries. Merely being the same as Android or iOS is not going to be enough. They need to get developers on board, but even so, will they have the games that most consumers like to play?
It's a tricky situation, but one nonetheless I am excited to see what happens from.
A strong opportunity for FirefoxOS growth is supporting ad-hoc and mesh link layers and providing an intelligent APIs that support that access without compromising security.
It's the anti-Google, anti-carrier, anti-corporate, anti-surveillance, anti-government, pro-efficiency, pro-security, pro-developing world feature everyone wants but nobody can have because none of the mobile OSs support it.
I hope Mozilla puts Servo into Firefox OS sooner rather than later. Same for rebuilding the whole thing in Rust, although that will probably last 3+ years.
The Servo team have actually been experimenting with "boot to servo" recently. Their blog has some photos and a description: http://blog.servo.org/2015/02/10/twis-23/
I really want to support Firefox OS and abandon Android. But Mozilla keeps missing the mark as far as I'm concerned. I don't want a flip phone, or a low-spec phone, or one that's only available in Japan. I just want something with a decent quad-core and more than 1gb of ram that I can purchase in the US and that will come with a warranty.
[+] [-] SwellJoe|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MichaelGG|11 years ago|reply
Every time I use the Play store, it tries to get me to enter a phone number. The way it does this is by popping up a dialog, with no buttons except continue. It makes it look like you MUST do this (there's no indication you can back out), even though it's optional. That's deceptive.
And of course, the idiotic permissions system. Want to check to see if a user's on the phone? Gotta also get access to who they call and their IMEI and other permanent identifiers.
Basically, all the time I'm on my Android device, I feel like I've gotta be extra cautious, that Google's out to screw me over. Unfortunately, MS is just flubbing their system by pumping it full of crap. (They were paying devs in 3rd world countries $2000 to push out junk apps. They refuse to take down garbage/scams. They even published fake Windows Updates on the store, and other stuff that falsely claims to be by MS.) MS could fix it all immediately by offering Android app compatibility. I'd switch in a minute.
I use Firefox as my browser, mainly because of this. I wish I could switch to another smartphone platform.
[+] [-] _jomo|11 years ago|reply
Some of Google's features may be nice, but I don't want them to track me and get all my private data from my phone.
I'm using CyanogenMod without all the Google apps. It's nice, but the experience just isn't as nice as you have it with Google-Android. Most of the features could be done without tracking users, however.
[+] [-] TazeTSchnitzel|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abrowne|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JimDabell|11 years ago|reply
Apple played a massive part in the success of the mobile web and responsive design. The release of Mobile Safari and WebKit was a watershed moment. Before that point, the mobile web largely consisted of separate, pretty awful sites on WML. Afterwards, most mobile platforms had a default web browser based on WebKit, and the mobile web transformed as a result.
I'm not saying Apple are perfect, but saying that they've "always been awful for the open web" is grossly overstating things.
[+] [-] vijayr|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Brakenshire|11 years ago|reply
iOS isn't interested in meeting that market, because of low cost, and if they did attempt it both Android and iOS might well suffer in trying to alter and dilute their brands and the unity of their interfaces.
It also works quite well as an target market, because a lot of the apps that would be expected are quite simple, and shouldn't be too difficult to create using web technologies - maybe news or magazine apps, cinema or TV listings, weather and so on.
Combine the right interface with a price of £50-£100, a good battery life, and a credible promise over security and privacy, and it definitely seems like an option which could get into the retail stores, and a place in the market of perhaps 2-3%, which is a good place to start.
[+] [-] jrapdx3|11 years ago|reply
In any case, I'm excited about the Firefox OS not because I'm old but because I'm interested in a technology that holds a lot of open-source promise: lower costs, non-coercive apps, respect for user privacy, among others. The app (and OS) development model encourages transparency (promotes security) and with a "lower bar to admission" invites wider participation among users.
Since I'm pretty familiar with web programming I think it will be great when FOS devices become available in N. America. I think it will attract many people looking for the alternative it offers.
Us elderly folks tend to value simplicity and utility over bells and whistles, after all, by default a senior's life is complicated enough. We're old, we don't have time to waste, we see through a lot of the marketing hype and unnecessary crap. When there's a task to do gimmicks are just a hassle--making a phone call should be simple, sometimes it's all a person is aiming to do.
[+] [-] mmahemoff|11 years ago|reply
That said, I don't see much in the article to suggest this is what Mozilla is going after. Yes, some of the devices will be cheap, but there are plenty of cheap Android and Windows phones too.
Even if an OS did target just this market, the problem would still be a lack of apps. They might not be the kind of users who install 10 home screens full of apps, but many of them will be interested in a handful of apps in different categories, so the long-tail marketplace still matters. That's where there's an advantage to an Android phone customised for simple usage, but still with the ability for a user (or their tech-savvy friends/family) to install a wide range of apps if/when they want to.
[+] [-] hackuser|11 years ago|reply
The specs I find myself dealing with are the following, which I think are typical:
* Very little knowledge of mobile computer conventions, or any computer conventions: Icon literacy, swiping, tapping, home screens, etc. Some don't understand what a web host is, or the difference between a browser's search field and its address bar.
* Constrained physical abilities: Vision to see small print, dexterity to swipe correctly, etc.
* Limited ability/motivation to learn more
[+] [-] themartorana|11 years ago|reply
It would be nice if another OS could be as instantly familiar as it was, as willing to be as simple or as complex as its user asked it to be.
It's funny how even today iOS and Android are just catching up to some of the beauty of webOS. Pieces of it live on in blatant (sometimes poor) rip offs, but even today I still miss it.
[+] [-] tvararu|11 years ago|reply
The first device I tried (and apparently the one with the beefiest hardware) was an Alcatel One Touch Fire. My enthusiasm took a sharp turn downward from the moment I unlocked the device; accomplished by sliding the screen left to right, the animation was jerky, did not track my finger accurately, and skipped to the end when I let go of the screen halfway through the width of the screen.
One of the hosts was quick to point out that the lock screen interaction was actually custom programmed by Alcatel, and so is the rest of the user interface, at which point he pointed to try a different device running something closer to "stock Firefox OS."
I'm enthralled by the promise of helping the web win by creating a device category where the web is a first-class citizen, but I'm doubtful it will happen if manufacturers outsource their tasteless UI customizations to web dev interns.
Sunspider came out at roughly 1600ms, which places the mid-2013 Alcatel somewhere in the performance bracket of an iPhone 4 (mid-2010, flagship device). Despite the rough benchmarks, I ran some Famo.us demos and they were surprisingly usable, and I could easily get a physics-backed drag interaction to run smoothly inside the browser.
I'm waiting to try out a Firefox OS phone with cutting edge hardware.
[+] [-] austinhallock|11 years ago|reply
It's a tough situation to be in where they need to improve the quality of the ecosystem, but need users to convince the big-wig devs to developer for the OS. The total user numbers we've seen from them is certainly better than we expected, but still too small to convince a major developer to build for Firefox OS on numbers alone.
If their platform wasn't the web, I'm not sure they'd have much of a chance at success, but being able to convince a developer the values of building for the web is much easier than building for a fairly new mobile OS.
[+] [-] listic|11 years ago|reply
Flame update page [1] has images for 2.0, 2.1, 2.2 and 3.0. LG/KDDI Fx0 has apparently shipped in Japan with version 2.0 [2] on December 25, 2014. All this suggests that at least version 2.0 has been released. Yet Wikipedia page [3] doesn't have release date for version 2.0 onwards, and I don't know where else to look.
[1] MDN: Updating your Flame https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox_OS/Phone_guide/F...
[2] Mozilla Press Center: Mozilla and KDDI Launch First Firefox OS Smartphone in Japan https://blog.mozilla.org/press/2014/12/mozilla-and-kddi-laun...
[3] Wikipedia: Firefox OS | Release history http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_OS#Release_history
[+] [-] asutherland|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xiaq|11 years ago|reply
Hence I look forward to Firefox OS as platform I can easily hack, but I am not sure whether it really is. Could someone with experience tell me:
* How easy is it to deploy a FxOS app? How is the remote debugging experience?
* How easy is it to hack the core apps (e.g. phone, SMS)?
* How easy is it to hack the "framework" (e.g. window manager, status bar)? Is it even written in JavaScript?
[+] [-] fabrice_d|11 years ago|reply
* hacking core apps is totally doable. You need a rooted device to update them though. Currently the best ones would be nexus 5 or sony z3(c).
* everything that is displayed is html/js/css. What you call "framework" here is part of the system app (https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/gaia/tree/master/apps/system). It's a fairly large app, but it's where a lot of the fun stuff is!
[+] [-] on_and_off|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fabrice_d|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aissen|11 years ago|reply
- have real browser. Seriously. Firefox on Android is a much better browser.
- handle the software, and the updates, Microsoft-style. Maybe have OEMs pay for this service, maybe involve the community. Seriously, all Firefox OS devices sold have an ancient version of the OS. It means I'm safer when I'm using Firefox on Android than when I'm using a Firefox OS phone. I understand the tradeoffs that led them to this decision (their dependency on the Android stack for example), but they seriously need to rethink it.
- allow for native code to run. I know it's hard. Even Google with it's uber-optimized (or so they thought at the time) Dalvik (for small phones) understood the need for the NDK. I'm not sure asm.js can cut it, as I've yet to see console-class games on Firefox OS like there are on Android and iOS.
- Of course, they need to continue their groundwork on APIs. There shouldn't be a thing you can do on say, iOS or WP and not in Firefox OS (and I'm not saying Android because it gives a lot of power to developers).
- They need a flagship phone, for everyone. Not a "developer phone" (although it can act as one), but a real flagship.
[+] [-] spiralpolitik|11 years ago|reply
This weekend I had a chance to play with a Jolla smartphone. Hardware wise it pretty good, and had some really good ideas, but the software was half baked. While in time both Jolla and Firefox OS could become great products, but time ran out a while back.
You now have to come to market with all the pieces (and then some). You can't adopt the "build it and they will come mantra" because unless you can give users a compelling reason to switch without losing functionality they won't come. The hardware wars are long gone. The app wars ended a few years back. We are now in the ecosystem wars and Mozilla (and Jolla) appear to have no answers for this (or have answers "coming soon").
The sad fact is that from here on out it's iOS and Android in a tussle neither can win, and unless the phone market resets itself like it did in 2007 there is very little anybody else can do.
[+] [-] onion2k|11 years ago|reply
If FirefoxOS is a success the next challenge will come from the fact that iOS and Android could easily have HTML5 apps too with a native WebviewUI 'player' app, and if FirefoxOS gets any traction their respective developers will add that functionality quickly. Hopefully, for consumers and developers alike, they'd all have compatible APIs so mobile apps would be truly cross-platform, but that's not very likely.
[+] [-] pjc50|11 years ago|reply
(Obviously it would be great if OSs were properly decoupled from hardware like in the old PC days before UEFI, but I can't see any way of getting back there other than a very long political slog. Title II gives a small amount of hope for that.)
[+] [-] aubergene|11 years ago|reply
The problems are broadly that it was slow, unreliable and poorly designed. It would just become completely unresponsive a couple of times a week, requiring the battery to be removed to restart. There are very few well known apps. Twitter seems to be the only one, and it was so slow for scrolling that I gave up using it. The included apps were just placeholders to install apps, almost all of them only worked online. I wouldn't recommend getting one to anybody. I'm sure you could buy a cheap secondhand Android and have a better experience. It was worse than Android 1.6.
There's such a huge mountain of work for the Mozilla developers to get this to be in anyway competitive to Android. I think Mozilla would be better to concentrate their resources elsewhere.
[+] [-] GigabyteCoin|11 years ago|reply
This, to me, is the most powerful prospect of Firefox OS.
I have been "writing apps" in HTML, Javascript and PHP ever since I can remember.
They are just as responsive and useful as any app I have ever used on my Android. Which works fine, but had recently been creeping the heck out of me because it's distributed by Google.
Every app is virtually a simple website imho. Look at google docs, for example. Angry birds could easily be written in javascript. As could flappy bird, and virtually every game I can think of.
I see no reason to bother writing a piece of software that can only be used on Androir or iOS, except for sheer greed, so I haven't. It's worked out well for me so far.
Here's to hoping Firefox OS comes to the first world sooner rather than later.
[+] [-] codewithcheese|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fabrice_d|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bla2|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lambda|11 years ago|reply
That would really help to make it worthwhile to develop FxOS apps; actually having a large installed base of phones that they could be used on, in order to help bootstrap the ecosystem up.
[+] [-] shmerl|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] realusername|11 years ago|reply
It's a really easy step to help Mozilla without changing anything to your habits.
[+] [-] jrochkind1|11 years ago|reply
Verizon seems like an odd choice in the U.S., to me they seem like a 'premium' brand somewhat more expensive than their competitors, while Firefox OS, at least prior to know, seems to have been positioning itself as a budget option.
[+] [-] abrowne|11 years ago|reply
I just upgraded my ZTE Open C to FxOS 3.0. This phone is similar, but worse, in specs to the original Moto E. It runs well, as long as you are using it for basic purposes.
[+] [-] lambda|11 years ago|reply
For people living in further out suburbs, exurbs, and rural areas, Verizon is pretty much a requirement. None of the other carriers have coverage that is nearly as good; you actually want your phone to work outside of a thin strip around the interstates, you buy Verizon.
[+] [-] tzs|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DigitalSea|11 years ago|reply
They really need to carve out a niche like they've done in non first-world countries. Merely being the same as Android or iOS is not going to be enough. They need to get developers on board, but even so, will they have the games that most consumers like to play?
It's a tricky situation, but one nonetheless I am excited to see what happens from.
[+] [-] contingencies|11 years ago|reply
It's the anti-Google, anti-carrier, anti-corporate, anti-surveillance, anti-government, pro-efficiency, pro-security, pro-developing world feature everyone wants but nobody can have because none of the mobile OSs support it.
Read bug+PDF @ https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=945047
[+] [-] higherpurpose|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dbaupp|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ralmidani|11 years ago|reply