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Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS

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Re: Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS

#281

Post by twblalock »

yoavm wrote: post #6

So we had Jolla, Ubuntu, Mozilla and even Microsoft trying to create a new major player in the mobile OSs market - all pretty much failed to do so. Is it practically impossible? Are we stuck with Android and iOS forever? This tiny selection of options worries me.

> Is it practically impossible? Are we stuck with Android and iOS forever?

I think it's pretty simple: people want to use apps on their phones, and no phone OS is viable without a competitive library of apps.

Most major apps are developed for both iOS and Android, and convincing app developers to develop for a third platform is going to be a tough sell, unless that platform is very attractive to users. However, to be attractive to users, it will have to have a lot of apps already...

I suspect that the only way to gain marketshare for a new mobile OS is to ship it with an Android or iOS compatibility layer, which would be pretty difficult to do well. The developers would have to re-implement the entire iOS or Android API, and keep up with all of the changes. If they did that, there would be no incentive for developers to target the native APIs of the OS, because they could just target Android or iOS like they do already. So, the compatibility layer could never be deprecated.

So yeah, I think we're stuck.

Re: Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS

#282

Post by nix0n »

djsumdog wrote: post #175
maheart wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Android is Linux on the phone. It's Linux kernel with stuff on top. Android is just the Linux kernel on the phone -- that's the issue I have with it. It comes with none of the other stuff that makes GNU/Linux great: philosophically/socially it's different, but on a technical level it's missing rest of the GNU/Linux stack (e.g. package management, and the plethora of developer tools -- including languages and libra…

The lack of package management and standard kernel/modules is a huge issue from Android. It keeps it from being truly open. I wrote a post about this a while ago: http://penguindreams.org/blog/android-fragmentation/ The TL;DR, Android needs to be fixed so ASOP can be installed on any phone, just like Linux/Windows. The current state is bizarre for what's essentially now a general purpose operating system.

I think you mean AOSP (Android Open Source Project) not ASOP (the linked article makes the same typo).

Re: Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS

#283

Post by bitL »

maheart wrote: post #68
vbezhenar wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with Android as a hacker-friendly platform?

Android (and Apple) have a relatively rigid development toolkit. For Android you develop using the Java programming language against the Android APIs. The NDK is available, and you can always hack up methods to call the Android APIs from your favourite programming language (e.g. Python) but it's cumbersome. I develop software for SailfishOS. It's like the Linux desktop. I SSH into my phone. zypper/pkcon install some…

Out of curiosity, is there any thorough Qt for mobile tutorial working nicely on Jolla C? I am even willing to pay for it if it teaches me how to do advanced stuff, like getting straight to OpenGL with the least amount of clutter etc. I would love to write some Sailfish-only apps cool enough to attract regular people.

Re: Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS

#284

Post by Apocryphon »

rajeshp1986 wrote: post #26
yoavm wrote: post #6

So we had Jolla, Ubuntu, Mozilla and even Microsoft trying to create a new major player in the mobile OSs market - all pretty much failed to do so. Is it practically impossible? Are we stuck with Android and iOS forever? This tiny selection of options worries me.

@Yoavm, what pisses me more is that both Apple & Google now have a yearly update of their OS and all they shamelessly showcase on stage is emoji's and notifications.

My theory specific to iOS 10 is that it's actually a stability-focused maintenance build behind the scenes. The emoji are for cultural appeal while they hide the fact that the real features are not actually features- they're boring, hidden fixes to stabilize iOS after the previous few releases.

Re: Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS

#285

Post by type0 »

grobbles wrote: post #206
lotsofpulp wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google might be, but not the phone manufacturers...except maybe Samsung but it's marginal compared to what share Apple gets.

Marginal? Holy shit, how isn't this completely transparent and dead, like my post will be? Samsung is pulling in about $4B profit per quarter from their smartphones. "Marginal"? In what universe is $16B per year "marginal"? Certainly not this universe. Just as a point of reference, Samsung's smartphone profits are greater than Walmart's profits. It's greater than the overwhelming bulk of world corporations.

> Samsung is pulling in about $4B profit per quarter from their smartphones. "Marginal"? In what universe is $16B per year "marginal"? Certainly not this universe.

It's Galaxy, not universe!

Re: Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS

#286

Post by [deleted] »

veeti wrote: post #139
SixSigma wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So their product on day 1 should have been faster, more responsive and had more features than Android / iOS ?

How about having acceptable performance to begin with? Even the medium spec Flame developer device feels laggy and generally unresponsive in use. Actual consumer devices like the $35 Firefox phone were literally unusable: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/10/testing-a-35-firefox-...

[deleted]

Re: Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS

#287

Post by type0 »

andyidsinga wrote: post #190
yoavm wrote: post #6

So we had Jolla, Ubuntu, Mozilla and even Microsoft trying to create a new major player in the mobile OSs market - all pretty much failed to do so. Is it practically impossible? Are we stuck with Android and iOS forever? This tiny selection of options worries me.

we're no more stuck with those two than we were with blackberry. things change in less than predictable ways. next big os front will be bringing embedded (read iot) from the old school to the new.

Wasn't it snapchat that released some strange techno-hipster glasses with camers just now. Eventually we will see embedded oled in them and hand gesture interfaces for more augmented reality.

Re: Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS

#288

Post by lazaroclapp »

_ea1k wrote: post #167
yoavm wrote: post #6

So we had Jolla, Ubuntu, Mozilla and even Microsoft trying to create a new major player in the mobile OSs market - all pretty much failed to do so. Is it practically impossible? Are we stuck with Android and iOS forever? This tiny selection of options worries me.

Can you imagine what it would be like if every Linux distribution tried to build a competitor to Linux instead of a competitor to other distributions? That would be a hard problem even in the relatively small Unix desktop space. That is how hard the problem was to solve for Mozilla OS. They were essentially building a competing OS when they could have just been building a competing distribution. Android (AOSP) + Fire…

That's what Amazon went for, with very limited success (that said, not really targeting privacy conscious users or free software enthusiasts, so outcomes might not apply)

Re: Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS

#289

Post by emodendroket »

hamhamed wrote: post #210
emodendroket wrote: post #202

Maybe they could work on Thunderbird again; that's a product actually used that doesn't have many real competitors.

They have way more competitors in that space, but I still use it because it's clean and bloat free.

Really? What are all these desktop e-mail clients other than Thunderbird, Outlook, and Mail.app? And how many of them are cross-platform?

I remember looking into whether there were alternatives for a while and really not being able to find anything.

Re: Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS

#290

Post by err4nt »

yoavm wrote: post #6

So we had Jolla, Ubuntu, Mozilla and even Microsoft trying to create a new major player in the mobile OSs market - all pretty much failed to do so. Is it practically impossible? Are we stuck with Android and iOS forever? This tiny selection of options worries me.

WebOS as well!
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