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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

#291

Post by abawany »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #164
vamur wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can easily disable Google services on most Android devices. Or purchase a Cyanogenmod compatible device and use a third party store.

The problem is that the majority of apps written on Android these days depend on Google APIs or libraries, to the point that an Android without Play Services is almost useless. (Yes, this is from experience.) Even Google's direct competitors require Google to use an Android. Skype and Outlook are great examples of apps you'd be amazed to discover will not run at all without Play Services.

There are fake GApps that I have tried on experimental devices and they fooled the apps enough to enable them to run. I haven't run these long-term or tried on more than 3 apps relevant to me to say if that would be a good approach.

Re: Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS

#292

Post by compuguy »

bwindels wrote: post #70
maheart wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a big supporter of GNU/Linux on the phone. I don't care if Jolla or Ubuntu don't ever make it as "major" players in the mobile OS world. I'd be perfectly happy with GNU/Linux mobile software that's as good as the Linux desktop. I run Linux on my desktop (and laptop), and we're 1% of desktop users. I'd be satisfied with 1% mobile market share. We don't need a billion users, all I want is a hacker-friendly platform…

The fairphone 2 is "fairly" hacker-friendly. The bootloader is not locked. They provide android stripped of google mobile services, and Ubuntu phone is reportedly 70% ported. Sailfish OS could also be an option if either Fairphone or Jolla port it. All of these setups still require binary blobs for firmware, but that's as good as it gets on mobile I think.

When they release a version of it with US 3G/4G bands, it would be an option.

Re: Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS

#293

Post by xanderstrike »

nir wrote: post #244
vamur wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can easily disable Google services on most Android devices. Or purchase a Cyanogenmod compatible device and use a third party store.

People reading HN could, but the general public doesn't really have that option.

Does the general public care though?

Re: Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS

#294

Post by rocky1138 »

TylerE wrote: post #279
rocky1138 wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very true! This hardly holds up to, say, a CAD$600 laptop. But, it'll be very handy to take traveling around the world or to visit my parents/nephew to play some Minecraft.

You want a free-as-in-freedom portable device so you can play a closed source Microsoft product?

Nobody's perfect :)

I'm preparing him for Minetest, though, if that makes you feel better!

Re: Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS

#295

Post by rocky1138 »

devereaux wrote: post #280
rocky1138 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you haven't already, please consider the Pyra. It's a full Linux desktop in a phone-ish format and supports SIM cards for voice calling and text. https://pyra-handheld.com/boards/pages/pyra/

Extremely interesting. Please tell us more about the LTE capabilities. Is it provided by a removable board? Which bands are supported?? Based on https://www.dragonbox.de/en/45-pyra it only supports B17 and AWS, which makes it mostly a AT&T compatible device I wish it would support other bands, B25 for sprint (which has cheaper LTE plans) Also, the wifi chipset is known. Can you run a hostapd?

You probably know more than me.

Here's what I could find on the wiki.

https://www.pyra-handheld.com/wiki/index.php?title=Modem

and

https://www.pyra-handheld.com/wiki/index.php?title=WiFi

Re: Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS

#296

Post by wmf »

zbraniecki wrote: post #249
creshal wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, thanks Mozilla for making a timer app that by default neither beeps nor vibrates. Thankfully I only lost one oven load of food before I noticed. And thanks Mozilla for making an OS that glitches out if you use the power button in the wrong moment, nothing wakes you up better than having to reboot your phone to stop the damn alarm clock. FirefoxOS is such an unfinished shitfest. I have no idea how 1.3 passed QA.…

And for that reason, it's worth recognizing how much work ahead there is for the web platform to be capable of delivering full OS experience. Only now, pieces of the HTML/DOM/JS spec that have been kickstarted out of need when FxOS was being developed start landing in the spec. Whoever will try next, will have an easier job because of the FxOS experience. source: I'm an engineer who worked on FxOS in 2014-2016

Or it's worth recognizing that trying to deliver full OS experience with Web technology is a waste of time.

Re: Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS

#297

Post by blihp »

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.

Only speaking for myself but I suspect others might feel the same way: I can't get excited about another essentially closed platform. I'm not interested in what are overpriced and underpowered devices that pretty much behave at best as slightly more open, yet still closed, Android-like devices.

I've been living this for the last several years both with Android and ARM devel/hobbyist boards and it isn't much fun. It would be nice these quasi-business entities (i.e. Mozilla, Canonical) would forget about their brand-exclusive strategies and try to rally around an open ARM-based platform (you know, with support for things like, I don't know, GPUs and such) they can all run on. THAT I could get excited about and we could all win. Short of that, I don't get what I want and they continue to lose relevance in the mobile era. Granted, I'm part of the 1% that runs Linux. But here's a newsflash: right now we're the only ones who care about Canonical, Mozilla, etc. and ~1% beats 0%.

Re: Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS

#298

Post by remir »

_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…

Going against Android and iOS was a mistake. Even Microsoft, with all their resources, is struggling to stay relevant in mobile.

Firefox OS should have competed against Chrome OS instead. Partner with some OEMs and you have a great alternative to Chromebooks.

Re: Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS

#299

Post by tootie »

lake99 wrote: post #21
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.

I really want the Tizen project to succeed. It's tragic that this doesn't even run on mainstream Samsung devices. Talk about faith in their own work!

Samsung consistently fails at software. I honestly wish they would just quit and make their hardware use something more standard.

Re: Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS

#300

Post by BoorishBears »

tjohns wrote: post #271
snuxoll wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the android UI framework is still garbage, having to freeze and thaw activity state just to handle screen rotation is the most insane thing I have ever heard of. Hell, even the various Symbians handled this better (I loved my Symbian S60 devices, but programming for them was an exercise in frustration).

I'm assuming you're referring to the behavior where activities are restarted on rotation and onSaveInstanceState() gets called. This behavior is the default because it prevents developers from needing to think about their UI changing dimensions (including runtime screen size/density changes!)... but it's certainly not required by the framework. If you set android:configChanges="orientation" in your application manife…

>This behavior is the default because it prevents developers from needing to think about their UI changing dimensions (including runtime screen size/density changes!)... but it's certainly not required by the framework.

No, the framework uses it to let you automatically handle those changes, the reason it's there is because early Android devices were weak (obviously) and the pipe dream was that we'd write apps that didn't mind randomly getting their processes killed as long as we used onSaveInstanceState... man-centuries later and it's clear the dream didn't pan out. I wonder how many billions of NPEs it was worth to be able to say Android does what iOS don't (multitasking) back then.

And that android:configChanges line misses out on many other triggers that cause you to need to handle onSaveInstanceState (like someone plugging in a keyboard). Even with every flag set for configChanges you still need to implement onSaveInstanceState for process death to work as intended.

The Android framework really is garbage. I might be biased though, I spent the day trying to trick it into not going to 7(!) FPS because our designers had the audacity to request we translate a video in an animation (and don't get me started on the insanity that is animations on Android [the X ways we've now gotten to do it which all have their own limitations]).

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