Mozilla to open first-world front in Firefox OS war • Hacker News Board

Re: Mozilla to open first-world front in Firefox OS war

#121

Post by spiralpolitik » Mon, Mar 02, 2015, 9:41 AM UTC

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.

Re: Mozilla to open first-world front in Firefox OS war

#122

Post by onion2k » Mon, Mar 02, 2015, 9:56 AM UTC

spiralpolitik wrote: post #121

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…

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.

Re: Mozilla to open first-world front in Firefox OS war

#123

Post by pjmlp » Mon, Mar 02, 2015, 9:59 AM UTC

SwellJoe wrote: post #35

jbigelow76 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JavaScript is the path a lot of people want to walk for making mobile apps. Firefox OS is the first to make it the primary way to develop apps for the platform. It has been possible to write fully native (not webview wrappers) Windows Phone apps in HTML and JavaScript for the last four or so years, but web developers didn't really adopt the platform (and those that did primarily used C# and XAML). You can scoff that…

Two things: 1. I had no idea you could make native Windows Phone apps in HTML. This may be a failing on my part for having less than zero interest in Windows Phone (though I find my dislike of Microsoft has faded quite a bit, as they've embraced more openness and more fair dealings with the rest of the world). 2. I don't think we mean the same thing when I say "the primary way to develop apps for the platform". I goo…

Well, maybe you should improve your Google-fu

"Get started with Windows Runtime apps. You can write a Windows Runtime app in a variety of languages, such as C# or C++ with XAML, C++ with DirectX, and JavaScript with HTML/CSS. Now you can easily create apps for Windows devices and Windows Phone from a single project."

Taken from https://dev.windows.com/en-us/getstarted

Free trainings and ebooks:

http://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/training-courses/deve...

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/microsoft_press/archive/2012/10/29/f...

Re: Mozilla to open first-world front in Firefox OS war

#124

Post by pjmlp » Mon, Mar 02, 2015, 10:02 AM UTC

onion2k wrote: post #122

spiralpolitik wrote: post #121

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…

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 Webview…

I would believe that if Web OS, Windows Phone HTML apps, Tizen, Blackberry, ChromeOS didn't already prove users and developers alike don't care.

Re: Mozilla to open first-world front in Firefox OS war

#125

Post by Brakenshire » Mon, Mar 02, 2015, 10:06 AM UTC

jrapdx3 wrote: post #99

Brakenshire wrote: post #55

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…

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 priv…

FWIW my post was awkwardly written, it might have been better to say I help a lot of people who are not all that tech literate and are also middle aged and elderly. I don't mean that people over a certain age are inherently in that category, just that there is a significant market there.

Re: Mozilla to open first-world front in Firefox OS war

#126

Post by pjc50 » Mon, Mar 02, 2015, 10:07 AM UTC

spiralpolitik wrote: post #121

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…

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.)

Re: Mozilla to open first-world front in Firefox OS war

#127

Post by pjc50 » Mon, Mar 02, 2015, 10:09 AM UTC

krisgenre wrote: post #101

MichaelGG wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I am a guy who gives everything to Google, have every god damn thing turned on on my Nexus. It's not that I trust Google, I have come to terms with the fact that privacy is dead. The overall experience when you do give Goggle everything is quite good ( Google Now ) but I too second your opinion about Android permissions, its really idiotic.

Google Now is of course sending your voice clips to strangers: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/strangers-on-the-internet-a...

Re: Mozilla to open first-world front in Firefox OS war

#128

Post by realusername » Mon, Mar 02, 2015, 10:09 AM UTC

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.

Re: Mozilla to open first-world front in Firefox OS war

#129

Post by MichaelGG » Mon, Mar 02, 2015, 10:09 AM UTC

randomchars wrote: post #112

MichaelGG wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> They were paying devs in 3rd world countries $2000 to push out junk apps Do you have a link for that? I can't seem to find any reference to it.

Actually I might be wrong: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jennifer/archive/2013/03/12/keep-the...

But from using the Store, the overwhelming majority of crap appears to be distinctly from not the US. Having dealt with local MS subsidiaries, I'd be surprised if they didn't do similar stuff. The ones I've seen are quite eager to promote and can get cash from Redmond.

Or, seeing as how MS regularly publishes stuff that's a total fake, even when the publisher claims to be Microsoft itself, I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't validate US residency here.

Or I might just be biased and the publishers just have terrible English and uncommon names for North America. But some of them used the letters "pvt ltd" in their fake company names, which is not common in the US.

Email me if you want some more details. I've got screenshots of lots of the junk, but I'm on my phone and don't have the links handy.

Being paid is common enough, and I've heard of companies getting 5-6 figures from MS to port stuff. But I think getting paid per app, like the link above shows, is the only explanation for some of the broken shovelware that's dumped on the store. Maybe advertising, but there doesn't seem to be any install volume. (Paid scams are a different story, like fake Netflix or WinRAR.)

Re: Mozilla to open first-world front in Firefox OS war

#130

Post by pjc50 » Mon, Mar 02, 2015, 10:12 AM UTC

themartorana wrote: post #98

Brakenshire wrote: post #55

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…

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…

This sounds interesting, could you list some of these conveniences?