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Mozilla Will Stop Developing and Selling Firefox OS Smartphones

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Re: Mozilla Will Stop Developing and Selling Firefox OS Smartphones

#251

Post by PeterOliver »

sremani wrote: post #52
frik wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to IDC the Worldwide Smartphone Market in 2015: Android ... 81.2% iOS ... 15.8% Windows Phone ... 2.2% Others ... 0.8% Worldwide Smartphone Forecast by OS for 2019: Android ... 82.6% iOS ... 14.1% Windows Phone ... 2.3% Others ... 0.9% Source: http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS40664915 @downvoter: it's a forcast by the well known IDC, also the current market share (2015) is interesting on its ow…

Will Windows Phone/ Windows Mobile be around 2019, as a die-hard WP user, I hope so. I just do not like those icon based OSes.

So install an Android launcher that doesn't use icons. They are available.

Re: Mozilla Will Stop Developing and Selling Firefox OS Smartphones

#252

Post by _nedR »

gkoberger wrote: post #9

Firefox appeared at a time when there was huge potential being stifled by a stagnant monopoly in the space, and people were desperate for something good. It filled a real need, and people loved it. FirefoxOS appeared at a time when there was huge potential being actively being pushed forward and innovated on by the two largest tech companies in the space, and people already had two great options to choose from. It fi…

To be fair , the market niche for a phone that doesn't try to imprison you or ransom you to the highest bidder, hasn't yet been served.

In the internet-landscape, Mozilla is the one that tries to intervene on the user's behalf against commercial interests. Maybe they thought they could do the same for the much more competitive mobile market.

The bigger problem i think is that Mozilla didn't make a phone that appealed to influencers - the high tech crowd similar to the early adopters for Firefox. Instead they tried to go for the emerging markets that was already well served by other alternatives, and who aren't ideal early adopters. From what i saw the user experience and quality of their Platform wasn't top notch either (and html apps still suck in 2015).

Ubuntu was on the right track with Ubuntu Edge (the Indiegogo campaign showed that there was definitely a demand for it), but they set their goals too high and since then they seem to be dragging their feet in getting into the market.

Re: Mozilla Will Stop Developing and Selling Firefox OS Smartphones

#254

Post by jay_kyburz »

detaro wrote: post #85
rimantas wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But if every app is a web page, and all the code is out in > the open, it is quite easy for the user to disable and > strip out rent extraction code. No. There should be more than a billion smartphones/tablets sold, what do you think is the ratio of those who can do what you told to those who have no idea? And what is the ratio of those who can willing to do it instead of just using the app? And there is also the i…

How big is the ratio of people using adblockers/YouTube downloader add-ons etc vs. those capable of writing them?

Yeah right, I was excited by the idea that we might be able to download all kinds of cool UI's for our phones.

I was thinking of developing a really minimalistic almost commandline interface for my notes, address book, dialer and calendar.

I would love to see what cool creative people could come up with.

Re: Mozilla Will Stop Developing and Selling Firefox OS Smartphones

#256

Post by bad_user »

_nedR wrote: post #252
gkoberger wrote: post #9

Firefox appeared at a time when there was huge potential being stifled by a stagnant monopoly in the space, and people were desperate for something good. It filled a real need, and people loved it. FirefoxOS appeared at a time when there was huge potential being actively being pushed forward and innovated on by the two largest tech companies in the space, and people already had two great options to choose from. It fi…

To be fair , the market niche for a phone that doesn't try to imprison you or ransom you to the highest bidder, hasn't yet been served. In the internet-landscape, Mozilla is the one that tries to intervene on the user's behalf against commercial interests. Maybe they thought they could do the same for the much more competitive mobile market. The bigger problem i think is that Mozilla didn't make a phone that appealed…

The stock Android on my Nexus 6 does a pretty good job actually. In a sense FirefoxOS is more limited than Android. You can't run an alternative browser on it for example.

On Android you can install a custom launcher to get rid of that annoying Google Search bar, you can replace Google Search with DuckDuckGo's app, you can install Firefox for Android on it and completely replace Chrome, you can install apps from third party sources like F-Droid or Amazon's Appstore. In Marshmallow the previously broken permissions system has been finally redesigned. Chrome for Android is pretty cool lately, as it also does push notifications, the app manifest and it does a much better job for making web apps first class citizens than Safari on iOS or Firefox on Android or whatever Opera is doing. You can actually run Facebook in your Android browser now and pretend that it's a native app.

And Android is also open source, I mean yes, while it's dependent on Google's Play services, like for push notifications or its location services, those can be replaced and Android is very much fork-able. Hey, Amazon did it.

Ubuntu was doomed from the start and Android is light years away from its competition imho. I mean, experiments are cool, but if your mobile OS is less usable than Android from 5 years ago, that's a failed experiment.

Re: Mozilla Will Stop Developing and Selling Firefox OS Smartphones

#257

Post by lotyrin »

rsync wrote: post #246
DHowett wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incidentally, I launched a pastebin ( https://ghostbin.com/ ) some time ago, used Persona for authentication, and absolutely loved it. Pastery looks awesome. It appears that you're using Pygments server-side?

Serious question for you and your parent: Why would a pastebin site need auth/login/userids ? All I can think of is editing pastes, but isn't it easier to just create a new (anonymous) paste instead of editing ?

Deletion. Modification of pastes and maintaining the same id (URL).

Though, these can be solved with tokens per post, it's tough to remember/maintain multiple tokens, doesn't work out in practice.

Re: Mozilla Will Stop Developing and Selling Firefox OS Smartphones

#258

Post by janvidar »

amlgsmsn wrote: post #161
gtirloni wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's maybe at only 5% in LatAm and that's where I know it's been having relative success.

It's 10 to 13% in European countries like France, GB, Italy and Germany.

Where did you get that number from?

Re: Mozilla Will Stop Developing and Selling Firefox OS Smartphones

#259

Post by jbiddy »

criddell wrote: post #108
Apocryphon wrote: post #6

Guess it's up to Canonical to make Ubuntu Touch a viable open source smartphone OS - are there even devices running it that are being sold in the U.S.? Did not expect that Sailfish OS would outlive Firefox OS.

If you want an open source smartphone OS, why not just use Android (AOSP)?

Because Google has almost completely stopped pushing things to AOSP and instead keeps all the goodies locked under their proprietary apps. There is no AOSP for their "Okay, Google" stuff for instance. Most Google AOSP functionality is stuck in Android 2.x days.
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