Posted Sep 5, 2013 12:46 UTC (Thu) by njwhite (subscriber, #51848)
Parent article: Firefox OS on the ZTE Open
Does anyone know to what extent Firefox OS depends on all the Android infrastructure? I worry that if it is a quite close coupling then they (and their users) will be just as dependent on and at the mercy of Google's opaque Android development and release cycle. Which would be a pity, as one of the exciting things about other free mobile operating systems is that they could offer more openness than Android currently do.
Posted Sep 5, 2013 16:43 UTC (Thu) by wlach (subscriber, #23397)
[Link]
FirefoxOS is basically Android with the Dalvik/Java bits removed and replaced with a very specialized copy of mobile Firefox/Gecko. I wouldn't say there's a very close coupling between Android and FirefoxOS -- most of our development efforts occur either in Firefox/Gecko or the web applications which run on top of it.
Using Android as a base
Posted Sep 6, 2013 8:09 UTC (Fri) by tdz (subscriber, #58733)
[Link]
From Android we only use the kernel, and system tools and low-level libraries; no Dalvic/Java infrastructure, not even all of the daemons. For porting to new devices, we need a handful of files from the previously installed Android system, such as binary drivers and device-specific config files. The rest is completely build from source. So we are fairly independent from Google's release cycle, as long as we support any version of Android for the device.
