How canceled is Firefox OS?

On December 8, TechCrunch reported from Mozilla's annual developer meeting that Mozilla had announced it was putting an end to its Firefox OS smartphone program. The announcement spread quickly—but with quite a bit of variation as to exactly what aspects of Firefox OS were being shut down. A number of tech-industry bloggers, for example, characterized the move as Mozilla "ditching" or even "killing" Firefox OS itself. But the actual statement published at TechCrunch was more limited in scope—although it still leaves many unanswered questions about where Firefox OS is heading next.

The primary complication is that the announcement in question was evidently made on stage at the Mozilla event, and so far no video or transcript of the session has been published. What did make it out of the room at the time were tweets from attendees; TechCrunch quoted Georg Fritzsche's, which said: "Honesty & courage for Firefox OS: back off from commercial shipping, re-iterate as innovation project 'connected devices'." It is not entirely clear from the phrasing of the article whether the TechCrunch story's author was present for the talk.

The story characterizes the announced change as Mozilla saying "it would stop developing and selling Firefox OS smartphones." At a minimum, that could be taken to mean that Mozilla will not be producing any more Firefox OS developer devices. There have been five such devices in the past: two variants of the Geeksphone, two of the the ZTE Open, and one of the Flame. Over the past year, there has been increasing interest in using Google Nexus phones as developer devices. They are easier to acquire, considerably more powerful, and can easily be reflashed to Android if one so chooses. Meanwhile, there have been sixteen consumer Firefox OS phones. Given that level of activity and the de-emphasis on developer devices, die-hard Firefox OS fans could be forgiven for interpreting the announcement in the least-drastic sense: as Mozilla's decision to forgo new developer-device production runs for the foreseeable future.

The TechCrunch story also quotes a statement released by Mozilla's head of "Connected Devices," Ari Jaaksi, who said "we weren’t able to offer the best user experience possible and so we will stop offering Firefox OS smartphones through carrier channels. We’ll share more on our work and new experiments across connected devices soon." Although still a bit on the nebulous side, that comment does seem to indicate that Mozilla is shifting the focus of its Firefox OS efforts, rather than simply not launching yet another model of smartphone.

Some readers may remember Jaaksi from his days at Nokia, where he oversaw the launch of the Maemo platform. While Maemo met an untimely end concurrent with changes in Nokia's upper management, the platform is still remembered fondly by quite a few in the free-software community. Since the announcement, Jaaksi had made several comments on Twitter. First, saying "Mozilla will stop offering Firefox OS phones through carriers. But we will continue improving web experience on smartphones." Later, he added: "FirefoxOS is alive and strong, but the push through carriers is over. We pivot to IoT and user experience."

Citing the Internet of Things (IoT) as the new emphasis for Firefox OS may seem strange, considering how smartphone-driven the project's marketing has been so far (it was initially touted, after all, as the mobile OS that would power inexpensive phones in developing economies). But support for other device types has been included for quite some time; the Mozilla wiki highlights smart TVs in particular, with passing references to tablets and smart watches. There have been occasional glimmers of other product types; in 2014 we reported on thin-client desktops like VIA's APC line.

But these alternative device platforms never seemed to attract much attention, and they were not the small, physical-computing device types most people mean when they use the term IoT. Only this past week has there been a report of an IoT-style device built with Firefox OS in mind: the CHIRIMEN, a single-board computer developed in Japan that includes a set of GPIO and I2C headers. The FirefoxOSCentral blog reported on its existence on December 5, though little in the way of hard information is available yet. The CHIRIMEN appears to be produced independently, but it is possible that the development team (called Mozilla Factory) has some sort of relationship with Mozilla: the About describes it as "Organized by Mozilla Japan". It can also be rather hard to reconcile IoT with Firefox, since so many IoT products are embedded systems without displays or input devices.

For its part, FirefoxOSCentral responded to the December 8 announcement by saying there was "no cause for alarm:"

To be fair, whether any news is "cause for alarm" is subjective and personal. FirefoxOSCentral may be more invested in the OS project than the average blog, but the fact remains that the details in the TechCrunch story are fairly sparse. In addition, they answer few of the pertinent questions, like whether or not any Mozilla developers have been re-tasked to other projects or whether the Firefox OS roadmap has changed. There simply have not been clear statements from Mozilla on these practical matters, and it may be quite some time before any are provided. The developer event runs until December 12, and those involved may decide to spend additional time preparing any further announcements, given how this most recent one played out.

For the time being, Firefox OS automated builds and QA tests are still happening on a regular basis, with reports appearing in the recently launched "Foxfooding" discussion forum. Asa Dotzler has also been regularly posting changelog reports to the forum. While commits are not overwhelming in their volume, they do appear to be steady. Some individuals at Mozilla have also posted reassurances that development continues unabated. On top of that, one cannot help but notice that the schedule for the developer event contains a heavy dose of Firefox OS sessions.

In recent years, Mozilla has developed a bit of a reputation for making surprise announcements that incite some degree of backlash and then subsequently require clarification—see the recent Thunderbird-abandonment story, for example. So it is understandable that the public might take an obscurely worded statement like that in the TechCrunch story and assume the worst. But it also remains possible that Mozilla's plans for Firefox OS have actually changed very little, and it will simply be several more days or weeks before the clarified story is released. The uncertainty can be frustrating for those who care about the project, but that is one of the side effects of a news story built on top of a single, brief source report.

The most that can be said now is that changes will surely be coming down the pipe for Firefox OS, but that no one outside of the decision makers at Mozilla know for sure what those changes will be.