Firefox phones are pretty canceled; OS may live on in IoT?

Posted Dec 10, 2015 2:10 UTC (Thu) by louie (guest, #3285)
Parent article: How canceled is Firefox OS?

Ari's blog post is fairly clear:

"We will make space for [exploration of IoT] by stopping our work to build and ship smartphones through carrier partners."

Sounds like some parts of FFoxOS will live on in IoT efforts.

I'm glad we* are no longer spending resources on a fight (mobile) we can't win, but not clear IoT is a good match for Moz either. Fundamentally, Javascript is still problematic, and we still haven't really defined what the Open Web is, which makes it hard to fight for. I'm very curious to see where IoT fits in there - there is potentially a lot of interesting space to reinvent what Mozilla's "open" (which is, IMHO, more user- and platform-centric than code-centric) means in that context.

* I'm still a peer, so I guess I can still say we?

Firefox phones are pretty canceled; OS may live on in IoT?

Posted Dec 10, 2015 4:38 UTC (Thu) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (2 responses)

> resources on a fight (mobile)

I've said it before... if people really want a viable open source/free software mobile system then Android is going to be the best bet.

Using a 'google-less' android phone is already possible and the big problems that plague people wanting to have a 100% free software Android (drivers, vendor support, etc) are going to plague every single other embedded Linux effort out there. The advantage to using Android is that you don't have to write the entire OS first before you can tackle those items.

Firefox phones are pretty canceled; OS may live on in IoT?

Posted Dec 10, 2015 15:22 UTC (Thu) by louie (guest, #3285) [Link]

Agree re Android. A full-stack mobile OS is hard; best to build on a model that is actually proven to work. (FFOS built somewhat on this core; but ultimately discarded a lot of what is proven to work.)

Firefox phones are pretty canceled; OS may live on in IoT?

Posted Dec 15, 2015 15:44 UTC (Tue) by ceplm (subscriber, #41334) [Link]

I have (after giving up on FxOS https://matej.ceplovi.cz/blog/firefox-os-post-mortem.html ) now Nexus 5 with CyanogenMod WITHOUT Play store (but with F-Droid). Having Firefox for Android and trying as many as possible HTML 5 apps.

However, now I am getting bitten straight by one sneaky lie of FxOS development. Apps on FxOS Marketplace are actually not true HTML5 Apps run anywhere, but substantial part of them expect to have Gaia available. So, no, I couldn't even use Notepad or help to develop Calendar or Contacts, because are not actually true webapps, but just platform-bound apps for one particular non-standard OS. Sad world.

Matěj