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Comment by transfire | Hacker News Reader

I bought my sister a $50 Firefox phone for Christmas. She's never heard of it, of course. But she loves it!

Why did Mozilla give up so quickly? Did they really expect to take the market by storm overnight? I don't get it.

Just guessing, but maybe they saw what has happened to Windows Phone market shares. Sure there are people who absolutely love their Windows Phones to bits, but it's not really gaining momentum to be a serious threat to Android or iOS, which means less and less developers are willing to put in the effort to create apps for their platform.

Now think of Firefox OS, it's even younger and even less mature than Windows Phone with no real benefit for your average users. I doubt I could sell a Firefox OS to a normal user on the street

I think the one thing holding Windows Phone back is that Google has not gone arm twisting about updates etc. If they did i suspect quite a number of OEMs have contingency plans in place for releasing Windows devices.

Do you feel like Google should take stronger stance for phone manufacturers to update their own software?

I don't think it can be blamed on Google if phone manufacturers don't update their devices fast enough and if Google would take stronger stance in OS updates and manufacturers would jump ship wouldn't Microsoft face same issues?

Or did I miss completely what you meant?

There is a big difference between being slow to update and not updating at all.

In Android world, just like in the old days of Symbian, Series OS and other OSes, updating means getting a new phone.

You aren't even safe with Nexus if the manufacturer jumps out (TI).

Aren't Nexus devices getting their updates from Google? I haven't really paid attention since I was using stuff like CyanogenMod until I switched to iOS

TI stoped doing the processors used by some Nexus.

Google apparently didn't had any contract in place for forcing TI to keep doing the updates in case of such situation would occur.

Neither they thought it was worth to spend some Google resources doing the updates themselves.

So they went to third option, letting their Nexus customers that they aren't any special and better buy a new Nexus.

Windows Phone market share depends on context. In Germany it's very close to iOS market share (and getting closer). No one would say iOS has failed in Germany, so you can't say Windows Phone has failed either.

So are there just bunch of well made German apps that are doing well or why do you think it's not spread to other countries?

You could have given her a 50 dollar android phone too is my guess. FirefoxOS never had a future. It was unsupported, laggy, without any direction from both thr developers and Mozilla, had no unique selling point that people cared about. I'm glad they killed it because that project would have destroyed Mozilla.

there are some misconceptions there. First, the project is not killed. Second, Firefox OS is not laggy, phones with 128mb of RAM and a single ARM core are laggy.

You are correct about the selling points though. Thats something that we did wrong. We had lots of reasons cathering to the volunteers and OEMs but not many for the end user.

That's a pretty bold claim to make. Saying "I told you so" is pretty easy. Nobody killed it, the media is killing it.

Their core idea was to empower the device owners/users. From day one that struck me as a collision course with most of the carriers/OEMs out there.

I have yet to figure out how easily, if at all, one can get in and "hack" on the UI on those Panasonic TVs that supposedly run FFOS.

We did not give up yet, that's was the point of my post in fact. While it's true that we are still exploring how we will approach Firefox OS in the future. The way we are doing this is critical though and the point of my post.

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