Mozilla has stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS

There should be a sticker "Don't blame me, I supported Firefox OS"

But this is the kind of thing that requires citizen action. Also, expecting the EU commission to be the only political consumer protection for multinational corporations is not ideal, there ought to be more actions on the American side as well.

Until then, I highly doubt that there will be any hope of breaking the duopoly, at least until Google's or Apple's core business model starts failing them, which is unlikely to occur within twenty years.

From an economical perspective, monopolies are great for companies and for the country's GDP, but they tend to cause lower standards of living, because of the loss of competition.

I don't care if Jolla or Ubuntu don't ever make it as "major" players in the mobile OS world.

I'd be perfectly happy with GNU/Linux mobile software that's as good as the Linux desktop.

I run Linux on my desktop (and laptop), and we're 1% of desktop users. I'd be satisfied with 1% mobile market share. We don't need a billion users, all I want is a hacker-friendly platform, with a good developer community around it (which I think both GNU/Linux on the desktop, and IMO SailfishOS [Jolla] provide).

Also they seem to at least cater to those not caring about apps, not able to pay for iPhone and dislike for Android.

Overall Market share in Europe around 5-10% was around a few months ago, but they have money to spare, and might keep selling Windows Mobile devices just not to loose face.

You cannot sell mobile OS based on FOSS religion, normal people want the apps everyone has and convenience, while most developers care about tooling.

So whatever alternative comes, must have a very good selling point to consumers and developers currently targeting the established platforms.

However I do think it's something that isn't yet ready for primetime, and it's going to be more a year or more before it is.

In the meantime they are trying to iron out bugs, improve features and get more developer attention for it. Recently they've added support for React Native: https://github.com/CanonicalLtd/react-native

HN readers might like to check out the Ubuntu Developer blog: https://developer.ubuntu.com/en/

There was a brief flurry of activity around it, including getting it run on older Nexus devices, then it petered out.

I submit that a big part of the problem is fragmentation of effort. There was no reason for Ubuntu, Mozilla, and WebOS all to be aiming at the same target at the same time in very similar ways but by different people.

I could also say the same about people upset with Facebook-2009-2010 people!

The problem with that, from my perspective as a developer, is that I don't want to develop apps for low-end devices because it's an enormous pain in the ass. The lack of horsepower and features means you're pretty much required to compromise your vision, unless you really are developing something very simple, or with minimal finessing.

On top of this, and this was even more so 3 years ago, today's high end devices are 2 years' time's low-to-mid-range devices. If it takes you 6-12 months to develop your app (again, depends on complexity) on today's high end hardware you'll be targeting the mid-range when you release. Of course, there's a bit more nuance to this because single core performance isn't really increasing that much, but you get the point.

Short version: targeting high end devices means you're developing for the future and not incurring the compromises (and, in fact, support overhead) of dealing with low-end kit.

Hey, at least it isn't a monopoly and one of the OSes is freeish. Freedom wise, hardware is behind, but the software is ahead (of the desktop market).

The issue is where the money is coming from.

Also, to move on an entrenched market you need to do a lot of things upfront. Android in, let's say, 2011 was much worse than iOS, today the gap has closed.

Offer something people want that the others don't. It's not enough to just not be iOS or not Android, that only appeals to the small segment of people that HN appeals to.

The selling point for Ubuntu, Mozilla and Microsoft's phone was just 'it's not them.' They didn't provide any value. Microsoft had apparently forgotten what they had to do to make the xBox viable against Sony and Nintendo when it first launched, because they didn't just launch it with 'Hey, at least we're not Sony, the developers will show up eventually.'

At any rate, it seems like two major brands is all the tech world can handle.

So, something like Cyanogenmod but with more drastic changes. It's Linux under the hood after all. It's already compatible with GNU coreutils and a whole bunch of other free software. No need to start again from zero.

For the same reason DOS/Windows reigned on the desktop for decades, with Mac having a few percents and Linux repeatedly failing to grab any significant market share.

For this reason, Android is a good middle-ground. It's well-sandboxed by default and if you need more power you can root it. Nothing is stopping anyone from releasing "free software" open source android apps published outside of the play store. As is, they would get more adoption than any app on the Ubuntu/Firefox/etc store.

As long as Android exists and is easily rootable, and preferably as long as the iOS jailbreak community keeps up with major versions, I'm happy with the state of "linux" on mobile.

Windows and OSX rule on the desktop/laptop with Linux a bit player.

Intel and AMD on x86 with Via, IBM, and Cyrix and the rest either no longer being able to compete.

ATI and Nvidia on the gaming GPU end, and even then ATI had to be swallowed up by AMD to remain competitive. Intel still a bit player for budget graphics and with no product that remotely compares with the GPU heft of even a many years old Nvidia card.

We'll probably see iOS and Android be the default mobile OS's for a while with MS's Windows as a third player. Surface tablets and Windows phones still sell. If anything, the Surface Pro might be the best mobile Windows device out there and one of the nicer mobile devices for sale anywhere.

That said, mobile is probably resistant to a foss solution as people expect all sorts of cloud and managed experiences. Maps, siri/googlenow, cloud storage of photos, ease of buying, sharing, casting, media, etc. Most people won't be happy with an unbuntu phone that doesn't have all these features and probably couldn't care less about the privacy argument here. Do default installs of Sailfish, Tizen, and Jolla have any of this? Joe Consumer won't buy these things if they can't compete feature-wise.

Windows 10 Mobile has some of the advantages of iOS in terms of security updates and the Microsoft developer infrastructure -- whether that's a good thing depends on one's technical opinion of Visual Studio versus Xcode and Android Studio in terms of programming ergonomics and features and languages.

All that said, that doesn't mean that Windows Mobile will ever be successful or that a world where it's Apple, Google and Microsoft would be significantly better.

That is how hard the problem was to solve for Mozilla OS. They were essentially building a competing OS when they could have just been building a competing distribution.

Android (AOSP) + Firefox + Firefox Market + Firefox Mail could have been amazing.

A great Windows Phone 10 launch would not have put them in the top two, but it may have solidified them as a third platform.

I think it's pretty simple: people want to use apps on their phones, and no phone OS is viable without a competitive library of apps.

Most major apps are developed for both iOS and Android, and convincing app developers to develop for a third platform is going to be a tough sell, unless that platform is very attractive to users. However, to be attractive to users, it will have to have a lot of apps already...

I suspect that the only way to gain marketshare for a new mobile OS is to ship it with an Android or iOS compatibility layer, which would be pretty difficult to do well. The developers would have to re-implement the entire iOS or Android API, and keep up with all of the changes. If they did that, there would be no incentive for developers to target the native APIs of the OS, because they could just target Android or iOS like they do already. So, the compatibility layer could never be deprecated.

So yeah, I think we're stuck.

I've been living this for the last several years both with Android and ARM devel/hobbyist boards and it isn't much fun. It would be nice these quasi-business entities (i.e. Mozilla, Canonical) would forget about their brand-exclusive strategies and try to rally around an open ARM-based platform (you know, with support for things like, I don't know, GPUs and such) they can all run on. THAT I could get excited about and we could all win. Short of that, I don't get what I want and they continue to lose relevance in the mobile era. Granted, I'm part of the 1% that runs Linux. But here's a newsflash: right now we're the only ones who care about Canonical, Mozilla, etc. and ~1% beats 0%.

This has to be one of the best ways into handset market for MS/Ubuntu or others.

And thanks Mozilla for making an OS that glitches out if you use the power button in the wrong moment, nothing wakes you up better than having to reboot your phone to stop the damn alarm clock.

FirefoxOS is such an unfinished shitfest. I have no idea how 1.3 passed QA. (Nor why Alcatel still isn't releasing any update, even though they're still selling the phone in question.)

To me this is synonymous with "has less features" or "unusable". I think Microsoft actually did an ad campaign on this "un-addicting" thingy.

If you're actually optimizing for time well spent, re-read https://medium.com/swlh/distracted-in-2016-reboot-your-phone... (you can apply most of this to Android).

You mean you love it because you hate using it?

> un-addicting.

Interesting marketing formula. "Un-addicting". Might be useful in the future to justify the uselessness of a product. "but it's a feature! it's un-addicting". It was so un-addicting Mozilla killed the project dead.

This is always true to a degree, but the more true you think it is, the less likely you are to jump onto said initiatives.

Maybe they thought Gecko would be ready by the time the OS was going to ship?

It's why I have a TV and a Roku, rather than a Roku TV. Why combine them when their upgrade cycles don't match up?

Mozilla has no technical leadership problems, but they have some huge people and business leadership problems, and until they figure out a path forward, the path will continue to be a meandering trail to the bottom :(

I don't want smart features, a fancy remote with two dozen buttons, TV tuning, or anything. I'd be happy with a thin TV but I don't need one.

Just give me a way to put my PS4 on the wall and I'll be happy as a clam.

The market will force a correction at some point if the value is there for an open platform.

That iOS/Apple (of today) are so revered by open-systems loving folks is a little bit counterintuitive.

In order for a solution to be successful it must be good at first place. FirefoxOS wasn't good at first place no matter how open it was.

I will repeat my take here, for the last time, on where they screwed up: They screwed up by pretending to target low end devices but still only supporting centralized communications. They should have had Ad-hoc/Mesh Wifi as a requirement, and designed the OS API to give those features to developers. Developing world people want to send things between one another, not huddle around shared wifi or pay premiums to carriers. I wrote this up in some detail at https://bug945047.bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=840... ... nobody bothered to reply, except for "wifi supports in FFOS is relied on wpa_supplicant which is provided by partner mostly", ie. the business setup within Mozilla was that the actual device manufacturers were the ones who had control of the wpa_supplicant build, and there was no way for the developers to rely on, require or enforce features in that software being present. Nobody took ownership, everyone lost.

Of course the big difference is that Linux succeeded while Firefox OS failed. But thats after the fact.

I think something like Firefox OS is important, but probably wasnt something Mozilla should have undertaken when their key asset was under massive threat and it keeps dropping other stuff that, admittedly small numbers of people are using, were still successful in Theur niche and could have continued with minimal effort (examples of projects that affected me directly are Thunderbird and Prism).

I'm not even a web dev, but I'm sad to hear that it didn't pan out.

I told Mozilla people on this forum for many years that it wasn't going to work, anybody can check my history. It didn't fail because they were using web techs but because they were releasing low end phones. Firefox OS phones should have been "geek" phones, phones for people who already own 2/3 phones and want something they can "hack" and boast about. The product itself wasn't bad, the strategy was. Again targeting emergent markets was stupid, people in emergent markets either have "feature phones" or android phones, because of what's app and co, Firefox OS should have targeted geeks and hipsters , with high end models... That's how you make a brand or a product desirable.

[0]: http://www.flatpanelshd.com/news.php?subaction=showfull&id=1...

Or well, any lightweight Linux distro, really.

There's also this, in case that comes closer to what you see as ChromeOS competitor: https://cublinux.com/

And after the dud launch, whatever momentum had been there, simply dried out. Nothing major has happened since launch for Firefox OS, while Android and iOS have had several major releases.

That it took Mozilla this many years after the fact to admit this failure, is (as other comments) a sign of bad leadership.

The effort spent here could have been much better spent elsewhere. And these days Mozilla needs to spend its resources efficiently more than ever.

IMO the whole "connected devices" initiative which Mozilla also mentions here (I had completely forgotten about it) will suffer the same fate. It's not connected to anything they currently do, or anything they have a natural ability to reach out to. Whatever drives this initiative, it seems completely disconnected from engineering.

Unless they kill it now, we'll see a similar announcement in a few years. And that too will be resources that could have been spent more wisely.