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Comment by franze | Hacker News Reader

I still love my FirefoxOS Geeks Phone Keon 2013, it still is my go-to backpacking phone. ongoing long battery runtime, a decent browser for the https://mbasic.facebook.com/, gmail HTML, hacker news. necessary apps are there and work fine: For me that's HERE maps & alarm function.

I love it, because it's un-addicting. android and ios are designed to get your attention, all the time. FirefoxOS ist a tool that is there for you when you need it.

I wish they had succeeded, I even ran an FirefoxOS meetup in Vienna, I will miss it. Now back to my Android Phone, I think it beeped, vibrated or needs me in some other way.

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Yes, thanks Mozilla for making a timer app that by default neither beeps nor vibrates. Thankfully I only lost one oven load of food before I noticed.

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.)

And for that reason, it's worth recognizing how much work ahead there is for the web platform to be capable of delivering full OS experience.

Only now, pieces of the HTML/DOM/JS spec that have been kickstarted out of need when FxOS was being developed start landing in the spec.

Whoever will try next, will have an easier job because of the FxOS experience.

source: I'm an engineer who worked on FxOS in 2014-2016

Or it's worth recognizing that trying to deliver full OS experience with Web technology is a waste of time.

"It always seems impossible until it's done."

> I love it, because it's un-addicting.

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).

As a former long-time user of Windows Phone, it's not "unaddicting" in a way that's boring. There are plenty of apps to waste your time with. It's just that you don't need to. When I used Windows Phone, I didn't need to open an app to see the weather, or to see my text message, or to see my email. The live tiles made sure I could see all of that from the home screen. One glance across the screen and I knew everything I needed to know. Time, weather, headlines, new emails, new text messages, new Facebook posts, new tweets, next calendar appointment, and at the bottom, rotating pictures of my family. All without swiping, scrolling, tapping, or opening any apps. Ten seconds and I could lock the screen and get on with my day.

There's no other OS on the market that lets you do this.

So why did you leave it and what do you use now?

I left Windows Phone because of the hardware. I couldn't stand the capacitive buttons anymore, so I switched to an iPhone since it was the only flagship phone without capacitive system buttons. There is nothing that replaces Windows Phone live tiles though. The closest you can get is widgets but it's not even close to the same. There's no Twitter widget on iOS, for example. And the widget section is a completely different UI.

I took a major step back in UX because of poor hardware designs. I shouldn't be forced out of an app just because my finger slid a little bit off the screen and hit the home button.

I don't understand if you like Windows Phone so much why didn't you get a phone with on-screen buttons? I have a Microsoft Lumia 640 and with the buttons on the screen, you can swipe up and hide the button bar, so it doesn't get in the way.

I'm actually trying to get rid of it and move because Window Phone 10's UX is a mess. Nothing makes sense, and apparently most developers don't have a clue about UX in the WP10 ecosystem.

For example, the native app to watch video, doesn't have a control to swipe and fast-forward. Wut? So you have to actually click on the length bar to get to the minute you want. That's like UX 101. And it's like this with so many apps...

On-screen buttons are capacitive buttons.

I did some research and all I could find related to capacitive was buttons out of the screen. But like I said before, you can hide the buttons bar, so it you would have to swipe up from the bottom of the screen and then touch the windows button to get to the live title stuff.. So I don't find your reason enough to do what you did, but anyway, it's your life! I'm looking forward to get my hands on IOS and see what's like

Edit: I was amazed by LG's UI on android 4.4. It's fucking cool. Those guys know how to make life easy and pretty for folks. It is actually a 14 bucks phone that kicks 100++ bucks phone assess

I can't speak for the user you replied to but I can speak for myself: they stopped making good devices. I had a lumia 920, then I upgraded to the 930 which I still consider one of the best phones I've ever had, for its time. Then MS just... stopped. Took them forever to come out with the 950 and it was nowhere near competitive both in hardware quality and design with the ios and android competition. That was the last. Everything was awesome until after the 930 they simply stopped coming out with competitive devices for me.

Roughly at the time the 950 came out I switched to androidland. This year I wanted my upgrade to be the iphone but when the rumours about the lack of headphone port became undeniable I ended up by upgrading into a new android phone, which I'm using right now.

All of this sucks because there's absolutely nothing that comes close to the fantastic design and usability patterns of windows phone.

As far as I know, you can do all that with homescreen widgets on Android. Or am I misunderstanding you?

You can to an extent. If the app supports widgets, and the widgets are the right size to fit together on your screen, you can fit a small number of widgets. That doesn't mean they look good though. Android widgets look like widgets, Windows Phone tiles are just the interface. That's what it looks like, it was designed to be that and only that and nothing else.

Where is your Android doing notifications that your Firefox Phone wouldn't have? You can use Android with just a browser and selected apps just the same.

> I love it, because it's un-addicting

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.

I understand the feeling. Mobile phones are great for what they give you, but also great because they're just crappy enough to push you to use a more comfortable solution when one's available. It's great to have a Swiss army knife, but you'll still wish for your toolbox at home.

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