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Comment by cylinder714 | Hacker News Reader

Regarding FirefoxOS, Mozilla erred in focusing their efforts on cheap, crappy phones¹ that were only available in places like Spain or India, and not getting first-tier phones into the hands of as many hackers as possible, as quickly as possible.

By focusing on low-end phones and not Nexus- or Galaxy-class handsets, they lost sight of the fact that smartphones are aspirational devices. People want the best phones they can get, with high performance and high-resolution screens. They don't care about libre software or the Open Web if the devices on which it runs are perceived as inferior. (Everyone I know uses either an iPhone or a reasonably performant Android phone, and I don't run in wealthy or tech circles much these days.)

Look at the runaway success of the iPhone. It wasn't cheap, but because it was clearly a quality device, both regular people and developers clamored for them. (Remember the hue and cry when Apple initially said they wouldn't provide a market for third-party apps?)

If Mozilla really wanted to spur interest in FirefoxOS among developers, they should have set up kiosks at every Fry's Electronics in the greater S.F. Bay area (on the doorsteps of Apple, Google, Facebook) to sell decent, unlocked phones directly. People would have lined up to buy them just to hack on them. I would have seriously considered buying one as an alternative to a Nexus phone, if one had been available.

1: Ars Technical eviscerates a $35 FirefoxOS phone: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/10/testing-a-3

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With respect, this seems very Bay Area short-sighted. Mozilla was open about targeting cheap, crappy phones, which my understanding makes up a very significant portion of the Android phone ecosystem. They were looking at those Spain, India, China markets, yes, and nailing those markets didn't really depend upon the opinions of comparatively extraordinarily rich Bay Area denizens or hackers. If you can afford a Galaxy s5 right now, even if you have to budget a bit, you are not the market that that OS was for (my understanding). Similar to that Facebook Internet thing - it wasn't for us, it was for people who can (and do) live two years off one of our paychecks.

EDIT: I just read that review you linked and it suffers the same problem - a total lack of perspective. The only critical error I can see is the lack of internal battery to keep time synced, which will be a major setback for browsing because of authentication and whatnot. Other than that, the sorts of people spending 35$ on a phone do not care about the three different materials, the thickness, the shitty camera, etc. I've seen the most horrifying, hackneyed together internet connectivity solutions in China that to mock a 35$ phone for being "too thick" is to be just... out of touch.

Just a precision about this "shitty camera" that Ars Technica loved so much. When we (Mozilla) did the development, we had reference devices from the SOC vendor (Spreadtrum). For sure this was not a high end sensor, but it was taking good pictures, not blurry or out of focus. So what happened? Well, one of the OEMs decided to save pennies by using a different sensor, but forgot to make the driver changes... (they also cheaped out on the battery which ruined the autonomy).

The lesson here, and where we failed, is that if you don't have control over the full stack you're shipping (hardware and software) and can't manage the QA and sign off process before shipping, you expose yourself to bad surprises.

It depends indirectly on their opinions, though: those markets (like everywhere else) get a significant proportion of their apps from Silicon Valley, and every missing app makes a new platform that much less competitive.

Anyway, crappy hardware cares more about software efficiency. Firefox OS struggled massively with performance, to the point of absurdity; targeting low-end hardware with that is an idea that only ever made sense on paper. Supposedly it was just a temporary problem, optimizations were coming… eventually...

I don't know why they didn't look in the USA. I don't want a cheap crappy phone but I think $500 or more for a phone is insanity (and not because I can't afford it). I want a decent phone for under $200. Right now I'm using a Moto G which has been great for me. I would very likely have bought a Firefox phone if I could have simply to not be entangled with Apple or Google.

> They were looking at those Spain, India, China markets, yes, and nailing those markets didn't really depend upon the opinions of comparatively extraordinarily rich Bay Area denizens or hackers.

It does when those Bay Area hackers are the ones who decide whether or not they will port their app to your phone.

> It does when those Bay Area hackers are the ones who decide whether or not they will port their app to your phone.

The mistake is rather that for closed protocols you are dependent on the Bay Area hacker to port the apps instead of "everyone can implement the open protocol".

> They were looking at those Spain, India, China markets, yes, and nailing those markets didn't really depend upon the opinions of comparatively extraordinarily rich Bay Area denizens or hackers. If you can afford a Galaxy s5 right now, even if you have to budget a bit, you are not the market that that OS was for (my understanding).

GP's point is that targeting these markets was a mistake. Their strategy was fundamentally flawed from the start.

> Other than that, the sorts of people spending 35$ on a phone do not care about the three different materials, the thickness, the shitty camera, etc. I've seen the most horrifying, hackneyed together internet connectivity solutions in China that to mock a 35$ phone for being "too thick" is to be just... out of touch.

Again, GP's point was that the idea of selling a $35 phone to China was what killed Firefox OS in the first place.

> With respect, this seems very Bay Area short-sighted. Mozilla was open about targeting cheap, crappy phones, which my understanding makes up a very significant portion of the Android phone ecosystem. They were looking at those Spain, India, China markets, yes, and nailing those markets didn't really depend upon the opinions of comparatively extraordinarily rich Bay Area denizens or hackers.

If Mozilla was targeting the market for cheap, crappy phones, they were also targeting the search market on cheap, crappy phones. Unfortunately Yahoo, Bing and Google, the companies who comprise nearly all of Mozilla's revenues, need access to extraordinarily rich markets to justify their bids. It's not clear to me that they'd be substantially better off if the Mozilla phone was considered a success.

I think the idea would be something along the lines of scale, and locking down an untargeted market. A sort of long-term plan, maybe hoping to corner a huge (greater than 1 billion) population of folks whose families might one day be targetable by ads for purchasing things and are already inside the ecosystem, or merely pulling a 1$ profit off a 35$ dollar phone... times 1.2 billion sales. I mean pie in the sky but I don't think "these people are poor" means there isn't money to be made.

There's also government social welfare contracts to consider, or good faith agreements with a government that allows you to corner a more profitable market (you provided five hundred thousand affordable phones to our people, so we'll let you lay fiber through our country / get through our Great Firewall / whatever).

> I mean pie in the sky but I don't think "these people are poor" means there isn't money to be made.

Yea, but you don't "bet the company" on it if the opportunity is smaller.

Firefox OS was not a "bet the company" project. Mozilla is financially very healthy.

You'll have to take that up with Mark Mayo:

> Mayo says it took the focus off of Firefox. “It was close to a bet-the-farm effort,” he said.

Read page two of that review again? I have no issue with the physical device, its terrible performance was ultimately what prompted my essay.

So if their strategy was a good one, why did it fail?

The Firefox team assumed that Android would be an expensive, bulky OS that wouldn't fit into sub-$120 phones -- leaving lots of room for spartan little Firefox OS to own the low end.

Not so. Android decided to do cheap and lean, too. I did some price comparisons in emerging markets back in 2015, and everywhere that Firefox OS tried to play, there was an Android alternative available at a comparable price. More details are here:

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/537661/firefox-maker-batt...

Poor execution.

It was the right strategy as well, target people just getting a smart phone, and those who were not invested in the app ecosystem.

Two years ago, at the same time Firefox OS phones were coming out, I had the chance to test a bunch of 3.5" screen size, android 4.2 running phones from China that cost $40 each. The Chinese phones had the full play store and were worlds better than the Firefox os.

I'm a Spaniard and can offer a bit of perspective:

Firefox OS was doomed the day they partnered with Telefónica. It's a massive juggernaut which phagocytes every startup they touch, assimilate their talent, then destroy the rest.

For those who don't know Telefónica, it's something akin to T-Mobile or AT&T (maybe even bigger, not sure). They had to change the name and branding of their phone division, a massive feat in both cash and brand recognition a few years ago to clean up their shitty reputation because people hated them so much.

In the tech side that HN may be interested in, they earn money by winning government contracts and developing crappy tech like a regular consultancy. They have a very high tech R+D division which I'm sure does wonderful work but their projects don't seem to surface.

In summary, if you see something "developed by Telefonica" it should turn your alarms on.

I'm a Mozilla employee, and though I wasn't directly on FirefoxOS I did work with and serve that team. Telefonica was by far the most engaged partner we had, they had good engineers and seemed genuinely committed to the success of the project. There were lots of disagreements on product direction, sometimes we were right and sometimes they we right. Ultimately we were both wrong - I don't think there was a winning product strategy. Not on the high end or the low end. In that situation everyone ends up with bad feelings.

It does make it hard to learn from the experience though. Maybe the lesson is about learning how to quit at the right time.

I want to second that.

I'm a Mozilla employee and I was very deeply involved in Firefox OS work.

On the engineering level, Telefonica was very helpful and working with them was actually a good experience. (can't say the same about all partners :().

Hindsight 20/20 is a powerful bias and it's easy now to talk about why FxOS wasn't meant to be.

All I can say, is that we tried our best and designed a pretty usable device in the end - just week ago I launched my Z3 with latest nightly of Firefox OS 3.0 (from April 2016) and damn, it's actually pretty nice and super smooth, and I'm speaking as a user of the Pixel.

I deeply believe that there's room for an open source operating system and that web stack is a good platform to base it on. The legacy of Firefox OS in form of tons of spec work and engine improvements (Firefox memory usage!) makes it much easier to do this now and I hope someone will.

I agree zbraniecki! And that's part of pain... we actually learnt a lot, enough to know how to do most things right now.

But anyone building a new mobile OS will be facing the elephant in the room: will you get the top 5 apps to run or be ported on your OS? Without that, no way you can succeed. For FxOS, the unwillingness of Whatsapp to build an official app was more damaging that all the other reasons I read about.

OSes are commodity vehicules for apps, which are rightly what users care about. This gives a lot of power to prominent apps, which are often silos themselves - so maybe the fight to give is to displace these!

Thanks for both your replies, yours and Ian's

I've also known Telefonica engineers and they are some of the best. Maybe my bitterness against the behemoth clouded my words and I apologize for that.

The problem, as Lance said, is their inability to execute anything that doesn't provide them a direct, noticeable impact on sales (said to me by a Telefonica exec)

What I'm truly sorry for is the fact that the Firefox OS flopped. As an engineer, I know that you can build an awesome product but the execs may trash it if it doesn't go in the expected direction. And, with Telefonica, that happens too often.

Just a note that I have a Firefox OS powered Panasonic TV and it does its job fine. I didn't know it was running Firefox OS until I powered it on for the first time after purchase and saw the logo.

It does have it's glitches (TV guide screen UI is very unresponsive) but I have few complaints. The Youtube app probably gets some usage as well as screen mirroring from Android/Windows PC.

You can all be correct here - the Telefonica people may have been excellent, but the Telefonica machine is unable to execute, simply by being so inefficient. Meanwhile the brand is damaged almost beyond repair.

"For those who don't know Telefónica, it's something akin to T-Mobile or AT&T [...] they had to change the name and branding of their phone division [...] because people hated them so much."

Comcast. The word you're looking for is Comcast.

More similar would be Verizon which was the despised GTE back in the 1980s.

Here in NYC, Verizon was the despised NYNEX.

A more recent example would be the merger of the despised Time Warner Cable with Charter, now renamed to Spectrum.

> By focusing on low-end phones and not Nexus- or Galaxy-class handsets, they lost sight of the fact that smartphones are aspirational devices.

Yeah, I remember when Firefox OS first came out, and when I heard of Mozilla's strategy of starting in the third world and then moving up, I knew Firefox OS was doomed.

Why? Because it reminded me of something I heard about car platforms, years ago. Back in 2002, GM introduced a pair of cars in the European market both based on the same platform: the Vauxhall Vectra and the Saab 9-3 (not the first generation of either nameplate, but the first to share a platform). GM made sure to introduce the Saab first. Why? Because Saab was a premium brand and Vauxhall wasn't. GM knew that "Saab built on Vauxhall technology" wouldn't fly -- people would see it as Saab degrading themselves by raiding a mid-level car for parts. On the other hand, "Vauxhall built on Saab technology" would go over very well -- people would see it as Vauxhall incorporating elements of a premium car.

The moral of the story is: you don't release a budget model and work your way up; you release a premium model and then bring it downmarket to cultivate the image of bringing luxury technology to the masses.

> it reminded me of something I heard about car platforms, years ago. Back in 2002, GM introduced a pair of cars in the European market both based on the same platform: the Vauxhall Vectra and the Saab 9-3.

Your comment actually reminded me of an old Top Gear episode [1][2] where they described how Saab were instructed by GM to change only the body and the badges of a Vauxhall Cavalier when producing the Saab 900, but they ignored them and modified so much that the two cars only shared 1/3rd of the parts [2, 03:59]. The same thing happened again with the Vauxhall Vectra and the Saab 9-3, but to an even greater extent.

It certainly sounds like Saab didn't want to be associated with GM or Vauxhall or use any of their inferior technology or parts.

[1] http://www.topgear.com/videos/jeremy-clarkson/tribute-saab-p...

[2] http://www.topgear.com/videos/jeremy-clarkson/tribute-saab-p...

On the other hand, you look at what ARM is doing to x86.

80% as good for 20% of the cost wins. You just have to be willing to accept selling for 20% of the cost.

The problem Mozilla has is that their hardware is not going to be any better/cheaper than somebody else's because it is somebody else's, and they can't undercut Android on price because Android is free.

What might have been an interesting strategy is to create a Firefox-branded version of Android that ships Mozilla equivalents to the Google apps.

I think completely separating them and not marketing them as X build on Y would be the better move. At least according to positioning theory from marketing.

They could only get carrier support in select countries and that was what was helping pay for development of the platform. And trust me, even if they had had them available for developers in the Bay area, I don't think developers would have cared. The hard truth is the APIs just weren't robust enough to do anything beyond the same HTML5 apps we already saw across Android and iOS, and it ran like dogshit.

The main problem with Firefox OS and also Canonical's Ubuntu phone was that they treated the lowend market of certain countries like second or third class citizens, assuming the cheap price would make up for the fact that there were no apps and the performance was terrible. What those companies didn't count on (but frankly should have), was that Android would just get cheaper and cheaper and the those countries would be fine with running two or three year old hardware (especially since apps frequently support old versions), rather than running a second-class OS.

I would always ask Mozilla what they would do when Android simply got as cheap, and I never got an answer that was in any way encouraging. And the answer was, they would accept defeat and give up.

I think it goes beyond both of these comments. So Plasma Mobile does support two high end phones, but only two and they're already outdated (Nexus 5 and OnePlusOne). Neither have an sd slot either.

A friend of mine had a Firefox OS phone at one point that she got for free at a conference, and I just remember at the time it was very difficult to even purchase a low end model outside of Europe at the time.

Part of it is carrier lock-in, but another huge factor is that you can't just install Firefox OS onto any old mobile device. Back in the late 90s/early 2000s, you could install any Linux on any PC/x86 system. PC was and still is a solid standard. The mainline kernel does a really good job of supporting the PC, both old and new (with really old support getting dropped and forked into things like the Linux/386 project for people who still use 386/486 embedded systems).

There is nothing similar for the ARM market. There is no standard. Almost no phones support Device Tree config (and definitely none of the flagships). With Windows and Linux, you install your base, you might need to install some drivers/modules and then you're done. ARM is a spec sold to SoC manufactures and then vendors attach whatever the fuck they want to whatever random pins. There's no unified boot loader. No standard way of determining devices. No standard platform. ARM isn't a platform. It's just an architecture.

http://penguindreams.org/blog/android-fragmentation/

There are plenty of x86 chips out there that aren't in PCs (The Wonderswan and the PS4 are both great examples of totally-not-a-PC), but they are the exceptions.

Ubuntu Mobile could have changed all this with the Edge. We may have finally had some standardized phones for open source and alternative operating systems. As it stands, every rom you see out there has to be customized for the hacked-n-patched together kernels of each and every single phone. It's not always an issue of binary drivers and no standard Kernel ABI, as some of these vendors patch things deep in the kernel in totally hacky, non-upstreamble ways for their kludged together hardware. Combined with binary blobs, closed baseband firmware, etc. etc. it's just a mess.

Currently there is no, convenient hackable mobile device platform, and that's keeping us from the same Linux revolution on embedded devices.

Windows on ARM is standardized with UEFI+ACPI, but that's only because Microsoft didn't half-ass it.

But I thought those bootloaders were still locked to Microsoft's signing key? So even if you have UEFI+ACPI on WinRT devices, you still can't install Linux can you?

Secure Boot was broken and Grub is running in UEFI mode perfectly. Sadly, Linux doesn't support ACPI on ARM 32-bits, so you don't get beyond early kernel init

They were simply too late to the market, but they had to do something, if they stick to the same course they will always have a very small slice of the mobile market as most people don't replace the browser on their mobile

I'm surprised that Google and in particular Apple aren't coming under scrutiny from competition watchdogs as Microsoft did with IE in the early 2000s.

Google has an incredible amount of money invested in our federal government here in the US. Including at least one former FTC Commissioner in their pocket. :)

Competition watchdogs in almost every other first world country, however, are investigating Google for various antitrust claims.

Apple doesn't get a lot of scrutiny from competition watchdogs because they aren't a monopoly anywhere. Heck, outside the US, the iPhone has a pretty tiny market share.

Google spent $0/year lobbying until Microsoft and the "Fair search" coalition did a lot of anti-Google lobbying in the US and the EU. They also didn't start building up a patent warchest until they were involved in a patent thermonuclear war.

I don't find patents or lobbyists particularly agreeable - but for an organization of a certain size to go without them in the 21st century is likely a very expensive strategic error.

Google's PAC, NetPAC, well predates the formation of FairSearch, by at least two years.

An important difference is that you have a choice between iPhone and Android, where you had no choice but Windows.

At the time you had Mac os (or early iterations of OSX), desktop Linux, Beos, os2, etc.

Sure, but Windows had (and still has) a monopoly on desktop operating systems. Being a monopoly doesn't mean you have 100% market share, but rather that you're (a) the dominant player, and (b) your market share is considered sufficiently high that it can be leveraged to modify the market forces themselves. When you're a monopoly, additional antitrust requirements apply to you that don't apply to the lesser players in that market.

In 2001 when the lawsuits were happening Windows (Desktop and Server) had 80% market share, Android has 88% now. And while you can switch to iOS it's prohibitive in that you have to buy dedicated hardware.

In 2001 if you wanted to switch off Windows you could buy BeOS, Linux, or OS2 and run it on the same computer that you had windows on. Back then I did just that, switching from Windows to BeOS when BeOS was made free, I did my university work on BeOS running on a Toshiba laptop that came with Windows.

Right now if you have an iPhone or Android phone you have very little option to switch operating system on your device.

Android doesn't have 88% of the US market, only the world market.[0]

Also, what got MS in trouble was their contracts with hardware vendors. Companies like Compaq were required to pay MS for a Windows license even on computers they sold without Windows installed, and that was an abuse of MS' power. If Google is charging companies for Android even for phone they sell without Android installed, that would be analogous.

[0] "While Android continues to grow its share of the global smartphone market, it is actually losing share in the U.S. Kantar’s data shows Android phones making up 55 percent of U.S. smartphone sales compared with more than 60 percent in the same period a year ago." http://www.recode.net/2017/1/11/14239038/iphone-apple-androi...

I'm pretty sure it wasn't 80% of the Desktop market. More likely 90%+ according to what I could find, with MacOS being in the 3-4 percent and Linux at less than 1%.

And yeah, sure, you could run OS/2 or even BeOS, but these never reached statistically significant penetration.

Just as today you can run Sailfish, or Cyanogen/Lineage, etc... the latter supposedly has a market share of 3% or so. Better than BeOS, Linux, etc... in 2001.

> Remember when we prosecuted Microsoft for bundling a browser with an OS? Imagine the future we'd live in if we'd be willing to let one tech company amass that much power.

> Thank God we nipped that in the bud.

https://xkcd.com/1118/

The alt text on this comic is beautiful.

It ain't quite accurate, though, since we can write "Fa¢ebook", "Goog£e", and "App£e" ;)

¢ doesn't quite do it, though...

Fac€book?

Alternatively, ƒacebook, but that's probably too subtle (and a minor currency anyway).

It's not like it was before. JIT engines made the situation more complicated. The security problems are hard.

That's a pretty lame exuse: if anything, OS integrated JIT engines are likely to be less secure, and a more diverse engine ecosystem makes attacks less attractive. Witness how JIT engines don't cause many problems (and never really have caused many problems) on desktop. Which isn't to say they're immune from security risks, just that there are lots of other components that pose just as many risks (or more), which are not (or cannot) be avoided - not least of which the first-party JIT.

Furthermore, many exploits don't care if their running on a JIT or on a scripting engine - that's an implementation detail. And if you really cared about security, you could design a verifiable native subset (as several systems have done) - webassembly shows that even slow standardization processes that need much more complicated cross-device compatibility can move meaningfully in that direction.

Disallowing non-first party JITs completely for security reasons is at best delusional, but more likely intentionally anti-competitive. Minor security bonuses are just gravy.

Also, as noted elsewhere in this thread, the App Store rules explicitly ban third-party browsing engines, so it doesn't help even if you go without a JIT entirely.

> OS integrated JIT engines are likely to be less secure,

I imagine you never used a mainframe OS.

I never have - what are you getting at?

Most of them use "OS integrated JIT engines".

Yeah, but on the other hand there are only a handful of companies that make Browsers, and even fewer that make browser engines. The vendors could pay Apple to audit the codebases and it would be worth it to be on the platform.

> (Remember the hue and cry when Apple initially said they wouldn't provide a market for third-party apps?)

No, I don't. But all my friends wanted an iPhone and they're not programmers.

I think most people didn't know or even consider one could develop apps for phones at the time. Or why would someone want apps on a phone. Or even what an "app" is. They only knew "programs" on Windows.

People bought what was available. There were starting to appear some apps for Nokia phones but it wasn't widely popular. It was also a hassle to download / update.

There was a huge outcry I remember it well, ironically Apple only wanted web apps which put it at a significant disadvantage to Windows Mobile, Symbian, Palm OS, and Blackberry based phones.

The wow factor of the UI and interface design more than made up for it though, but there is a famous interview where Balmer laughs at the iPhone because it was expensive, had no keyboard, and no applications whereas Microsoft was selling millions of Windows phones a year with all of those.

Then I guess you don't remember it all that well - even at the introduction people made fun out of the lack of 3rd party apps and consistently criticized it. Symbian smartphones were already pretty popular (at least her in EU).

And to counter your anectode - pretty much none of my friends wanted an iPhone and they're not programmers either ;P

People very well knew what apps were and why they wanted them on a phone. Especially as phones were slow back in the day and had slow 2G networks (original iPhone), an app was a much more fluid experience than a touch-website.

In fact people wrote apps for rooted iPhones before iOS came out with official app support and an Appstore.

As an app developer pre-iphone, people certainly didn't know what apps were.

It was crazy how after apps came to the iphone suddenly people did know and there was even a little cachet to it.

As an Indian who bought the Firefox OS phone, I second the cheap phones strategy being what killed it. I remember it taking so long just to open an app and say search or even to open the marketplace, I gave up very often. Forget about developing for them. I think it is atleast partly because of the bad hardware, I don't know enough innards of the OS itself to say whether it was inefficient or not.

> ...[ignore Spain and India, target SF]...

Because what the globe needs is yet another company pandering to tech elites and ignoring the huge numbers of people out there of modest means? I mean seriously, Apple does all this stuff you're saying, pulling in devs with the shiny stuff, and targeting the SF yuppie... and this helps the people in Spain and India how? Not to mention that you're talking about the market segment already occupied by Android. Mozilla was trying to cater to those left behind.

Mozilla's raison d'etre isn't to push libre software per se. It's to enable the masses; libre software is merely an asset in that mission.

...tech elites...SF yuppies...

Read again what I wrote: the point was to get the phones into the hands of hackers, so they would write apps and create that ecosystem to ultimately benefit people elsewhere. (If there's a place with a more active hacker culture than the Bay Area, let's bring the phones there.)

I agree with amyjess' point made elsewhere. A quality phone is the means by which you get people interested in a platform, particularly developers. I think that's what's happening with Android and iPhone, in that the first phones are expensive, but the cost is spiraling ever downward. I just would rather see a freer alternative succeed, and hoped FirefoxOS would be it.

The hackers in the bay area are more interested in shiny iphones than up'n'coming tools for the masses. You'd be better off doing it in Europe, where there is a stronger hacker culture towards doing stuff 'for everybody', plus much more familiarisation with i18n issues. In this bay area/startup bubble we live in, the default refrain is "I don't want to fiddle with the underlying machine", and that's not the kind of mindset you want for an underdog that is never going to be as polished as the market leader.

> iPhone ... but the cost is spiraling ever downward

The iPhone 1, the one that got people excited, was US$400. The iPhone 7 is US$650 (for the bottom model). Inflation in the US has not been 50%+ for the intervening decade.

Interestingly this is also the path Sailfish is taking. The launch of a fairly lowend device with Intex didn't see a rush of devs from IN (not surprising) but resulted in the forums and marketplace comment sections being flooded with incomprehensive and often abusive blabber. Hope they got paid well by Intex.

this

Just because you don't care about freedom doesn't mean no one cares about freedom.

(I'm writing this in Firefox Beta for Android, for what it's worth.)

You misunderstand--I desperately wanted FirefoxOS phones to succeed, precisely because an Open Web and free software is important, and ultimately a phone that can run any arbitrary software or OS. I know FirefoxOS wasn't that, but it seemed to be a step in the right direction. But if a phone is a lousy application platform and if developers can't be enticed to hack on them, then the question of freedom is moot.

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