While they are not immune from poor decisions I really believe they try to do the right thing in the end. That’s more than I can say for many other companies.
Without it, billions of people in developing world are going to have every every second of their lives snooped by Google.
It failed, but it was still a good idea.
I think it was a huge mistake to abandon FFOS but not enough people felt that way.
Compare how FFOS did to how Ubuntu Phone did which was essentially vaporware IIRC.
> I think it was a huge mistake to abandon FFOS but not enough people felt that way.
Sometimes you need to pick your fights and when even MS decides they don't stand a chance I guess it is time to stop bleeding money and try another approach.
Firefox the browser was falling behind. While it was always my favourite it was totally eclipsed by Chrome for a while.
After they started focusing on Firefox again a number of great things have happened:
- Firefox is getting faster
- Firefox is getting safer
- Firefox is gaining mindshare
- Techies are starting to use and recommend Firefox again
- etc
All this puts Mozilla in position where they can do things like they now announce: they will make big improvements again, this time by squelching 3rd party tracking.
Also, which other approach are you talking about?
Other approaches to furthering their mission: if getting their own phone to market is to expensive, regroup behind the main product(s) and use them to launch new approaches like we are seeing in the linked article.
I haven't looked at their books but surely there was enough money to fund FFOS if they just stopped their rapid expansion into every single emerging market they could find. Make 1 high quality, expensive headset, that nerds will buy (OnePlus did this), and keep working on the software.
IMO There are more than enough nerds out there (myself included) who will fork out $400/500 for a FFOS phone with how much of a difference it was from other OSes.
Very good point.
But you really need to nail the marketing on such a thing:
- you really want people to buy it to support mozilla and FFOS
- but you don't want to look desperate
- you want people to talk about it
- but there are a number of reviews and articles you don't want to be written. ('FFOS phone arrives and is already outdated', 'Too late, too little from Mozilla')
- etc
It is still early on the morning and I'm in a hurry so I cannot name any but I have a strong hunch that this has happened to comparable initiatives in the past few years.
I know it's naive to think so, but fuck marketing posturing, just make a good thing, in a strategic market, and stick to it. They literally did the hard work, making the platform, getting big apps to add compatability (LINE, a huge messaging app here in Japan had a FirefoxOS app) -- which was also easy for them... Then you just throw up your hands because of rough waters in literally the hardest arena you could have gone into (the low margin arena)... Also, people in other developing countries were starting to use the phone and it is way easier to develop for.
They really let go of something that could have changed the game. I see how their other products have benefitted but it really doesn't seem like they didn't have the money to do it, it seems like they didn't have the money to do it the stupid way they were trying to do it.
There's the firefox team, and the thunderbird team. I know mozilla does a lot of other shit, but maybe stop doing that other shit if you want to be an alternative to google/microsoft/amazon level players a mobile OS is strategic. Maybe stop trying to get clicks with IoT shit (gateway is cool though, so props) and just hunker down? They don't have a board in the traditional for-profit company sense so I dunno wtf.
I can't remember where I read (assuming I did) that mozilla's C-level team suffers a lot of turnover because people just come in, do whatever they want with mozilla's direction and then leave to some for-profit company.
Sorry this is more of a rant but I dunno, I just really feel like mozilla screwed the pooch. I literally flew to another country to try and buy the highest spec FFOS phone I could find (LG's FF zero phone I believe), and bought multiple because I didn't want one to die eventually. I can't be the only one who felt that way.
I believe the development kit for apps is now available.
You can already run Purism on other machines(laptops, desktops, etc). The mobile version will essentially be Purism with gnome-mobile UI. I’m sorry to read that you don’t think an open device that will have its drivers available and probably work with Android, isnt worth the cost.
Regardless, the hardware is what I really want. I have a feeling it will even end up with a removable battery and a headphone jack!
There's a few alternatives to the Android/iOS ecosystem, notably Librem 5, KDE Mobile, Ubuntu Touch, microG (e.g. with LineageOS), and last but not least Sailfish.
Google is everywhere. What if you don't want it on your KaiOS-powered Nokia phone and prefer open source alternatives? If I want Google, I'll get Android with OpenGapps. It has terrific support for Google's products.
Buy a different phone?
MeeGo was a combination of Intel's Moblin and Nokia's Maemo. I'm not sure what became of Intel's efforts after MeeGo. Sailfish is the successor of Maemo/MeeGo whereas Mer is an open source mobile Linux OS which Sailfish uses as base. Both utilise libhybris [1] for Android compatibility layer. Backwards compatibility = important; no apps / ecosystem = no users, and that curve is very steep.
Another interesting effort I saw the other day is actually from Google. An effort to easily build an app which is easily ported to Android and iOS. That might directly benefit Android and Google most, but indirectly it could benefit libhybris users. I'm unsure how good Sailfish 3's Android compatibility is these days. It used to be Android 4.4 compatibility for a long time.
A while back Samsung released a Tizen phone to Indian (and Russian?) markets, but it wasn't much of a success.
They might have even been able to work with Amazon, who has a vested interest in Android a la FireOS, and possibly forced Google to make AOSP a truly open project.
You might as well start clean with an OS designed for the modern era, Android's over a decade old now, and it shows. You're stuck with the app gap either way.
A lot of other apps pops up a dialog saying they need Google services but then work perfectly without it. I'm not a android Dev but it's almost like that behavior is default even if the developer doesn't use any of Google services?
It worked much better for me than the native player and I could download any videos at any time. Definitely a great application.
Could the Hooktube Redirector work on mobile too? https://hooktube.com/
On the PC I use that FF extension which sends any Youtube request to Hooktube and works like a charm.
Still sounds like a better deal for them than no smartphones at all. Do they even care about Google's data collection? I find it to be a perfectly fair tradeoff for cheaper smartphones and free services.
Mozilla has done incredibly well to have Firefox survive at all against competition from Microsoft and Google, and has undoubtedly had to make some tradeoffs (such as DRM), but it's at its best when it sticks to its principles.
This is something Mozilla should think about. There's a market for something like Chrome OS (digital signage, library PCs, the elderly, schools, etc).