From where I am at it was a massive opportunity for Mozilla and Web developers all round the world. They didn't have to take on Android and iOS directly, but may have gotten there eventually thru 'worse is better'.
Imagine a web developer learning just a few APIs and being being able to customize their web app for smart TVs
This was WebOS in 2009.
Windows Phone, WebOS, Meego and Ubuntu Phone all "failed" around the same time period as Firefox OS. I have a hard time laying blame solely on Mozilla there.
So, what would have happened to Android, if Google didn't have the Maps / Play Store big stick?
Every device manufacturer wants to differentiate. None of them are good at it.
Elop was an incompetent leader, but he had not been involved in creating the mess. He went for a worse option, but that does not say that Meego would have ever succeeded.
Yes, I am stuck in the past myself, typing this on SailfishOS. But one has to see the realities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N9#Reception
> The Nokia N9 was announced at Nokia's Connections event in Singapore, June 2011. The reception for the device has been very positive, citing the MeeGo v1.2 Harmattan UI, pseudo-buttonless design, polycarbonate unibody construction and its NFC capabilities. Still, many reviewers did not recommend to buy the N9 only because of Nokia's earlier decision to drop MeeGo for Windows Phone for future smartphones – often questioning this decision at the same time. Engadget's editor Vlad Savov said in June 2011 that "it's a terrific phone that's got me legitimately excited to use it, but its future is clouded by a parent that's investing its time and money into building up a whole other OS." In a later review, Engadget writes: "Love at first sight — this is possibly the most beautiful phone ever made," and "MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan is such a breath of fresh air it will leave you gasping — that is, until you remember that you're dealing with a dead man walking."
> I can't understand how Mozilla failed to execute on Firefox OS.
This is naive. They did execute, and failed. That’s different than not executing at all. You can’t break into this segment without cooperation from the mobile phone operators... even in India and Southeast Asia whom were the primary target markets (less disposable income than Americans)
I had a Firefox OS phone. There was nothing great about it. It was average (by intention in order to work on restricted devices). I never used it to make calls, I used it for development. And it only had a wifi connection because I did not buy service for it.
There was nothing really “disruptive” about it as I recall. $20 Android phones destroyed any hope after the mobile operators turned a blind eye.
p.s. I still have the phone.
People do this all the time. I did it with my first android phone, a Nexus S, despite having bought the phone with no intention of doing so. The Chinese crapware it came loaded with didn't really leave any alternative.
Then Mozilla's leadership didn't have the patience to wait for the right opportunity.
I.e. if you've got something to claim as the reason it can't also apply to KaiOS unless there was something KaiOS did right that Mozilla didn't.
We actually:
- have been friendly to 3rd party clients developers, like Loquim (https://loqui.im/). Once WA turned on e2e encryption, the situation for 3rd party clients changed from "difficult but fun" to "mostly impossible".
- wrote a JVM in JS to run the S40 version of WA (https://github.com/mozilla/pluotsorbet).
- partnered with a company specialized in bringing android apps to other OSes (they had Windows Phone support for instance).
The only people I know who don't use WhatsApp are very privacy focused and therefor use Signal.
More roughly, my understanding of the messaging space was:
- USA: Facebook Messenger
- Japan, Taiwan: LINE
- China: WeChat
- Everywhere Else in the World: WhatsApp
And the comments here seem to basically bear that out.
I've seen a number of comments on Windows Phone since then (on HN), and one and all they emphasize how much better and nicer Windows Phone was -- from a consumer perspective -- than any other phone.
What was the failure? This isn't a retrospective that makes any sense.
As of 2019, however, 52.4% of the mobile OS market belongs to iOS, and 47% to Android[1]. Neither of our favorite mobile phone OSes have succeeded in comparison.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/266572/market-share-held...
This doesn't pass the sniff test, unless you're doing something weird like measuring the mobile OS market in dollars spent on phones.
> Neither of our favorite mobile phone OSes have succeeded in comparison.
To be clear, I have no experience of Windows Phone. I'm just bemused that 100% of comments about what it was like are so glowing. For some other product, you'd expect to see some comments saying "this was the greatest product ever to be commercially available" and some others saying "no, I had one of those, and it sucked". That doesn't seem to happen for Windows Phone.
A lot of patent fees paid to Apple and Google for every phone sold.
Windows Phone was really good and it had millions of fans. It would probably do well in today's duopoly market if relaunched but MS has lost interest in phones presently.
Windows Phone was an epic disaster in how badly it was rolled out. It was Ballmer at his worst. MS kept oscillating between whether they wanted Windows Phone to be an iPhone competitor or an Android competitor. They picked the worst of all worlds, by choosing to focus on distributing through 3rd party vendors, but refusing to allow them to make any changes to the interface, therefore basically eliminating any major vendors from adopting and promoting Windows Phone. It’s still amazing that MS was unable to unseat Android at a time OEMs were desperate for an Android alternative thanks to the uncertainty around the Oracle lawsuits (and were already paying more to MS than Google for Android! thanks to MS’s OS related patent portfolio).
Ubuntu Phone never made any sense, targeting the most expensive niche of the market as it did.
Windows Phone had great, snappy, intuitive UI (which was really surprising coming from Microsoft). However it had no apps. If you look at the top 10 iPhone apps in the app store, only Facebook and Netflix were officially supported on the platform. I recall there being (great) 3rd party apps for apps like Instagram, but there was a dearth of anything else.
They needed Samsung and HTC to have adopted them at the time.
People didn't buy it. Simple as that.
Doesn't matter how much better people think the consumer experience is if nobody's buying it.
I don’t need to do anything!
The only thing that matters is people didn’t buy it. It wasn’t a success.
No YouTube, no Snapchat etc.
With YouTube Google used their position to keep it that way.
It also wouldn't surprise me if someone told certain app developers that "that's a nice app you have there, it would be shame if there was a bug in the Play store that made it hard ro find".
When it comes to App Store I have heard it is pretty well established that you won't get featured, no matter how great your app is if it is available on other platforms.
> With YouTube Google used their position to keep it that way.
YouTube is available to anyone with a web browser, such as people using a smartphone.
> “In the software world, particularly for platforms, these are winner-take-all markets. So the greatest mistake ever is whatever mismanagement I engaged in that caused Microsoft not to be what Android is. That is, Android is the standard non-Apple phone platform. That was a natural thing for Microsoft to win. It really is winner take all. If you’re there with half as many apps or 90 percent as many apps, you’re on your way to complete doom. There’s room for exactly one non-Apple operating system."
https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/24/18715202/microsoft-bill-g...
Because this product could only be sold to a hardware maker. It doesn't matter how good it was/is, because hardware makers are smart enough now not to rely on a 3rd party supplier of an OS, in fact they've been working hard on degoogling Android as much as possible.
Another failed alternative that comes to mind is WebOS, and yes indeed, it got acquired by LG for the reasons above.
I have personally gone through carrier negotiations and they’re the reason why Android phones come with bloat ware and people go to such lengths to build and distribute minimalistic Android systems.
When the pandemic is over and the world opens again go visit Mobile World Congress. Bring a tissue because the industry might make you cry.
Wasn't it initially too slow and bloated for the hardware they released it on?
Might it have something to do with the word "OS" in the title? It's never worked except for Apple, but because Apple is selling a whole product, not an OS, it doesn't seem to hit in the same way.
Marketing something as "____ OS" appears to more or less guarantee a marketing failure.