So I guess the question is what made KaiOS able to succeed instead of fail if we're saying the problems FirefoxOS faced weren't execution? Was it simply different timing and now more operators are willing to partner?
Then Mozilla's leadership didn't have the patience to wait for the right opportunity.
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.
The only people I know who don't use WhatsApp are very privacy focused and therefor use Signal.
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).
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.