If I could time travel into the past, in addition to preventing all the bad things (e.g. Young Sheldon), I might have told Yahoo they should flex some financial muscle while they still had relevance and worked to mobilize (no pun intended) developer time, energy, etc and perhaps even provide a baseline ecosystem of stock apps to support FirefoxOS.
A big part of the market share loss was due to monopoly and distribution lockdown of a controlled platform tightly tied to hardware, so I can certainly see the strategic wisdom of the attempt. I suspect they didn't have the resources to press forward, they had a lot less money then than they do now. Which makes it all the more maddening that Yahoo's role as a partner was so muted; it could have made the difference for both of them.
But on the other hand progress was quite good. Back in the days I was maintaining unofficial images for Alcatel Fire. Each version was a little bit faster, but you really can't do much when the whole OS is a browser running on a device with with 256MB of RAM and a single core CPU.
The Pre had 256MB and something like a 600mHZ processor. While it was no speed demon, I was always impressed with the animations and multitasking they pulled off with it.
Today, we have Mobian, postmarketOS, PureOS and many more GNU/Linux OSes for smartphones.
If I want to interact with modern society, I have to use banking apps, the NHS app, WhatsApp, numerous IoT apps... The list is endless. Many of these will refuse to run on rooted phones.
Google and Apple won. We can learn from this and hope the next big thing to come along has some competition from the truly open source side of computing.
Interact with good circles of people and stuff. I mean, it's cool that my pixel is some mini high powered TPU computer that can run apps, F-Droid etc, but I only really care about the 5g data link within it.
If any app refuses to run due to rooted phone -> open a browser go to the web version.
I know that you know these things and I'm not trying to make any point other than: no, you don't have to use those things. but if you want to, you can.
the next big thing to come is already here, Linux with its infinite mix of desktop environments, user environments, distros with pre-set up things. You can have a device use your SIM/e-SIMS.
Google and Apple's push notification system being locked for what they deem allowed and control the push tokens, browsers have push notifications too.
All I'm saying is: Google and Apple didn't win anything and there's great things like GrapheneOS, plus Google's TPU chips are awesome.
But, they most certainly didn't 'Win' and 'modern society' is crazy.
When feasible, this sounds like a great reason to switch banks. If enough people did this, banks would all offer web apps instead of forcing native apps.
Too late for what? Librem 5 is my daily driver. Would you also say that in the 90s Windows "won" and "it was too late"? Please stop with the security/privacy nihilism, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27897975
We did guess it. Google were already past their “don’t be evil” days in 2013. They were possibly better than other companies of similar scale, but the decline was already clearly beginning. People had long warned that Google could not be trusted to keep Android open in the long term, that eventually their benevolence would fade. A good chunk of the enthusiasm around Firefox OS was in breaking the duopoly and the idea of a platform that would be much harder to lock down.
The two places it's mind boggling that Mozilla doesn't have a product are (1) identity (especially as a provider to 3rd parties) and (2) instant messaging (especially on mobile).
They were important 10 years ago, they're more important today, and the existing providers all have huge privacy concerns.
Nothing says you have to track users, if you're not looking to optimize ad monetization per user.
And I daresay there are a fair number of companies who would love to get even blind exposure to Mozilla's userbase.
IMO Mozilla should just double down on the browser and do everything they can to keep it as a lifeline for Free Software devices to be able to participate on the internet as first class citizens.
Doesn't Mozilla have their own Matrix server?