I used Firefox OS for 30 days and it made me want to quit phones | Hacker News Reader

I used Firefox OS for 30 days and it made me want to quit phones

digitaltrends.com

95 pointsmsh99 comments

I haven't used Firefox OS, but I've wrote PhoneGap apps for iOS and Android, and the biggest problem is just that it puts the developer experience before the end user experience and that seems backwards to what makes a great product.

Yes, using the same code everywhere is cool, but if it takes longer to load, is less responsive, and has a worse experience, you have saved yourself time, but made something worse.

I imagine it like a 3D printed plastic hammer. If I want a cheap toy for my kids maybe it's great, but if I'm putting a new roof on my house I want a real hammer, forged in steel, etc. You know, so that I can have the best tool for driving nails into wood. I don't care that it would be cheaper/faster to make a plastic hammer, I care about a tool that is great.

I know that properly executed and with enough processing power, maybe performance is a mostly non-issue, but in my experience mobile JS dev isn't there yet and it's not remarkably better this year than last.

I hope this Firefox OS thing works out for Mozilla, but until the perf issues are solved, it's not going to be too exciting.

I think you're looking at it backwards: App consumers aren't interested in well-crafted apps. Consumers treat mobile apps like "gladware": they want cheap and disposable/replaceable. This plays very well with companies' desire for cheap production. Hence the steady march toward the commoditization of web app development and the "war" on native, especially in the mobile space.

I completely disagree with you. What's the evidence for this?

my experience is a combination of the two : consumers want (and have) cheap, disposable, well crafted quality apps.

I'd turn the question around: what's the evidence they want well-crafted apps developed with native SDKs or otherwise?

I don't think there is anything like evidence (in the scientific sense) for either position.

I do think the ratio of free to free+IAP to up-front-purchase apps supports my contention rather than the other--people get what they pay for, and they apparently don't want to pay very much for apps. To my mind, this means they don't want to pay for the development effort required to sustain well-crafted apps (or else they believe the development effort required to be either less than what it really is or else that it's overpriced).

This is of course a generalization; as such there are exceptions.

Whether or not people want to pay for apps or not has nothing to do with whether they desire polished apps. Most people don't know a thing about development and the effort required to create a good app, but do seem to appreciate quality.

I don't have good data on this either, but from personal experience here these apps have spread like very quickly through my circle of (iPhone-using) friends:

  Square
  Instagram
  Clear
  Snapchat
  Letterpress

These apps all have something in common, which is that their creators clearly put a lot of care into their products. Most of them still manage to be free, except for Clear.

During the Apple Maps debacle, none of my friends used Google's web app, but many downloaded the native app as soon as it was available.

I really don't understand how you can think that "App consumers aren't interested in well-crafted apps." If you're right, then how do you explain the success of Apple and the developer community surrounding Apple?

Apple's demographic and target market consists primarily of affluent consumers (high discretionary income) who have a history of spending more than the average consumer for products without regard to quality or functionality. They are not representative of "most consumers" by any measure.

I mostly agreed with you until "without regard for quality or functionality." Either way, apps are extremely inexpensive for the effort put into them compared to say, a cup of coffee. There are also a lot of free or ad-supported apps, which means that price is likely not the main differentiator between two apps. And if that's true, then what else can you use to evaluate an app but its usability?

Do you yourself value cheap and "disposable" apps more than well-crafted ones?

I believe there is always a niche for well-crafted apps. They might not always be the most popular, but often they have higher margins and more passionate users.

Also, companies like Evernote specifically do native apps because they offer a better experience and that leads to happier users, better conversion rates, and ultimately more money.

> the "war" on native, especially in the mobile space.

I actually think its the complete opposite. eg, Facebook, Linkedin

https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/under-th...

http://venturebeat.com/2013/04/17/linkedin-mobile-web-breaku...

They tried web-based apps. They said the experience isn't what people expect as with native.

Why do people stop with this assertion? Why not ask why the experience isn't as good? Who controls the web experience on mobile? (Overwhelmingly) the same companies that control the OS. The web experience simply isn't as important to those companies. There isn't much competition driving the experience to get dramatically better.

This is exactly why Firefox OS exists. Because the web had become stagnant on mobile due to a lack of competition.

Really? I think it's because mozilla foundation is awash in money and egos and answerable only to itself.

Your first assertion is highly subjective, but compared to all the other mobile phone players I'd say it's laughable.

Your second is demonstrably false - both the Mozilla Foundation and its wholly-owned Corporation have awesome boards of directors, and from my experience (having worked and volunteered for Mozilla for many years) the leadership is extraordinarily sensitive to outside advice and criticism from people outside the organization as well as inside.

Mobile has incredibly high barriers to entry, and breaking into it is not easy nor simple, and is not going to happen overnight. However, moving mobile away from locked-in native platforms and onto open standards is a laudable goal in my opinion, as is making inexpensive, capable devices for the next billion people who are coming online.

Somehow I think the next billion people will get their devices with or without mozilla.

Unless Firefox OS is going to add additional APIs that make essentially make web applications proprietary I'm not sure what your point is. The problems with HTML5 development for mobile applications are well known and are the result of an impedance mismatch between the document model and the native controls that the user expects to use on the platform. Simply trying to replicate a native application rapidly introduces complexity which isn't helped by the generally slow performance of DOM interactions with javascript on slower mobile platforms.

Do you think that every vendor purposely downgrades the mobile experience(even vendors like samsung which don't have a reason to favor native vs. web apps)? It doesn't make sense to blame mobile safari, chrome, and ie mobile when google, apple and Microsoft put a lot of resources into their development.

Firefox OS is adding new platform APIs and developing them into web standards: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Apps/Reference#Firefox_O...

> Do you think that every vendor purposely downgrades the mobile experience(even vendors like samsung which don't have a reason to favor native vs. web apps)? It doesn't make sense to blame mobile safari, chrome, and ie mobile when google, apple and Microsoft put a lot of resources into their development.

They put far fewer resources into the web on their devices than they do the native sdk. For example, last year Google created "Project Butter" because people were complaining about touch performance on Android. There is no Project Butter for Chrome on Android, even though it has touch responsiveness issues too. Why? Because the former costs them sales of phones and the latter does not.

This is why Firefox OS is important. They are putting all of their resources into making the mobile web better which, hopefully, will lead to a better mobile web on other platforms as well.

I don't think consumers want cheap and disposable. They want faster and sexier, and they want to do what they're already doing, but better. That could mean cheap and disposable, that could mean more expensive but more solid. It also varies from customer to customer.

I don't think this is quite as clear-cut as you say it is.

As well, I think this march is a march fueled by developers, developers who are looking to do what developers are always looking to do: to make developing easier. I don't think it's external pressure fueling this move towards the web, it's developers desire to move towards a more universal/simple platform. If something else had come along before and been able to offer a better "universal runtime" than the web, we'd all be using that. But it didn't, so here we are, taking the path of least resistance.

>I think you're looking at it backwards: App consumers aren't interested in well-crafted apps. Consumers treat mobile apps like "gladware": they want cheap and disposable/replaceable.

No they don't. They might like them cheap, but they also want them good. Good apps sell more.

Treating your customers like they want cheapo bs is not a business model.

The iPhone was built on this concept in 2007, that applications on a phone should be accessible through a web browser alone. Apple re-thought that idea, but I wonder if mobile HTML5 would in a better place if they had not.

I suspect mobile HTML5 would suck if Apple hadn't started out expecting web apps to be the only option for third party developers. Where has all the alleged competition from android, palm, rim, and microsoft generated advances beyond the huge slew of stuff apple has done?

> I haven't used Firefox OS, but I've wrote PhoneGap apps for iOS and Android, and the biggest problem is just that it puts the developer experience before the end user experience and that seems backwards to what makes a great product.

I strongly disagree with your definition of "user experience". I believe that changing phones and having to install different apps, with different UIs, or possibly doing without one because the new phone doesn't have an equivalent, is a bad user experience.

This is my opinion as a user, not as a developer.

So, as a user, you don't change phones to one that forces you to do without your favorite apps, learn a new UI, and so on.

The fact that I need to worry about this at all is a bad user experience.

Because you expect to buy any product at any price and for everything to Just Work — fantasy.

You must have a really tough time renting cars.

Or using remote controls.

So you prefer an objectively worse experience across all two serious platforms in case you switch?

How often are you jumping between iOS and android that this is an actual, real concern?

I disagree that all web apps are "objectively worse". I use HackerWeb[1] because I believe it to be better than any of the Android apps I've tried..

[1]http://hackerwebapp.com/

To be perfectly fair, HackerWeb is the best web application I'm terms of cross platform performance I have ever ever seen.

Edit, wait oops I thought you meant http://hn.premii.com but HackerWeb is well done too!

"To be perfectly fair" implies that it shouldn't count. Does the Premii app demonstrate what can be done given the effort?

To achieve those results requires a lot of effort, and hardcore optimisation. Native coding gets you the same results, minus all that effort (as long as you're okay with targeting one platform), so yeah I was sort of saying it doesn't count IMO :)

That said, I'm building all my applications using web tools, Facebooks React allows for some amazing native performance, cross platform! If the views are decoupled enough, you can get two UIs with the exact same logic client and server side, with near native performance to boot.

Now it's not there yet, but it's super close, and once tooling is built up to tackle this use case with the new tech and architecture (client side), then I think it'll be a very big deal!

It seems to me that switching phones is .0001% of the user experience. Loading the app, tapping things to switch views quickly, etc is the vast majority.

Of course, many users don't think about lock-in until they buy a Roku and discover all those movies they bought on iTunes won't play on it, but I think about it every single time I install an app. That's why I prefer apps that don't burden me with the worry.

User using multiple applications on a single phone is quite a lot more common use case than user using single application on several phones. I'd opt for making the common use case consistent.

> Yes, using the same code everywhere is cool, but if it takes longer to load, is less responsive, and has a worse experience, you have saved yourself time, but made something worse.

You see, this isn't an issue with the latest, incredibly fast phones. And all phones are getting faster, so this becomes less and less important.

While FF OS does sound pretty bad from the descriptions in article, I'm willing to cut it some slack.

Sounds like it should not have been released at this point, to me, but the biggest benefit (IMO) of open-source software is that things can get patched. And if you look at the activity on the FF browser, it can happen very fast.

This article encouraged me to clone the source code and play with it -- but after nearly 20 years of software development I'm starting to learn that my eyes are bigger than my stomach. Still, for anyone interested: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox_OS/Building_and_...

Now, I would like to start hacking on the browser at some point... http://codefirefox.com/

In conclusion, I feel that their release process (like don't release until it works properly) is broken, but hopefully will be fixed, and I am almost glad that the product sucks, because it shows such room for improvement. I think the mobile industry, and the software industry more generally, is still young.

I picked one of these up because it was $80 unlocked, well w/in impulse buy range, and anyone w/ some webdev chops can churn out an app w/o learning [STUPID DEV STACK THAT DOESNT WORK ANYWHERE ELSE].

I wish there was some slicker FFOS hardware, but I like where the platform is going

And how is HTML any better?

This is a good example : http://fb.html5isready.com/ a fairly sophisticated facebook application in HTML. It's barely usable on my Lumia 920 (IE10), barely usable on my BlackBerry Z10 (webkit based browser) and doesn't even render properly on a Nexus 7 2012 (Firefox). All these are pretty powerful devices.

Doesn't look like HTML is working everywhere as people claim.

Moto G with Firefox. Header renders but has graphical errors. Main body of page doesn't render at all. html5isready? Funny.

I just go to facebook.com with firefox on the nexus 7 and it just works waaaaaaaaay better than this website you refer.

So.. I don't think it's an HTML problem. Turns out, facebook.com also works great on my desktop browser.

That was built in a couple of days as a demonstration, it's not a production-quality app.

It's also great if you want to go to a foreign country, or if (like me) have to visit back your native one. It has good battery usage, and it works pretty good for it's purpose (phone first). for $50 the best I could find was very old design phones (back in Buglaria) that looked a lot worse than the $80 deal from FFOS (and they were locked at that, while ZTE is open).

So I think the PRICE should be taken very seriously here. I love my Nexus, and I love my wife's iPhone, and my friends' fancy Samsung, etc. - but each one of them is multiple times more expensive than the ZTE Open.

And it might finally make me start develop more for the web (did too much C/C++ over the years).

You're right, the price is crucial. It's silly to compare it to an iPhone which costs hundreds of dollars unlocked.

I reallllllly think this author misses the point of firefox os. it is not meant to "take on android" it is meant to take on feature/dumb phones. People who store their contacts on their sim card, and pay for things using SMS.

What's wrong with storing contacts on a SIM card? Seems like a good idea, just move it to a new phone and boom, all your contacts are there.

All the cool kids sync their data in "THE CLOUD"

You are fairly limited w/regards to space.

My main problem with it is the lack of enough fields to store all contact information. If you have, for example, a person's home phone number and mobile phone number, you end up using two entries instead of one, because last time I checked (and at least on the SIM cards I own) the storage format is a simple two-column list: Name-Phone. Furthermore, there are strict limits on the amount of characters one can insert (and the character set is very limited, too). Additionally, one can only store 250 entries or so (varies from card to card). To sum it up in one word, for me it's very unpractical. I remember having to use Bluetooth to transfer contacts from a old feature-phone to a new feature-phone because, obviously, the SIM card would not hold all the contact information I had in the old phone.

We certainly have the technology to make better cards with more storage (BTW, the space for SMS text storage on the cards I own is ridiculously small, too). But as people moved on to store information on "rich" contact systems and, more recently, in the cloud, I think there isn't much motivation to innovate in that area.

Interesting. I didn't know they had those limitations. Better off with regular SD card backups then.

Not as good as syncing to some online service e.g. Google. I recently bought a new Android phone, before that I used a Windows Phone 8 phone and before that another Android. On both the WP8 and second Android, I simply logged into my Google account and all my contacts synced in mere minutes. (On the Android, it also reinstalled all my apps, reconnected to all my WiFi hotspots etc.).

I believe a SIM card can hold 100 numbers. Many people will have more numbers than that, so that's not really a viable alternative.

Manually exporting to an SD card and then importing (which I believe can be done on Firefox OS, although exporting requires a third party app) is another option, but it's not as convenient as syncing to an online service.

Exactly. When the author mentions, "I like playing around with smartphones", he is immediately ruled out from the target audience of FirefoxOS today. Perhaps in the future it may compete evenly with android/iOS, but that's not an immediate goal.

I think that's the short-term strategy, but the long-term strategy probably is to take on Android. As it stands now it seems like Firefox OS is a good proof of concept but is lacking in polish and is a bit unreliable. I had a chance to play with a Firefox OS phone a few months ago, and I would probably opt for a feature phone over that, right now. In a year or less though, I think it could be a viable replacement.

For competing with Android, they have a lot of catching up to do, but I think it's within reach and not requiring devs to learn another api/platform to create apps for it should help them get past the biggest hurdle any new players in the smartphone OS have to contend with, which is a lack of apps.

Remember that the apps being written for Firefox OS are the first of their kind. They had to write IMAP libraries from bits and pieces of Node libraries because no one had ever tried to write an IMAP library for the browser before (of course you couldn't in the past) whereas Java has many mature libraries to choose from.

A lot of the complaints surrounding Firefox OS are stuff like this, the Mozilla guys are doing a lot of from-scratch implementations of complicated protocols

What I understand from a friend who works for Mozilla, their interest is in "the next two billion people to come online." That is to say, people who are outside the smartphone saturated bubble of the first world and who are unlikely to jump to iPhones on LTE in the foreseeable future.

This really is about a designing a system that works in the incredibly constrained and frequently unstable conditions of the developing world. If you've ever been there, you know it's a really different universe - politically, socially, culturally, economically, and technologically. And yes, all these factors influence the definition of solution correctly optimized for its environment.

Without an understanding of that environment, it's hard to judge whether or not Mozilla is hitting its marks.

I lived in Cambodia for a couple years, and my wife and daughter were born there. It is, as you say, a different universe. I agree that most people in developing countries are not jumping to iPhones anytime soon (although they all want one, Apple simply doesn't care about people who can't drop hundreds of dollars on a phone), but LTE is definitely coming. I don't at all see why they won't all be buying smartphones in the near future. At the low end, there are already Android phones selling for less than $100. What would prevent them from eventually getting down the price to where feature phones are now?

The author addresses that:

> If this was the first ‘smart’phone I ever used, I’d wonder what the hell the fuss was all about, and return to my trusty Nokia 3310 in confusion.

That is not addressing it, it is projecting his own bias into a situation he doesn't know. You are assuming because it types slowly, it isn't worthwhile to have all of wikipedia, google, and every other website out there available. For someone who has never had a smartphone, having the internet on your phone could be a TREMENDOUS deal.

> That is not addressing it, it is projecting his own bias into a situation he doesn't know.

It is addressing it, although perhaps with a particular bias. Don't try to twist words like that. And unlike people who have never had smartphones, he obviously has the experience of both having a dumb phone and a smart phone, so he knows how it is to not have things like a browser on a phone, though you might argue that that was probably in a time where you didn't gain a lot from having convenient access to the Web... but then you're starting to really draw in many assumptions about the author just because you refuse to concede any point when it comes to what you wrote. ;)

At this point I don't care! I'm rooting for Mozilla as they are most definitely the company I trust more than any other in the world. They are really transparent and it has the community support Google wishes it had.

I really hope it catches on with the years. I'm still bitter that I can only use Objective-C to make iPhone apps. I mean, objective-c!?

People wrote this type of article about Android when the first Android phone had come out. Mozilla can definitely salvage this and it's natural that it would take more iteration before they arrive at a really good user experience.

I think the big problem Mozilla face is that they haven't been left much of an opening by Android. Even if they offer a wonderful user experience, why would anyone prefer a Firefox phone over an Android phone?

Because it's a third or less of the cost of an Android.

You can get a Chinese android phone for 80usd

Reading this made me realize what a thick skin you need to put your work out there and not be phased by such negativity. It's also a reminder about the high degree of entitlement software development outsiders have.

Disclaimer: I am a Mozilla Rep volunteering with Firefox OS stuff.

Let me address some misconceptions in this article and why I think it is misguided but first lets be sure that we're all on the same page and that people are entitled to their own opinion, even if we disagree.

Firefox OS is not made to fight mid-range and high-end Android devices. Firefox OS was created with the following main objectives:

- Create a Free and Open mobile source operating that is developed in the open. Android does not fit this bill because Google only release Android source code once the job is done and is not keen on accepting contributions from third-party. Firefox OS is on github from day one and everyone is encouraged to contribute.

- Create a system based on web technologies where using nothing but HTML/CSS/JS you can access all phone features. The mobile ecosystem was becoming a closed market where each vendor had their own proprietary system and walled garden. Firefox OS is open and use open standards for development. Apps made for Firefox OS can be used in other systems with minimal fiddling.

- Create devices that were cheaper than the usual low-end Android device. The market is not the U.S. the market is Latin America, East Europe, Asia where people don't have the same budgets as U.S. In Brazil an iPhone costs USD 1000 at least where Firefox OS costs about USD 80 without contract. The Moto G device quoted on the article costs about USD 350 here.

Now with this objective in mind, lets review some parts of this article.

The phone does not have two marketplaces. There is the adaptative search that displays web apps based on a search query. You can use those apps once (open the page) or save them (add a link to them) to the launcher. The Firefox Marketplace will provide you with apps. Saying that the adaptative search is a marketplace is saying that because Google Now can search the web it rivals Google Play.

On the current version of Firefox OS being shipped you can add contacts from SIM Card, Facebook and GMail. There are apps on the marketplace to import vCards and other contact sources.

You can add email accounts from many popular providers and from scratch using IMAP or POP. There is an issue with self signed certificates meaning that on some special cases, people hosting their own email can't add the server because the certificate is not recognized. This is being addressed in the open.

Apps are made by their developers, not by Mozilla. If the Twitter or Facebook app does not work as well as it should is because those developers are not doing the necessary effort. When I say necessary effort is because its so damn simple to pick a mobile web site and just add it as an app that some developers forget to optmize the experience to be more app like with things such as appcache. The Twitter app when first launched was pretty bad, these days after some updates it became quite decent. The Facebook app still basically their mobile web version and has a lot of room for improvement. Anyway, this is responsability of the developers.

The fact that there are apps that the author considers embarrassing is a good thing, it proves how easy it is to develop for the system. Do an exercise, imagine if the world wide web instead of using HTML/CSS/JS used 6502 Assembly language and that to code for it you would need to do it in that language. How many web developers we would have? How open and accessible the web would be? One of the cool things about the web is that it is really easy to cook something that is usable. To build great experiences in the web requires a lot of knowledge but to build something that works it is quite easy. Because of this Firefox OS is approachable by hackers and new developers alike and this is reflected in the current marketplace. Another thing is that Mozilla doesn't charge you anything to be able to place apps in the marketplace and there is no SDK or special computer/OS (Apple I am looking at you) required to build apps for Firefox OS. Anyone can do it. This is good, democratic and pays well in the long run, just look how popular the web is today.

Nokia Here maps has navigation. Also, criticism about Here maps should not be directed at Firefox OS. Its like blaming Mac OS X for the lack of triple A games.

There is no fragmentation in Firefox OS. Just like you can browse the web in Firefox 25 or Chrome or Firefox 18. You can use the apps in different versions of the OS. The companies that build Firefox OS are required by contract not to wait more than six months before updating the phones. This means that in the worst case scenario, it updates at double speed than the usual competitors that have yearly updates. The vendors are updating it more quickly though. It took just some months from Firefox OS 1.0 to 1.1. Also Firefox OS is divided in three components (gonk, gecko, gaia) and updating Gaia is pretty easy.

Anyway. The article missed the point which is an open system for a cheap device aimed at emerging markets. This is not a competitor to iPhone 5 or Galaxy S4. The main competition is dumb phones and very low end Android devices that have crap performance.

You miss understood a lot of the points in this review.

* Low-end smart-phone should not do basic things such as calling and texting worse than a low-end feature phone (dumb phones). Author is pining for his old, low-end feature phone after using ZTE Open

* While adaptive search may not be a market place, if it looks like one to the user, then it will be percieved like one and confuse the user.

* Platform ecosystem is a valid critiscism. The main criticism of windows mobile is lack of apps. While that is not the systems fault, MS are being active in improving this, since they know that this is the main feature of a modern smart phone. If Mozilla don't realize this either, they are in trouble. It may not be ffOS's fault that the twitter app is bad, by users don't want it if it doesn't have a good twitter app.

* Critiscism of here maps should be directed at ffOS. Other maps exists, mozilla has strong ties with Google, Mozilla chose this one as default. Also see above. My limited experience with here maps from windows mobile showed me a great service, so maybe the author is off on this one.

I don't know what the feature phone market looks like in Brazil, but if its anything like the Chinese, then it doesn't sound like the ZTE Open beats the feature phone market.

I was getting a ffOS phone for christmas, until I realized that the only one available to me is a ZTE Open. It really does look like a crappy representative for ffOS, but if this is what Mozilla and ZTE decided on, then the software side should run more than decently.

Thanks for the feedback, let me be clear about some things from your message:

> * Low-end smart-phone should not do basic things such as calling and texting worse than a low-end feature phone (dumb phones). Author is pining for his old, low-end feature phone after using ZTE Open

Basic phone stuff such as calling, texting work pretty well. These are common things that all phones do well right now.

> * While adaptive search may not be a market place, if it looks like one to the user, then it will be percieved like one and confuse the user.

Adaptative search does not look like a marketplace, it looks like a search engine. There is a marketplace icon that launches the marketplace app which has a experience similar to other app stores. Bonus point: Our app store is open source, you can fork it and create your own.

> * Platform ecosystem is a valid critiscism. The main criticism of windows mobile is lack of apps. While that is not the systems fault, MS are being active in improving this, since they know that this is the main feature of a modern smart phone. If Mozilla don't realize this either, they are in trouble. It may not be ffOS's fault that the twitter app is bad, by users don't want it if it doesn't have a good twitter app.

Mozilla has paid staff and volunteers working on making the experiences better. Lots of the vendors are listening and improving. Remember this platform is on its first year and yet we're moving very fast.

> * Critiscism of here maps should be directed at ffOS. Other maps exists, mozilla has strong ties with Google, Mozilla chose this one as default. Also see above. My limited experience with here maps from windows mobile showed me a great service, so maybe the author is off on this one.

Here Maps is also going thru updates and is working better than before. Its a good map. I like the offline saving of maps, makes me use less internet.

> I don't know what the feature phone market looks like in Brazil, but if its anything like the Chinese, then it doesn't sound like the ZTE Open beats the feature phone market.

We don't have the ZTE open in here, we have the Alcatel One Touch Fire and the LG Fireweb. They are all similar. They perform better than the feature phones. Our main difficulty right now is the lack of apps (its getting better) and the quality of some apps (its also getting better).

> I was getting a ffOS phone for christmas, until I realized that the only one available to me is a ZTE Open. It really does look like a crappy representative for ffOS, but if this is what Mozilla and ZTE decided on, then the software side should run more than decently.

The ZTE is a cool phone but it is a low end device, you can't compare it with a heavily subsided phone such as the moto g. They have different purposes.

One thing that some people often doesn't realize is that Mozilla launched an open system with at least 4 hardware partners and 18 carriers this year. A system that promotes open standards and freedom from a community that values your privacy. Mozilla doesn't operate to generate profit and answers to no one but the users. This is a system made by people that have the same values as we do and we're moving fast.

> Adaptative search does not look like a marketplace, it looks like a search engine. There is a marketplace icon that launches the marketplace app which has a experience similar to other app stores.

The reviewer was probably right to be confused as it isn't clear from basic descriptions of the OS exactly how it works. Instead, there is buzzword fluff (HTML5! HTML5!) and marketing jargon about the 'web'. I am very technical and I still am not clear about how firefox os applications work. Are there additional APIs available to applications from the marketplace? Are applications downloaded by the launcher or does every application act like a web link, or is there a combination of the two?

You can add any web page to the home screen as a launchable icon (the "adaptive app search" lets you search through curated ones), which is basically a standalone chromeless browser.

Open Web Apps can be packaged and served via the Marketplace (or downloaded directly), and have access to new platform APIs (via javascript), that are being standardized: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Apps

There are additional APIs available to all applications. They don't need to come from the marketplace to use such APIs. An application can use the "Open Web Apps API" to install itself onto the phone (with the user permission) bypassing the marketplace. So you can distribute your own apps on third party marketplaces or on your own web page.

There are two types of applications: Hosted and Packaged. Hosted apps are normal web pages that you host somewhere and access from the device. If you use appcache and responsive design, they will provide an experience like what native apps provide in other platforms. The packaged apps instead of being hosted are packaged and offered on the marketplace. Its basically a zipfile with your HTML/CSS/JS, when it is installed this zipfile is copied to the device and sandboxed.

There are three security levels. Plain, Privileged and Certified. These security levels govern what APIs your app can access. Hosted apps are always plain apps. Packaged apps can be plain apps too but they can also be privileged apps that can access an extra set of APIs or certified apps that can access every API on the device. Only Mozilla and its hardware partners can build and deploy certified apps due to security reasons (you don't want an app with the ability to send SMS or make calls without user interaction).

So in summary, you can have plain web links in the launcher and you can have links to packaged apps that are actually on the device. Both things are possible and indistinguishable from a user point of view. Both solutions work offline if you use appcache with the hosted app.

If you want to know more, I've written a Free and Open eBook about it called "Firefox OS Development Quick Guide" available at http://leanpub.com/quickguidefirefoxosdevelopment/ you can also hop by Mozilla Developer Network portal for Firefox OS at https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox_OS

Given that the post we're all discussing is from someone who is ostensibly pretty savvy about these things, I think it might behoove the folks working on Firefox OS to rethink aspects of the platform user experience.

> Basic phone stuff such as calling, texting work pretty well. These are common things that all phones do well right now.

While this is true of the OS, this doesn't hold true for the ZTE phone itself, hardware wise. The touchscreen doesn't register every touch, and performance is slow all around.

Still, when I run the Firefox OS emulator on my computer, it's blazing fast. Much faster than the Android emulator, which has had years of developments / optimizations.

I'm really looking forward to Firefox OS on decent hardware. :)

Perhaps support installation on the Samsung S4 & HTC One, which are both popular developer phones due to their Google Play editions.

> Here Maps is also going thru updates and is working better than before. Its a good map.

Here Maps is not a good map:

Go to here.com. Search for "東京" (Tokyo). It jumps to ... Beijing. ><

Ok, try using "tokyo" instead. This time it actually jumps to Tokyo. Zoom in to see what's around ... and ... oh wait, there's essentially no content. According to here.com, Tokyo has no buildings and only 5-6 roads in the entire city. For Nokia, one of the biggest and most important cities in the entire world is basically an empty featureless plain.

I'm not exaggerating, look for yourself: http://here.com/35.6798245,139.7395558,15,0,0,normal.day

Essentially unusable. Good choice Mozilla!

[It shows a few rail lines too (though a very small fraction of those that actually exist), but when I zoomed in I realized that they're not located correctly relative to the other few landmarks that are shown... ><]

There's absolutely no reason the default map for ffOS shouldn't be powered by OpenStreetMaps

This. Great point!

"Firefox OS was created with the following main objectives: - Create a Free and Open mobile source operating that is developed in the open."

If the goal is to be completely open, why use closed-source mapping at all, including Googles offering, when a good open equivalent exists?

I'm glad to hear that the basic ffOS phones perform better than low-mid-range feature phones.

I don't think my initial post made it very clear, but my critique of the ZTE Open was based on what the reviewer said (so basically hearsay) and he didn't seem impressed with that phone compared to his old Nokia.

I'm very excited about ffOS, and do hope for its success.

What made me jump with my initial post was the way you were excusing its shortcomings. Saying "it's not Mozilla/ffOS fault" that this and that don't work is a very dangerous stance to take. It is also one that most consumers will not understand.

I very much appreciate this comeback. Very good points.

First thank you for the phone. I'm regular Nexus user (US, California), but I bought the ZTE out of curiosity. Month or two ago a friend of ours (in their late 60-ies) had to fly and stay in Italy for 1-2 weeks. They asked me & my wife (being younger in our 30-40-ies) for a phone and whether it'll work in Italy. I gave them the ZTE, explained how to change the SIM card in Italy - and they've used it without any problem. Yes - there was only one photo taken, but they were able to use it for it's real purpose - a phone! - And on top of that I encouraged them to not get overly panicky if something happened with the phone - after all it's just $80 bucks. So they were pretty good testers, and I got back the phone and it still works.

I'm planning on using it in Bulgaria (my home country) and I feel it'll serve it's purpose - e.g. talking on the phone.

As for apps - there could be some improvements - for example if it's possible to clearly separate online & offline apps - so I know what's gonna work on the plane, or when I don't have connection - or if there is some way to "wget" the app in (if it makes sense though).

Thanks for providing one more good alternative!

I'm really glad you are developing Firefox OS, I think we need a free and open mobile OS.

But I think you really miss the point of the review. So many of your responses seem like telling the user he is wrong for wanting what he wants, and if he only wants a different thing, it'll be great. But what he wants makes a lot of sense to phone users (rather than developers).

That is going to work only if he (and most of us) are not your target market, but you do have a target market in which your product is successful. I hope you do.

I totally really hope you guys are succesful. I hope this post doesn't represent your lack of understanding of what phone users want -- at times it sounds like you're saying, hey, firefox OS wasn't created to actually be good to use, it was created for ideological reasons. That's not gonna lead to success.

> The fact that there are apps that the author considers embarrassing is a good thing, it proves how easy it is to develop for the system.

Imho, this is not always a good thing. I think that Apple's decision to force developers to use ObjectiveC actually drove the app quality up - making the development process "just a bit harder" than it should forces developers to think more before "just coding it" and also keeps the bad developers away.

(Of course, the "just a bit harder" is a hard equilibrium to get and Apple only pulled the trick by being the first to show up and swallow a big chunk of the market pie so what's allowed for them is not allowed for others...)

You are right, but FFOS 1.1 can't compete with actual feature phones. I will explain why I think so. But first, I'm a Mozillan, a Webdeveloper and FFOS lover. My iPhone broke a month ago, so I started using my Alcatel One Touch Fire. I used, and use, it as my main phone by now. Things happened till now:

The clock app crashed over night. So no alarm in the morning. I woke up to late, realized it and started the clock app again. Alarm did sound - but way to late.

The "phone call" app crashes many times. Sometimes it crashes after the third ring tone, some times it crashes during a call. Bad.

email doesn't really work with iCloud. The mail app pulled all emails onetime, and that's it. Can't get any new email. If I send a mail, sometimes the text content arrives as mime.txt attachment.

Contacts. I have many contacts. If I open the contacts app to get a phone number, it seems to load async. I scroll down (laggy), find the contact, tap it and it opens the wrong one. Because a second before it tapped, it loaded more contacts.

SMS. I get 5 SMS from one friend... and 5 notifications. To hide them, I had to open the notification center 5 times, tap a notification 5 times and close the SMS app 5 times.

So FFOS isn't better than any feature phone I know. I can suggest every Mozilla Rep to use it for one month as your main phone. Give your high end phone your girlfriend. And use a ZTE or Alcatel, no geeks phone! They have more memory!

It's like Android and iOS the early days. Doesn't make much fun to use it by now. But it will get better over time.

Firefox OS isn't aimed at Android, as the article implies. I don't think it's even meant to be aimed at something, not even at dumbphones.

The intent is to provide a fallback digital-freedom option, should any of the mobile players ever start to exhibit monopolistic tendencies.

Firefox OS is a hedge that Mozilla is building for us.

tldr: user expected 3y old phone hardware and from-scratch OS to beat Android/iOS on quad core devices, got disappointed.

> Surprisingly, given the ZTE Open’s wheezing 1GHz single-core processor and the feeble 256MB of RAM, [Cut the rope] didn’t choke and was perfectly playable.

In what world would a modern 1GHz processor have any issues with a simple 2D game running at a low resolution?

Firefox OS remains highly unlikely to go anywhere with the current direction. They need a rethink, fairly fast, as Android has got the "we're not iOS" market sewn up at this point. (MS are about the only group left with any hope whatsoever, and that's fairly slim). As has been repeatedly demonstrated web technology based operating systems simply don't run well on mobile, especially if (like FFOS) you haven't got completely GPU accelerated graphics, which is a slight problem on lower res screens like the Open, but is completely essential for anything in the 720p or greater territory.

Chasing Chrome OS in netbook land would be enormously more entertaining, and far more likely to actually get some traction, especially with the recent negative noise about any cloud services.

I just saw instructions how to upgrade to 1.1 and it became clear how far away from prime-time Firefox OS is.

FirefoxOS consumer phones upgrade over the air just like Android and iOS devices. The developer preview phones are unlocked so the developer can opt to update by hand from his own copy of Firefox OS.

Updating is OTA.

Updating the developer phone? Harder.

I had a similar experience, only I really enjoyed the OS, but the hardware was completely unusable for me and how I use my phone, which is more like a computer than a phone.

I was so frustrated with how slow everything was that I just had to go back to my old phone (which at the time was a Windows Phone 7 - go figure). I really think that FFOS on really fast hardware would be awesome. The phone & experience actually reminded me of my old G1, but at that time, there wasn't much to go back to until I got the iPhone 3GS :)

I've bought the ZTE Open through a friend of mine from Spain.

As other have said the article is a bit biased and it doesn't stand the comparison with Android or anything really. It's a very young OS (remember the first few versions of Android?).

But, this said, my biggest gripe is the touch screen of the device in question. I really thought there would have been better touch screens available for that price. Bummer.

As Far as i am concern, Mozilla has never been great ( or even good ) with User Experience. So it is no surprise all those time they wasted on Firefox OS didn't bring any major ground breaking achievement.

However I do admire them to continue working on "Open Web". Open Codec etc. Sometimes I just wish they could be more realistic.

Flashbacks from when I got a Lumia because I thought I needed to try it. After trying to like it, I tried to avoid using the thing at all for anything and I reverted back to my S2 after a few weeks. My wife had the same reaction and got an iPhone. I use the Lumia to build apps solely now; outside that it's switched off.

Dude, it's not even a "released" phone yet, what you have is a dev version at best.

If it's sold in stores and featured in advertisements, it is released.

How about the Alcatel OneTouch Fire? Has anyone got his/her hands on it?

It has the same spec so is pretty much the same, but with a different look and slightly bigger screen

Try Sailfish.

The author seems miss the point in the comparison to the Moto G's price, since ZTE does not have a ~$50B search business to subsidize its phone business(Motorola's been losing money at a fast clip) and needs to make money on every phone it sells, it's not really a valid comparison. Android phones in the < $150 price range are quite slow too.

That said, it seems to be underperforming other OSes. I remember WebOS on my HP Touchpad had issues with scroll and lagging even on a dual core 1.5GHz processor.

Anyone know how the CPU in the ZTE Open(single core Cortex A5 at 1GHz) compares to the Qualcomm MSM7227A Snapdragon CPU Cortex-A5 in the Lumia 510(A WP7 phone)? Both have the same GPU(Adreno 200) and 256MB RAM, but the 510 doesn't seem to have that many issues with lag despite the ZTE Open being clocked 25% higher.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDZQuEn2mMM

The Lumia 510 was indeed a WP7 phone, and one the (few?) things WP got right was smooth performance on low end hardware.

> The author seems miss the point in the comparison to the Moto G's price, since ZTE does not have a ~$50B search business to subsidize its phone business(Motorola's been losing money at a fast clip) and needs to make money on every phone it sells, it's not really a valid comparison.

It's an eminently valid comparison because the Moto G exists and is sold for $179. Sure, they have advantages that let them do that. No consumer cares. (Few developers care.)

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