Fix the OS of your own smartphone (with Firefox OS) | Hacker News Reader

Fix the OS of your own smartphone (with Firefox OS)

glamour.tweakblogs.net

48 pointsjanjongboom25 comments

TL&DR: To little to late. Nokia :(

I was so looking forward to MeeGo on Nokia and was ready to switch to that stack. I had grand ideas of all the things the community could do with an open enviroment where we could place our Linux ecco-system onto a phone.

Sadly the time-frame has lapse and I am looking at Nokia with HUGE disappointment. They really should have been the Android but instead they floundered for years while Apple and Google passed them by.

Firefox OS also something that might have been special 3 years ago seems to little to late sadly. Ubuntu OS looks great if it came out 3 or 4 years ago. The community could have made it the perfect hackers phone. Now not so much sadly.

I disagree. I really want to have a phone which out of the box would have rich set of powerful, well-designed and integrated applications (Mail, Contact manager, Calendar, Notes, Todo, Maps, IM, Music player, Book reader, File manager, Alarm, Gallery/Camera).

I think Android is far behind here in current state, and all the new stuff they do is so Google-centric that it makes me sick.

So I do see a room for another OS that doesn't need tons of apps for each thing, but rather has great stack out of the box.

What you describe is more of a computer. I want that too, have done since those pocket organisers in the 90s, or the Casio Databank that played dial-tones of friends' numbers down the phone line.

What we really want, I think, is the ultimate portable computer. With a phone feature. I'd actually rather it was VOIP and everyone used that over 3/4G networks for most calls, but imagine that happening in the next 5 years - fat chance. This ultra-portable device would have the perfect form-factor of usable screen and keyboard, all somehow tucked into a pocketable device. Much like those old Psion devices, or the N900, only packed with decent hardware.

This is sort of what canonical is trying to do with Ubuntu and Unity. The phones they'll be coming out with later this year are said to be a "full os" in the form factor of a phone. The interface is made to allow you to pair your device with an external device (say screen and keyboard) and the interface adjusts its self to that form factor (think "responsive design"). So at say a public library, they could have these cheap terminals that people with phones can just walk up to and use with their phone as the computing platform and the peripherals as just an input interface. Right now every major manufacturer is putting out two OSs (chrome/android, windows/winphone, osx/iOS), and I think they're just now realizing it doesn't make sense, I mean google even touts chrome as mobile OS, why the heck are they making two? I don't think they have any plans to combine the two projects, but I really hope we aren't using java vms everywhere in the future. It seems microsoft is now rethinking windows 8 and their phones aren't selling well (for a number of reasons) and I think most likely they'll be coming out with a convergent OS soon. It'll probably be a rip off of unity or gnome shell.

The 4G standard actually specifies using VOIP for all calls - current 4G networks use what's known as Circuit Switch FallBack (CSFB), but the plan longer term is to move to VoLTE (Voice over LTE). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LTE#Voice_calls for more info.

WinPhone actually does that stuff very well. Better than Android, imho. However, you go from "google-centric" to "microsoft-centric" with Outlook.com in place of Gmail and OneDrive/SkyDrive in place of Google Drive.

But then you lose out on the app ecosystem surrounding Android, and you're in an even-more-closed space.

I mean, even if quality is a problem, there are ideological reasons to go Android over iOS. For WinPhone, the only advantage is cost - WinPhones are cheap and decent quality.

What makes you say Android is "far behind" your desired goal? That sounds exactly like what a contemporary Android device ships with.

Currently apps are badly designed, and google makes them feel half-online / half-offline, with oversimplifying interface, and pushing it's online services. Contemporary Android device has two email programs (GMail and Email), 2 photo galleries (Gallery and Photos), SMS called Hangouts (and merged in a weird way), Music player which doesn't have podcasts and also feels as half-mobile-website.

I would really like a mobile phone which would have it's base programs be self-sufficient and well-designed, not something that feels like a lightweight front-end for a cloud API. And then it would integrate with google (or others) as a feature.

What makes you say they're "badly designed"? I'd agree if we're talking about Android 2.x, but it's come a long way.

I agree with him... the key phrase for me is " well-designed", of course that is arguable and subjective.

I don't understand why it would be too late for "the community" to get an alternative OS for their smartphone to tinker with. Especially since there aren't any open-source and free alternatives yet (notwithstanding Android maybe ?).

I own an iphone 3GS and Samsung ??1500 and I really don't like them (I am not using them, their were dropped on my lap by some friends who took pity on me). My old sony-erricson Naite suits me better but I can't help waiting for something like the upcoming Ubuntu phone or a Jolla phone (or a clone ?) to get on board.

PS: I might have missed it but my comment falls flat if you consider Android the only tinkering smartphone OS (I don't have any opinions regarding that statement though).

Note that this only works with a rooted phone. In newer versions of Firefox OS, you should be able to do all of that via the App Manager [0], without needing to root the phone.

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox_OS/Using_the_App...

I doubt that, you can't push system level (certified) apps through the app manager if you're not rooted either.

This is a cool demonstration, but it also makes me wonder why this couldn't be an option in something like about:config.

Wouldn't editing source like this make your mobile software difficult to patch? If so, it seems like it would be a security risk.

True, if you would want to persist these changes you should handle your own updates (have a branch and apply upstream changes on top of it). These changes will currently be overwritten by an OS update.

> Wouldn't editing source like this make your mobile software difficult to patch?

Why? Looks pretty easy to me.

> If so, it seems like it would be a security risk.

How?

Right now I'm thinking of this in terms of git rebase. Can the package manager in Firefox OS handle local backports upstream? Would an update to a given Firefox app wipe my changes automatically by default? Would an update to a given Firefox app never occur automatically by default because of my local changes?

In other words, if I edited the source of this app on my hypothetical Firefox OS, would I be damned for the rest of eternity to either upgrade manually, or wipe my local changes? The security risk I'm concerned about is "my software isn't up to date with the latest patches therefore it is at risk."

If you feel like contributing to annoyances;

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?bug_id=984792%2C984...

Interesting flexibility. To do the same things on Android is possible, as evidenced by all the mods done to existing apps, but requires a decompiler (and you also have code signing to contend with.)

The only downside I can see is that non-native code won't ever be as efficient as natively compiled and optimised code, which could be important on a mobile device.

On Firefox OS, HTML/JS is native code ;) Seriously though, Firefox OS does some things considerably faster and more efficiently than Android and it's "native" Java stack.

Doesn't this make for a massive security risk on rooted phones? With other apps being able to inject code into any app without the user noticing.

Seems risky to me.

I think that when one of the first things to come to mind about having the freedom to easily modify your apps is "security risk", something very wrong has happened to computing society.

Apps are sandboxed. To inject something you need to plug a phone into computer with ADB.

Plus you need to remount the moment you want to actually do write actions to protected areas of the phone.

I want a phone that I can modify and change the apps. But not running everything as a web app/javascript.

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