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Comment by valarauca1 | Hacker News Reader

A lot of the misgivings most developers seem to have in this thread have to do with the physical hardware specs. Which I hate to use this term but this is a side effect of "1st world privilege". FireFoxOS/Phones were designed for emerging markets [1]. In the West dropping $500+ USD on a smartphone is not uncommon (Or to sell retail phones for this price). While in 'emerging markets' like China/India/Brazil/etc. 500 dollars can be 4-6 months worth of rent [2].

[1] FireFoxOS presentation at mobile conference circa 2013

[2] numbeo.com

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What really "grinds my gears" is that when you want to use a particular mobile OS, you have to go out and buy a specific piece of hardware. I want to be able to choose from a range of phones, and then select the OS for them. Even if that means the OS is installed on a micro SD card, or even a variant of the SIM card.

You can install FOS on a lot of devices, been available for a while now, same as Android itself and Ubuntu Phone or Sailfish.

What you are saying only applies to iOS really.

Forgetting WP? And even Android? Can you go out, buy a Lumia, and install a working copy of Android?

You can install Android on devices that are already running some version of Android. And some fringe cases like the HTC HD2 and HP Touchpad (I had both, the Touchpad didn't work too great). But that's far from what the OP was asking for.

That's a lot of work for a feature that probably wouldn't excite most consumers.

An OS operates hardware, hardware needs drivers, drivers need testing, this is expensive and time consuming and not very possible for all hardware, even if the parts claim pin compatibility.

Hardware manufacturers compete with each other for market. If every handset is the same compatible hardware, that just leaves build quality and price as the variables and they are orthogonal.

That means hardware people also like to add features like GPS, compass, different cameras, expansion ports, heartrate monitor, fingerprint recognition, dual-sim, etc. etc. and we're back to drivers and testing.

The PC market used to be the same way -- you had Commodore, Coleco Adam, Apple, Ti, etc. But eventually the market settled on a standard (x86 architecture), with multiple OS environments and applications available on hardware from multiple vendors. Of course you still have outliers. But I'd think that at some point a new player would come into the market, make a bunch of handset models with off the shelf features, and ship the environments separately. Just like IBM did with the PC, and the clones followed.

Maybe but there is much blood on the floor of those markets. They rallied around one OS, if you recall, and that OS manufacturer was successfully prosecuted for exploiting their de-facto monopoly. Consumers were definitely harmed.

Dell, the leading hardware supplier lead the race to the bottom and now flounders. PC commodity markets are cut-throat and it is Intel that makes the real $.

As someone who was born in one of those emerging markets, I have my doubts that people who fall in the economic category you mentioned would spend $170 on a phone. There are way cheaper options available, for as less as $40 which play music and FM -- perhaps the two requirements that people care about it. I don't think having apps is on the top of the list, but then, this is my (anecdotal) opinion.

There's a lot of range there. Have you seen our $25 Firefox OS phone initiative? We're going to cover several segments of these markets.

Oh that's great. I never knew about this. This is the price I had in mind.

And that's why you can configure it to use less RAM, to emulate lower-end hardware. (The emulation is imperfect, but it's certainly better than nothing.)

I live in the first world, and I want one of those too.

Actually one of the features Mozilla has been stressing is a FM radio player. Their target prices was 25-50USD for eastern european/chinese models.

What prevents consumers in emerging markets from buying an Android phone for an equivalent amount ($170)?

Notice in its feature it has reduced system RAM controllable by software so you can mock up reduced performance phones... like those that will be sold in emerging markets.

There are several solid consumer-facing phones in this price range. This is not a consumer-facing phone. It contains a very specific hardware profile that isn't matched by those consumer-facing phones. This is a "reference phone" containing "reference hardware". In addition, it's the phone that Mozilla is standardizing Firefox OS development on, so it will have lots of other Mozillians using it which is important to many in the Firefox OS development ecosystem.

> tell devs to buy it so they can support firefox phones.

> phone is not what users will have.

how is this better than using the emulator then?

also, how is this any different than the last 4 times this was done?

> how is this better than using the emulator then?

Well, the emulator is not quite as comfortable for testing, say, calls, or SMS, or gyroscope, etc.

> also, how is this any different than the last 4 times this was done?

I am not aware of 4 times. However, it is true that Preview/Early Access Developer Phones have been released in the past. This one is not a Preview. IIUC, this one is considered stable.

This phone is designed to be a superset of the hardware of other FirefoxOS phones. In theory, any hardware feature on another phone will also be found on this phone. Additionally, this phone has features like the ability to artificially limit the amount of ram it has, to test other device profiles.

but for 170 usd you can get android and windows phones with both better spec's and a more complete OS.

What good is a reference phone for development of Firefox OS itself and app development on that OS if you're running Android or Windows Phone? I think you've missed the point of the device!

I think the idea was to make it possible to install Firefox OS on a popular and affordable Android handset. Both Firefox OS and apps for Fx OS could be developed on it.

"...and a more complete OS." That doesn't suggest to me that this person is intending to develop Fx OS on it.

This phone isn't invented to be your daily driver. Its built as a development platform.

You wouldn't buy a AMD Opteron A1100 Development board (AMD's ARM based CPU) and bemoan the fact that for ~$200 you can buy a vastly computational superior computer. Your buying it as a development system.

But you can also synchronize on a reference system from your competitor's systems and then you can do easy comparisons.

(For example, Solaris x86 clearly favored 1-2 specific windows/mac laptops --which could be ordered on a fast track internally-- and supported the bundled devices on those laptops if the device's type was supported at all. Swapping the external reference every few years was annoying but cheap and limited the arguments to selecting among actual configurations rather than future possibilities.)

I would hope there is another reason is like getting a reliable ABI and clear licensing for the DSP side software? Otherwise, offering a better OS on a few models of android phones will be more useful now, and then again as used Android phones enter the emerging markets.

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