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Comment by suprgeek | Hacker News Reader

India is a great market for a low cost smartphone. For a long time Nokia was king, both high-end to very-low end. There are many people who are now migrating off these cheap Nokia's into these tier-two companies, such as Micromax/Intex etc.

Might as well they migrate to an open hackable platform - Two apps that really need to come pre-installed - WhatsApp & RedBus. I have been stunned when a village lady asked me if my phone had the bus schedule (the last time I was visiting). A 10 minute conversation with her changed my perspective significantly from the Silicon Valley bubble that I am usually surrounded by...

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Actually for me the missing features are

- a mail client that works well (and that includes at least push/imap idle support and SHOULD, in the RFC sense, include server side searches)

- a client for xmpp

Note that there are some apps for the latter use case, but those are either broken, incomplete, or use bosh to talk to a random untrusted server elsewhere which _then_ connects to the server you want to use.

I might be able to forgive the lack of (decent, usable) xmpp support, but at the moment the limited mail client is the feature that keeps my Flame on my desk. A smart phone without emails is .. a tough sell, if you have a working solution on another platform. Even if you WANT to make the switch.

Background mode for apps! You know, so apps can be actually useful for mobile applications.

This is the biggest missing feature by Mozilla, and it really shows their lack of understanding of how mobile apps work.

The situation on background 'services' is not ideal that's true but it's not as bad as you paint it. Since v1.0 it's possible to wake up an app with the alarm api and let it run whatever it needs to. This is used eg. by the calendar app for periodic synchronization. The future is Service Workers, and support should be there in gecko by the end of the year. Note that anyway, you should always design your service as something that can be shutdown by the OS if it needs to allocate resources somewhere else.

> Actually for me the missing features are

> - a mail client that works well (and that includes at least push/imap idle support and SHOULD, in the RFC sense, include server side searches)

> - a client for xmpp

These are the times I wish Mozilla would have Thunderbird rise from the ashes (hint: like Phoenix, that ultimately became Firefox) and develop it directly.

While I want Mozilla to succeed, I would like it much better if it spent some time and money on Thunderbird both on the desktop and mobile platforms. If there were a "Support Thunderbird" donation campaign, I would even support it monetarily.

ConnectA2, a WhatsApp client, comes bundled with the phone.

You don't catch buses in the Valley?

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