Firefox OS Shows Continued Global Growth | Hacker News Reader

Firefox OS Shows Continued Global Growth

blog.mozilla.org

165 pointst1m120 comments

I am SO excited about the possibilities Firefox OS provides. I do realize it's in early stages now, and there are many hurdles for the Mozilla team to overcome for it to become a real player in the market, but I'm crossing my fingers.

Specifically, I can't wait to see what local developers in developing countries create to improve the lives of people within their communities and societies. With the barrier to entry lower to develop these HTML5 apps (not only concerning the tech stack, but also regarding the cost to buy hardware), I expect the app development community will gain valuable members with more diverse backgrounds and life experiences.

From what I observe in myself and in those around me, I think we are best at addressing challenges we have been personally affected by. Therefore, I think great potential rests in empowering people from all around the world, living in incredibly diverse communities, to create local solutions to local problems.

Mozilla team - keep it up, my friends. I'm rooting for you!

Really well put, thanks for sharing.

>I can't wait to see what local developers in developing countries create to improve the lives of people within their communities and societies.

I can't resist the urge to plug my project here. It failed as a Show HN, but now it's very relevant: https://github.com/geomaster/beoprevoz. In short, it's a neat public transport FxOS app, specific to Belgrade, Serbia (but in theory and by design pluggable and easy to generalize to arbitrary areas), that boasts some cool features, such as Google Places/Google Maps integration, local data to make it independent of Internet access, an optimized client-side routing algorithm for shortest-path calculation, among others. Check it out, all feedback welcome! (It's even multilingual :)

Hey geomaster! Long time no see... You probably know who I am... That's a great app, mine (Wi-Fi password search) failed since Mozilla didn't want to approve it due to it sending location data to the server, so in the end it never even had the chance to enter the Telenor competition. Congrats on the app and the prizes.

I never imagined I'd run into you here, in all of places! Thanks for all the kind words and, having experienced something of a sort before, I really feel sorry for your situation with the app. I have skimmed through your websites and I see you have greatly improved in a multitude of aspects since I last saw any word from you. Keep striving for greatness, and if you wanna talk, drop me a line (email is in my profile) :)

Thank you very much. I am restarting that project for Android this time, so maybe I'll have more-ish success. I'll contact you.

i do think they're making a mistake by not providing FxOS (nightlies) for higher-end devices. they would have so much more dev talent to fill their store and help find bugs and provide feedback. i've been wanting to try it and make apps for it but there's nothing available that i can install without having to build it myself. (HTC Jewel / EVO 4G LTE)

Mozilla can't provide base images without licensing proprietary software (for the RIL primarily, although there may be others depending on the hardware).

Also the focus for Mozilla right now is on providing new low-end hardware and optimizing for that. It's possible to build and flash onto your own hardware, people on the XDA forums have done it.

Testing web apps in the simulator (or just with the responsive design tool) is totally doable right now, but it's hard to get an idea of performance without actually testing on a target device.

> Mozilla can't provide base images without licensing proprietary software (for the RIL primarily, although there may be others depending on the hardware).

how do the AOSP/CM11 devs do it?

For my device, they would just distribute the blobs of all drivers that they don't have the source to.

Well said! Congrats indeed to Mozilla for making this happen.

Does anybody know of a good resource for asking folks that work in/with developing countries what apps would make the most difference in the lives of the folks living there? Is there a StackExchange site that might fit the bill?

Unfortunately it is part of their push to lock down the web. Lock it down to legacy languages - JavaScript and HTML. Transpilation is of course not an answer, because it is not nearly same development experience. I hope mainstream platform providers and democratic solution providers such as Xamarin will keep on their good work in letting us use the languages we love, be it Scala, F#, C# on any other as beautiful.

There was a review the other day at http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/10/testing-a-35-firefox-... (I think this was from HN).

I was interested to see how they defined "growth" in revenue figures. It's disappointing to see that they're only stating launches, rather than sales and return figures, and calling that growth. But perhaps it's too early to get real figures right now.

>It's disappointing to see that they're only stating launches, rather than sales and return figures, and calling that growth.

Seeing as this is HN, and part of the start up community. I think you've falling out of touch with the modern techno-economical world ;P

Well, it's out of touch with the techno-channel-stuffing world, but some companies aren't in that. After all, Apple is, despite being gigantic, pretty much worshipped by the startup community, and it is very conservative with its figures.

I have AOTF with 256MB RAM and I'm not surprised that Cloud FX performance is a disaster.

Ouch:

The Good •Per-app privacy controls. Block an app from seeing your location, contacts, or a host of other things on your phone. •It's cheap! •No really, have you seen how cheap it is? It's $35. Off contract. That's like, really cheap.

The Bad •The software—Firefox OS was a totally inappropriate choice of operating system for this hardware. There are literally zero considerations for the speed and memory of the Cloud FX, and most of the device's really serious problems come from running software on hardware that feels well below the minimum spec. •The software (again). •The keyboard—No multitouch, no auto correct, no copy/paste. Press "Q" and "P" at the same time and the keyboard registers "Y." This ruins e-mail, searching, texting, typing URLs, and lots of other stuff. •The memory—The phone constantly runs out of memory and can't multitask. Critical background features like the alarm and checking e-mail don't work because the phone is always out of memory. •The screen—The viewing angles are terrible, and in landscape the shimmery-ness of the display is headache-inducing. •The storage—There isn't any. •The modem—You get Edge data. No 3G. Don't even ask about 4G. •The camera—Pictures look more like impressionist watercolor paintings rather than scene recreations. •The build quality—Ultra-cheap, ultra-plasticky build quality. •The performance—Performance is really inconsistent, but it ranges from moderately slow to I-think-I-need-to-reboot-this slow. •It can't keep time. There's no battery backup for the time, so if the phone resets or runs out of battery, the time defaults to last century. This silently breaks all apps that use a secure connection. •There's no GPS. •Firefox crashes all the time.

The Ugly •Anyone who had this as their first smartphone would swear off smartphones forever.

Much of the bad is cultural. Americans are impatient with devices, and feel frustration/anger when they don't get instant gratification.

Others are more adaptable, more patient, and content to learn to use the device as it must be used to work correctly.

Job would smash this phone, at least he would only be out $35.

Most of the world lives with dumb phones and don't dissolve into childish fits. How to explain that?

Save $5 and get a phone that actually works.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B004ZLV4JG/ref=sr_1_1...

Edit: I want FFOS to succeed, pretending that this phone is usable will not help that goal.

That phone sells for 500+ in the third world...

Sounds like a business opportunity.

For many it is...

That's just it, though. If a "smartphone" offers a worse webbrowsing experience than a "dumb phone" with Opera Mobile that runs well on its resource-constrained host, why buy the smartphone?

Most of the 3rd world lives with dumb phones that work well for the tasks they are designed to perform which are to make calls and send text messages. The device in question is not able to perform any of the above named tasks without running into problems. This would frustrate anyone no matter where they live

If the 'problems' are lag and failure to multitask (as listed) then they are only problems of patience, as I mentioned. This does not frustrate anyone; it frustrates folks who feel entitled to the best.

Except a 5 year old Symbian phone is capable of multitask without any issues.

Which matters only if you've ever owned one.

Asia, the market intended for Firefox OS, is one of the biggest ones with feature phones and Symbian devices.

Maybe because they have more people there? Most people, even there, own non-smart phones.

It's weird how Americans are apparently the only group that it's perfectly acceptable to criticize in completely malicious and baseless ways.

I'm an American, and while there's much wrong with my country and its people, you are full of shit here.

The phone performs poorly, and the excuse is to blame the "impatience" of Americans?

This comment reads like a sarcastic "It's not a bug, it's a feature." If the phone is terrible compared to the competition, people aren't going to be patient and adaptable--they're going to buy the competition.

There's competition at that price?

From that little snippet I'd say it doesn't sound like Firefox OS was tested very well on the hardware before this phone was released. Which is a real shame since one of the main differentiators I've been reading about is how much better it run on low-end devices than android.

If I were Mozilla I'd think about finding another selling point. Maybe they should rethink the product. I remember when they were first talking about it, it was going to be able to get around the carrier/OEM update problem that Android has using their layered software architecture. That fell through quickly after launch and now not only is OS not being updated and the browser isn't either. Meanwhile, Android is slowly fixing it's update problem and have already worked around it by putting much of the updates into the Play Services API's.

I thought the best selling point of FFOS was going to be branding control as it was originally going to be a white label product with only the code name Boot2Gecko and let all the branding be handled by manufacturers. But it looks like Mozilla gave up on that strategy. I'm guessing because carriers or manufacturers demanded a brand to sell.

I think a workable strategy for Mozilla would be to build a good App Store for Android using their FFOS runtime/API's. Really pour over the user experience. Make fans of the users. Then work with phone manufacturers and carriers on bundling it.

Oh how I hate the fact that while I was buying my Alcatel One Touch Fire in Poland last year I was already reading about FxOS 1.3 in the making, now I read about 2.1, but ...

When I bought it 1.0.1 was installed, half a year later when they bumped it to 1.1.1 then I was really hopefull to get 1.2 but Alcatel and the polish Telekom wouldn't release it because they said the quality is not good enough, but they are working together with Mozilla on releasing 1.3.

I've been waiting ever since, no sign of any update. I asked in the #b2g IRC channel what is up with that and nobody would tell me anything.

I have an app in their marketplace https://marketplace.firefox.com/app/feedmonkey/ it was even featured for a couple of weeks, and even though I could upgrade manually I need to stay on 1.1.1 because all the users of the app are still on 1.1.1, think of all the wasted(?) work everybody is doing which will (probably) never reach the users unless they buy a new devise.

I really like the idea behind Firefox OS, but I am really disappointed how it is turning out, and I have no plans to buy a new FxOS phone any time soon, at least not before this particular thing has been fixed.

Calling Firefox OS "the only truly open mobile operating system" is misleading. AFAIK, it still includes proprietary bootloader and device drivers. So, if I am buying Open C http://www.ebay.com/itm/Unlocked-ZTE-OPEN-C-Firefox-OS-Andro... with Android I still have to modify bootloader to install Firefox OS and I cannot compile and install a new version of Firefox OS myself, if ZTE won't release updates (judging by their previous begaviour, they won't)

I understand that Mozilla is a non-profit with a budget uncomparable to Apple or Google. I like for Firefox OS to succeed, I really do; but wishful thinking is a wrong way to do it.

Firefox OS is not as open as I would like it or what I would call "truly open".

Buy a Flame and have a better device that you can flash every night if you wish. Building is a single command, flashing a simple second one.

Works fine for me.

(Sure, the drivers are still binary blobs, but .. otherwise it's as open as is feasible, I guess)

I have an Open C and I recently manually updated the phone from 1.3 to 2.1. You can most definitely compile and install a new version of Firefox OS yourself regardless of what ZTE chooses to do. The only catch is that you need root access, and this is not enabled on the Open C by default, but ZTE provides a tool for rooting your phone with a single button press.

My understanding is that all aspects of the OS under the control of Mozilla are completely open, but manufacturers like ZTE include proprietary components and of course their hardware isn't 100% open, but Mozilla isn't responsible for that. Mozilla certainly needs to find other partners however, because my experiences with ZTE have been pretty poor thus far, and I've read a lot of negative things about Alcatel's Firefox OS devices as well.

As an aside, Mozilla needs to start targeting higher end devices since I believe that hardware experience will largely factor into the success of the OS, and the current official Firefox OS devices are pretty awful. I've also been following bugs concerning core features for YEARS now, and Mozilla has yet to address any of these. 2.1 has some improvements over 1.3 for sure, but it's missing very basic functionality like some group messaging features and a calendar application that's actually useful. A lot of the noticeable changes from 1.3 to 2.1 are purely cosmetic, and it's incredibly frustrating to see essential features get completely overlooked time and time again. The marketplace is also starting to seem completely devoid of useful applications - a lot of them are very low quality, some of them are simply shortcuts to the mobile versions of websites, and games seem to make up the majority of the applications.

Firefox OS continues to disappoint me (As it did when I bought first Firefox mobile a year back). A Blog post on Growth with absolutely no numbers is disingenuous (Even if you are open source company).

I did a little investigation since Firefox Blogpost provided where the devices are available (For India at least):

1. ALCATEL ONETOUCH: Available on Flipkart.com . Exactly one person rated. Compare them with high priced Alcatel OneTouch devices that use Android: http://www.flipkart.com/search?q=ALCATEL+ONETOUCH&as=off&as-...

2. Spice Fire One Mi available on Snapdeal. 60 People rated and 14 people wrote reviews. Comparing this with other products I would think total sales are few thousands for the device.

http://www.snapdeal.com/product/spice-fire-one-mifx1/5311267...

3. Cloud FX on Snapdeal and Intex Technologies channels. Most Likely is the device with biggest sales in India for firefox os. 3682 Ratings and 880 Reviews. 2.75 rating with 1 Star rating out numbering any other.

http://www.snapdeal.com/product/intex-cloud-fx/1356760619#bc...

Worst of all none of the Phones are 25$. They are atleast $30+. 99% of times when someone doesn't provide numbers and claim growth, they are trying to hide a failure. Disappointed that Mozilla is not being open.

Measuring whether or not a device is gaining market share is tricky. I remember iphone launching and weeks later, every website with substantial traffic had a noticeable number of visits from an iphone. Same with ipad.

At the start, there were more nokia n95s, blackberry's and other pre-iphone smartphones in the market. There were even more being sold as iphones were supply limited. But, none of these mattered because if you looked at it from a website's perspective, there were no visits. Sales don't matter.

There's something similar with ChromeOS. People like buying them and maybe owning them. They're cheap and novel and the idea is appealing. But, how many visits to your site come from a chromebook? Usually it's below the attention threshold.

I wonder if Firefox OS will be similar. IE, people could buy a $25 phone on a lark, to house a rarely used SIM or similar but not use it as their primary phone.

This isn't a problem exactly, but it might make it hard to gauge how important the platform is at any given time.

Just be sure to not mistake audience to your site with general worlds population.

First, there's a lot of aggregated data available online. Second, I think the traffic stats for chromeOS are so small right now that it probably wouldn't make it out of the 'other' bucket on most sites that don't specifically target the OS as an audience.

Who is the ChromeOS audience anyway? My perseption is that it's pretty general: Students, 2nd computers, postmen, etc. A lot of tech-savy people seem to buy them as an extra machine or just for fun.

On second thought: maybe the right metric should be 'Daily Tinder Searches' - DTS.

Speaking of usage rates for Chrome OS - We monitor traffic for many small business websites (across a diverse range of non-technical sectors) and typically see Chrome OS rank behind Linux (but slightly ahead or on par with Windows Phone/Blackberry) within our Google Analytics reporting.

I do wonder if within the "education" industry (and of course across social media sites) Chrome OS usage is much higher as students are the typical customer.

> But, how many visits to your site come from a chromebook?

A lot.

I sell SaaS where about half the customers are high school students. In my estimation, of the schools where all students are issued a device, about 1 in 4 schools opts for chrome books, and the rest use iPads.

For many reasons, I think schools should pick chromebooks instead of iPads. The laptop form factor is better, and iPads have such little memory, they cache nothing, and overload the network which is a the bigger problem for most schools.

No actual numbers of users, BUT the number of OEMs, distribution deals, carriers, and regions is impressive. Gaining distribution for handsets can be very complex. If they have managed to figure out how to do this quickly, they've really got something.

Why surprising? It fills a very existing need.

Also note that, while the press has nicknamed it $25, it's actually $33.

This is probably the price with contract (i.e., it's subsidized by the carrier and the true cost is higher)

Nope. It's actually $33, also in developing countries nobody pays more than $0.01 for a phone on contract.

I'm from a developed country and I don't know anyone who pays for a phone on top of the contract price. It baffles me how in US people get a $50/month contract + they have to pay $200 for the phone. Crazy.

Huh? What country are you from then? Every country I know a bit about in this regards (which covers a sizable part of Europe) has 'get a cheaper contract but still get a more expensive phone by paying up front for a part of it' options.

Alright, I wasn't entirely clear - yes, you can get a cheaper contract and pay a bit upfront for the phone - but I don't know literally anyone who does that. At least in the UK since you can get pretty much any phone model for 30-35 pounds a month people just do that rather than get a 20 pounds/month contract and pay anything upfront for the phone.

Because the phones are $600? At $50/mo it would take an entire year to pay for just the phone before any revenue could be used for actual operator business.

Yeah. That's exactly how it works. Me and all my friends have top-models of different brands, and I don't know a single person who paid anything upfront. HTC One here - 30 pounds a month contract. Iphone 5S - 35 pounds a month contract. LG G3 - 28 pounds a month. All of these prices roughly translate into $50/month - so why would you pay anything upfront?? And just because a phone costs $600 on the retail market don't assume that operators pay anywhere near that.

Everyone I know just buys phones outright and is on giffgaff at around £12 a month... Different demographics I guess.

What do you do when you want to break the contract? I.e., after 6 months you decide to switch carrier? Now what?

On O2 you just pay off the phone, and then break the contract whenever you want. There is no early termination fee.

Just to drive gambiting's point home, here's EE's phone selection: http://shop.ee.co.uk/mobile-phones/pay-monthly/gallery

The nearest to the $200 upfront is the £150 upfront for the "iPhone 6 plus 128GB", although that's then about $100 a month. For the very latest top-end phone. All the others have tiny or zero upfront fees.

They have to pay the smallest possible amount, in my country $0.01 (not in US dollars, of course)

they try to milk it (and it appears to work)... there is always pre-paid-no-contract plans BYOD

What the fuck? the price of the article is '$25', and all the links they give show a 80€ => $100 tag price...

http://www.materiel.net/smartphone/?f[11037]=Firefox+OS

http://www.cdiscount.com/telephonie/telephone-mobile/zte-ope...

http://www.rueducommerce.fr/Telephonie/Smartphone/Smartphone...

http://www.webdistrib.com/cat/Smartphone-ZTE-Open-C-Night-Bl...

http://www.ldlc.com/telephonie-gps/telephonie-portable/mobil...

The cheapest devices ($25 are $35) are sold exclusively in India and similar low-income countries, AFAIK. In the western world, you can only get Alcatel, ZTE, etc.

They're being sold on eBay as well (by resellers), but never bellow $65. I wonder who's buying them.

People in other countries who want to check out these phones.

Is is the same as the ZTE Open C Firefox Phone? because I tried it and it's pitiful. IIRC it's £60 in the UK.

Don't bother with that phone, it's useless.

Form the point of view of the folks who never use a smart phone before, this $35 phone is probably very good.

Just as win3.1 might be very good for someone who only use DOS before.

I disagree on both accounts actually. I hated Win3.1 with a passion, everything ran like crap as it tried to do too much on computers that weren't ready for it, 99% of the time (only by the time of 3.11 for WorkGroups it started being decent). I was definitely happier working on DOS (DRDOS 6, MSDOS 5, DOS/V) at the time using protected mode.

This is a bit of the same thing. A smartphone so poor, it will make you love your dumbphone and your computer a lot more. Tries too much on hardware that just cannot deal with it.

Shame, because some of the ideas are really necessary right now. Like OS-level control of app privileges as standard, network control, privacy controls... absolutely essential. I'd very likely get a high end Firefox phone despite of how terrible the current phone is, if it performs passably. There was talk about that (and tablets) earlier in the year but I haven't seen anything.

Seriously? It's my main phone. It has drawbacks, clearly, but it's quite sufficient for my needs.

Seriously? back at you. It's absolutely terrible, fails as a phone and I would rather have no smartphone than using that.

http://www.snapdeal.com/product/intex-cloud-fx/1356760619 and http://www.flipkart.com/alcatel-onetouch-firec-4020d/p/itmdy...

Its Rs 1999 (Roughly $32)

In developing countries you can get feature phones that are more powerful, offer real native apps, a web browser and cost a similar price.

In other countries, Android and Windows Phone devices are already in the 100€ range. Specially if one is not looking to buy the very latest models.

Personally, I think it would be better to focus resources elsewhere.

That is thousands of proper native apps, that are available today.

I actually dislike Firefox OS, not because of the lack of apps or the architecture (code a new launcher in hours, without having to learn Java), but simply it was horrendously slow.

I had the Geeksphone Keon, as part of the Firefox OS challange from my local mobile carrier, Telenor.

I'm ignoring the battery, since this was a developer phone, but it shipped with a corrupted OS that didn't show any icons and I had to upgrade it to the latest version (stable, I might add), and then apps would close, it was really laggy, camera rarely worked, the music player also rarely worked properly, and the whole phone just reeked of unfinished software...

The phone has long since died (corrupted itself beyond repair), and I'm unsure how the new Firefox OS works (the simulator doesn't simulate the device itself, so it's not a good way to test the OS) but if it's the same... Nope.

Did you expect anything else from JS and HTML5? I mean it's an OS, not an interactive document.

I think the idea of an HTML5 runtime that integrates well with an OS is a great and powerful concept. However I'm not certain about an entire OS being restricted to that runtime - at the end of day, tricky situations arise and in those instances developers need options.

Is there some technical detail in Firefox OS that makes it a good choice for cheap phones? I've come to understand that it's not particularly lightweight, but am I wrong?

Maybe not a technical detail per se, but as far as I can tell they're gambling on not having to pay the usual Android patent license costs to the likes of Microsoft.

Firefox OS can run in 128MB or RAM. It runs better in 256MB RAM. Android requires 512MB RAM.

We can argue about "require", but Android phones exist at the same price point that also operate with only 128 MB of RAM, e.g.:

http://www.amazon.in/Jivi-JSP-20-Black/dp/B00NOV3NQU

(Android phones with 256 MB of RAM are quite common.)

I admit I haven't searched very hard, but I am yet to see a 128 Mb Android phone that I would consider usable.

Go Firefox OS! Save the world from the "apps"!

LOL, by locking us into using a limited set of flawed legacy scripting/markup languages?

Go on, un-locked user of proprietary system apps that do not run anywhere else.

Personnally, I would also love to have a second phone like this one. Cheap, simple, just to "phone&browse". No apps.

I live in France

Not to be rude, but what stops you from buying an old android phone/iphone 3GS/any older windows phone? I can almost guarantee that they will be faster for browsing than any of these new ultra-cheap Firefox OS running phones.

You might think that, but you've got to be careful not to let old phones update. I've got a Galaxy S2 I use mainly as a wifi hotspot with a data-only sim, and while it used to have a pretty snappy UI, these days it really crawls, almost to the point of being unusable.

To be honest I've not looked particularly hard at why this is, but how well a phone runs a browser, for instance, isn't frozen in time when the phone is bought.

You are absolutely right, but a phone that is few years old and has 512MB of ram is going to load pages faster than this new $35 firefox OS phone which only has 128MB.

Could go either way, I reckon. I've got no idea what the relative CPU speeds are, for a start. At some point the newer phone will start to make sense.

Not letting your phone update maybe isn't a great solution if you care about security at all.

Users shouldn't have to choose between 'affordable' and 'currently supported'; I hope Firefox OS can help here.

You're absolutely right - it's a real pain.

I purchased a developer Peak when they first came out. I used it as my primary phone for about a month on two different occasions when I was between phones.

In theory it was nice to just have a basic, but in practice I had to tether it to my computer or Nexus 7 for anything more than a quick text or Facebook message. The OS isn't there yet (though 2.0 is getting there) and the touchscreen is a thing that constantly needed to be fought against.

What I found I was really longing for was a small dumbphone that had LTE so I could tether when I needed to get work done/browse the web

I recently got a KitKat phone, and felt instantaneously trapped in Google Play land (no improvement over Apple Appstore I guess), not a good feeling. A 'web' based OS would be a nice thing to try.

What's the difference between Android with a web browser and a Firefox OS phone? Literally nothing.

And people ignored WebOS when it was released in favor of Android, even though WebOS used HTML and Javascript for apps and was so hackable you could load a new kernel over USB, and Palm themselves gave you directions how on their official website.

Well, Android Apps run on Dalvik/ART, which is not HTML5/js but I agree, it's not a real difference, except in FirefoxOS marketing strategy, targetting ultra low end devices with heavy (heavier than ART) apps will result in an absurdly unusable system.

Well what I was trying to say is, Firefox OS apps are just web pages. Saying that an Android user is locked into the Play store unlike a Firefox OS user seems silly, because you don't need a single Android app installed to mimic the functionality of Firefox OS. All you need is the browser.

No, because Firefox OS apps are web pages with benefits :)

In particular, they can be bundled to be used offline, and they can get access to a whole host of device APIs, which I don't believe are accessible to any web apps on Chrome for Android: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Apps/Build/App_permissio...

An Android phone is actually quite usable without Google's app store, using alternatives like F-Droid and Amazon. You can't say that about an iOS or Windows phone.

Good point. I forgot about non Google Play 'distribution'. I just wish it was the norm :)

Go to your local Leclerc or Darty, or by at LDLC, CDiscount, etc :)

At this point, I think Mozilla really needs to: 1) launch a high end phone, capable of competing in specs with the Nexus 5 and the like; 2) release the first Firefox-OS tablet, which would be a prove very valuable to kiosks.

What is the advantage of releasing a high-end phone?

They've made a sensible strategic choice to target a low-end market -- probably the place where firefox-os has the best chance of competing with Android. Trying to have a high-end flagship would dilute their branding and divert their dev efforts.

> What is the advantage of releasing a high-end phone?

Developers use high end phones.

Developers would be better off trying their apps on a $25 phone. Of course you might want to use a more powerful device for development, but the risk there is that low-end testing and code optimisation is left as a last minute step.

FxOS tablets already exist [1]. The Flame and ZTE Open C are higher end devices than the device talked about in the OP. Not quite Nexus 5 level (more Nexus S I think?) but are mid-range.

I'd like to see more pushing the envelope of what HTML applications on mobile devices are capable of. Currently devices use the Facebook, Mobile and YouTube mobile sites. These don't make great use of HTML APIs. There is little in the way of offline support for example.

I'd like to see developers, or Mozilla, provide versions of these applications that are equivalent to native. I don't think there is much missing in the web platform to make this difficult.

[1] http://benjaminkerensa.com/2014/05/02/unboxing-first-firefox...

Firefox OS has a huge advantage when running on low-memory phones. The most memory intensive thing typically run on a low-end phone is the web browser. (Or an app that wraps a browser, like Facebook). So the ability to run a web browser is the limiting factor. Every other OS has to have enough memory to run a GUI + a browser. Since Firefox OS uses the browser for its GUI, it theoretically can run smoother in 128MB or 256MB of RAM than any mainstream smartphone OS. IMO, Firefox should concentrate on the areas where it's intrinsic advantages lie.

Ever heard of Series30, Series40 and Symbian mobiles?

Native apps + browser, best of both worlds.

i agree. I bought one of these (Intex) instead Nokia 109 and i regret the decision now. The phone is useless even for basic phone purpose. But hey i am now using twitter device. The battery come for about 4 hours with nay app running.

I did have the word "theoretical" in my post. An "Opera OS" phone could probably work with 64MB...

That doesn't seem to be the case at all according to the ArsTechnica review: 128MB cripples the phone to the point of near-useless.

The original iPhone had 128MB RAM.

The native apps on the original iPhone were incredible. The browser, not so much. Worlds better than the competition from 2007, but in 2014 you would certainly notice the extremely slow Javascript interpreter, the missing HTML5 capabilities, the missing phone API's, and the inability to hold more than one web page in memory simultaneously.

A 256MB RAM, in volume, would cost about $2.5-5 in volume. If that's the only difference between Android with 512MB(which is very usable) and FirfoxOS device, that doesn't sound like a lot.

Also opera/opera-mini offers much better performance on mobile than mobile firefox,and opera mini is very light on ram(maybe 30MB-40MB). So while i haven't tried, i wouldn't be surprised to learn that running opera mini on a 256MB android offers better performance than FirefoxOS.

one of the nice things about their current position is that the hardware catches a lot of the blame for the overall experience. People expect next to nothing from these phones due to their price, and when they work better than was ever expected it looks favorable.

it may be in the interest of firefox-os to compete with the low-end market for the time being, where expectations are low, while polishing the OS for release on a high-end phone when high-end features are thought out.

The title isn’t right. The Intex phone I assume it refers to is an Intex phone, not a Mozilla phone. The actual title should be what the press release title is: ‘Firefox OS Shows Continued Global Growth’

Can it run Android apps?

http://www.appsurfer.com/

It only "runs" webpages.

So true, even marketplace apps are just shims around web pages. I have been using Firefox OS for about 2 months and this is one of my biggest complaints. Apps are just websites, no more, no less.

Search for ":packaged" in the marketplace to find apps that are not shims around web pages. But in general, there's nothing wrong with good web pages if they provide offline support... What is still frustrating is that discovering those good ones is a pain.

I disagree for a couple of things, unfortunately.

For 'apps' I might (mostly) agree, but some apps provide services. And that experience is quite bad so far. Think IM (and even the email client is not there yet => IDLE/Notifications/Server Side Search)

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