Mozilla gives up on producing $25 smartphones

It was inevitable. Not because they're $25, but because they're not built on the thinnest and leanest software.

If they were uber-cheap phones that were built entirely on a thin Linux kernel that contained 4G radios, I'd buy one. It's why I'm buying the OnePlus One. Unfortunately, Mozilla forces the HTML/CSS/JS stack onto everything they build, and an underpowered embedded environment really just doesn't match up with that ideal. "Adding support for 'key [Android] apps'" is also a bad idea, because now they get to play the gatekeeper on which apps are "key". There's no good way to put the Web on underpowered devices, and I think that's the way it should stay.

"The Web" is an inferior platform for realtime interactive applications because it's not built from the ground up for efficiency.