Today 10 years ago I went to Poland to buy a Phone with pre installed #Firefox OS on. The Phone was a Alcatel One, so very shitty. Two years later I installed Firefox OS on my Nexus 5 instead.
It was a very good concept, but sadly rolled out on too shitty hardware so it never caught on.
Imo that’s what caused Firefox to lose market share to Chrome. They focused too much on Firefox OS and deprioritized browser development. In one example, it took them a long time to implement FIDO when it was already functional in Chrome.
Considering how dominant the mobile OS has become, this wasn’t a terrible gamble. Like they lost and it looks bad in hindsight, but you can’t blame them for trying. If it had succeeded, we’d be living in a very different world of technology right now.
My recollection was that the game was already down to just iOS or Android by the time this came out. Windows Phone still existed, but it was already being ignored by popular apps like Snapchat.
Plus the people who even knew about this (tech people) didn’t like the “everything is a web app” idea when Chrome OS did it, much less a smartphone.
They tried to focus on lower end devices and that’s not inherently stupid. If you only need half the ram and CPU of a low end Android phone, you can undercut Android’s marketshare - in theory at least.
focus on lower end devices and that’s not inherently stupid.
It is. Phones are an aspirational market, it’s the top end that sets market trends. It’s been the case since 2007 at the very least, and arguably well before that. Focusing on the low end was a huge mistake from Mozilla leadership, and it’s sad that nobody seems to have paid a price for it (beyond the FFOS team, which was eventually disbanded). FFOS almost killed Mozilla.
No. You’re way too euro/us-centric. There’s a huge market for low end phones in Africa, South America and large parts of Asia.
If the FFOS team would have managed to get, say, a Nigerian carrier on board and produce a viable smartphone at 40$ or so, that would have absolutely dominated the market there, especially in the early days of smartphones.
The needs of the poorer 4 billion of this planet are not met by 500+$ phones that break every six months and have a battery life of about 5 minutes.
KaiOS, a FirefoxOS fork, is used in the JioPhone in India. It is a feature phone with some internet capability, and is reasonably popular among lower middle-class users.
But they didn’t manage to - nobody will, not writing an OS from scratch. To support that level of development you need high per-device margins that only high-end devices can command. The low-end is restricted to low-margin new devices and secondhand high-end models - because, despite your preconceptions, high-quality models can work for a decade when not abused. The poor Nigerian will buy a secondhand flagship today and, if they get wealthier, a new one tomorrow; they know the market as much as anyone and will not buy something that simply makes them look poor.
The view that the developing markets will eat shit simply because it’s cheap, is an out-of-touch colonial mindset that dooms a lot of companies.
You can probably have much larger profit margins on that $500+ phone, and if it breaks quickly (and if consumers are OK with that trend which they seem to be), then you get even more money.
That said, it hasn’t been my personal experience that smart phones break easily. At least not the few I’ve had that have all lasted me 5+ years each. I’ve been using my Pixel 6 with no case, and I swear this thing tries to commit suicide constantly. If a surface isn’t completely flat that thing will slowly slide until it falls and hits the floor. I’ve had it been literally 10 minutes after setting my phone down, the thing will seemingly fly off the desk out of nowhere. It’s wild.
Anyway, this thing is built like a tank. Still works great.
You can probably have much larger profit margins on that $500+ phone
Cool, then go ahead and sell the 500$ phone to a nigerian farmer.
Getting a foot into the high end market is almost impossible, the barrier to (successful) entry is gigantic. Tackling the underserved low-end market is a much more viable strategy. And now comes the kicker: Not being able to enter a market is (and this will shock you) even less profitable than entering a low-margin market.
I really don’t intend that as an insult, but you’re looking at this from a very western, rich, profit-oriented standpoint. Mozilla never was about profit and the world is larger than our western rich kid bubble. 500$ is enough to feed a person for an entire year (or more) in some countries.
This perfectly explains the demise of BlackBerry phones too.
I think what destroyed Firefox market share was a RAM leak that took them like a year or two to fix. It consumed all of your available RAM and would bog your computer down. I know that’s what drove me away. It took like 10 years for me to come back.
Chrome won the browser war because they were lightweight, had better plugins support and it was easy to integrate with you google accounts, which were basically standard.
Firefox at the time was plagued by memory leaks and it was worse with plug-ins installed.
Ironically I switched back to Firefox years ago because Chrome was having those same issues that Firefox was had.
Once Firefox lost session manager and downthemall, it was dead to me.
Nowadays I use edge. All the benefits of chrome plus it’s leaner.
I use kiwi browser on phones for the addons, and because it’s faster than Firefox
Fxos was just android + a custom launcher, it was not a huge investment since it was just a launcher in the end. They focused on low prices, a camera to create video reports and a usable mobile browser.
This is incorrect, it was also Linux-based but completely unrelated to Android.
It was android 5 (or maybe 6 with its 2.6 versione) and the launcher was gaia
Wish something like that would come back.
Same, having competitors to Android and iOS would be great.
The are some alternatives out there. Calling them competitive might be a stretch though.
There’s a Linux phone, but I’ve heard it is a beautiful mess.
It’s KaiOS now, completely independent from Mozilla
This makes me nostalgic for my Palm Pre and webOS.
Me too. I loved webOS. Favorite phone I’ve ever had.
oh wow, i had forgotten! I too was hopeful…
This makes me nostalgic for my old Palm Pre. It was basicallly ChromeOS: Phone Edition. So far ahead of its time if was dismissed….and the hardware engineering was trash. That may have contributed to its downfall a little.
The Palm Pre was so fun. I bought a pre+ for 20 dollars towards the end.
I’m glad the ceo at the time was wise enough to recognize what she had and made the os open source, and still somehow managed to sell it in the end. Web os lives on tvs now, although many of it’s benefits are wasted there.
I never understood why they targetted low end hardware with a tech stack that’s notoriously slow (web).
This was exactly my (dumb, layman) view of things - great idea hobbled from the outset by the marriage of slow web apps with slower hardware.
To keep it affordable?
Then use something more efficient than the web stack. In the end, Android ran better on the same devices and had better software support.
I remember when Ubuntu for phones was hyped so big, then it fell flat…
can you still get that
Yep https://ubuntu-touch.io/ . Rolling out LTS 20.04 for their supported phones at the moment.
For the curious people, Firefox OS kept living in a way, being used as the foundation for KaiOS, which was a smart operative system for “dumb” phones. This one took off in certain parts of the world.
Fira font <3
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The N9 was killed by Stephen Elop, the new CEO coming straight from Microsoft with a mission: get Nokia bought off by MS.
Right from the start, he ran an explicit counter-advertisement campaign against the N9 and Meego. Whatever commercial success it would be, this would be the first and last device running MeeGo from Nokia, and there would be no support for MeeGo.
Nokia was to embrace Windows mobile OS, that turned out to be a total disaster. But indeed, after he tanked Nokia, it became cheap enough to bought by MS, as Nokia got both cheap and undsirable by any other big player due to its binding to MS bad mobile OS, and Elop got his VP status back there.
This is a shame in the history of mobile phones and OS!
Later, some former Nokia would start their own phone company reusing part of MeeGo. Jolla was born.
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Reminds me of the pre phone/tablet line with webOS and the way hp or better their short lived CEO Leo Apotheker killed it. That was such a shame great devices and great os.
I remember Ars Technica had an article or series on his bad decisions called “Apotheker needs an Apothecary” and lit into him for all the dumb things he was saying and doing. I just don’t see how you can have the manufacturing and branding behemoth HP was then, get giftwrapped Palm and webOS while RIM was still in the process of imploding, and fumble the bag so hard
I still get mad at this. I had bought Nokias for most of my life and it was probably the biggest and best european tech company and it was destroyed by that idiot.
I resent him slightly less than the idiots who appointed him CEO. To be appointed, you need to come with a plan you present to the board. Who the hell thought “let’s destroy everything that made Nokia successful so far and become a Nth Windows Phone maker!” was a good strategy??
https://seekingalpha.com/article/916271-how-stephen-elop-destroyed-nokia
Symbian OS still had a very large user base and some support from large customers. The N9 and MeeGo was getting better reviews and customer satisfaction reports than Samsung and Apple’s phones! The obvious strategy was to navigate a transition between the legacy Symbian and a rising and promising MeeGo. But since his mandate was not to make Nokia successful but rather to have bought by MS, he could trash the business at will: made it cheaper for his real employer, MS.
Seriously, that guy should have been jailed!!
This situation was revolting in every way. They destroyed the best european tech company. They had everything. A music service, a maps service superior to Google Maps, mail service, everything. It was sickening.
I would love another, more privacy focused os. I’ve tried graphene, etc, but something altogether different would be cool.
It would be great, but a big problem that I see with a new, completely different OS is… the apps.
If a new OS not based on Android launches tomorrow, it will have no 3rd party apps, and it will be very hard to catch momentum without WhatsApp, Youtube, Netflix, Spotify, TikTok, Facebook,
TwitterX (🙄), Uber… all of those apps that most people use their phone for 90% of the time.It’s what killed Windows Phone. There was a period of about 6 seconds to get in on the commercial phone OS game, and it was long gone by the time Windows made a legitimate effort (Windows Mobile phones didn’t really count - they were stuck with legacy PDA software).
Honestly, the AT&T exclusivity and the late rollout of the app store (iPhones initially only had the factory apps) were the opening that let Android in.
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i really hope these alt-mobile OS’s take off, i know theres things like pinephone and kde mobile but they’re still a little bit rough around the edges last i checked… at the same time tho maybe i should do some more digging around. i imagine someone’s made a daily-driveable alternate OS for phones at this point
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I thought this was an urban myth or a collective hysteria.
If you are still interesting in Linux phone, consider looking at PinePhone Pro. I would recommend it only for experience users and the phone experience is far from Android, but software is catching up. Check @linuxphones
P.S. writing this comment from PPP :)
Or SailfishOS! Has Android layer where apps can run seamlessly (without some hardware stuff support, like fingerprint etc.).
Want to mention that on GNU/Linux we also have Waydroid that provides Android app support :)
I know about that, but from my experience nothing really compares to the ease of use of the SFOS AlienDalvik. Though something may have changed since I last checked (1.5 years ago).
I mostly wrote it for other readers.
Also used both, I would say they are similar. But Waydroid can’t forward notifications to the main OS as in Sailfish. Sad that AlienDalvik is not FOSS :(
I know about the PinePhone Pro and I am quite experienced.
But even hardcore hairy dude like Drew Devault disavowed it (source).It seems that the main complaint is calls and SMS. I use different distro (Arch, btw) with FOSS firmware for the modem and calls / SMS work fine for me.
Are there any foss options for non-tech people?
If you mean GNU/Linux - no. But you can buy a phone that supports Lineage OS. It’s Android distribution, so you will have everything you used to have on your phone and the OS will be fully FOSS.
Thank you. This seems to be the best option at the moment. Right now I’m stuck on iPhone which I bought without realizing how restrictive their OS was. However I don’t have the budget or interest in buying a new device currently, so I’m just keeping an eye on my options.
bad link ?
Sorry, forgot that I need to use exclamation mark: !linuxphones@lemmy.ml
:)
Nah. just not properly linked instance.
We had two of these that ended up sitting in my desk at work back around that time. They were sent to us free with hopes we would port our (shitty) android/iOS apps to it. One was a bit newer, but they both just felt shitty compared to the equivalent Nexus or iPhone of the time, so I never bothered trying to use it as a daily driver. I wasn’t even on the app dev team, no one else wanted them or cared at all. Was fun as a technical curiosity though.
I remember using multiROM to install Lineage OS, Sailfish OS and Firefox OS all at the same time on my Nexus 4. I wished there was some kind of software today that you could dual boot an android phone.
