I don't care if Jolla or Ubuntu don't ever make it as "major" players in the mobile OS world.
I'd be perfectly happy with GNU/Linux mobile software that's as good as the Linux desktop.
I run Linux on my desktop (and laptop), and we're 1% of desktop users. I'd be satisfied with 1% mobile market share. We don't need a billion users, all I want is a hacker-friendly platform, with a good developer community around it (which I think both GNU/Linux on the desktop, and IMO SailfishOS [Jolla] provide).
The fairphone 2 is "fairly" hacker-friendly. The bootloader is not locked. They provide android stripped of google mobile services, and Ubuntu phone is reportedly 70% ported. Sailfish OS could also be an option if either Fairphone or Jolla port it. All of these setups still require binary blobs for firmware, but that's as good as it gets on mobile I think.
yes, but it's not an "official" image yet, meaning it won't receive support from the Jolla developers (and is missing some things like the Android app compatibility layer)
Ideologically, I like Replicant. Actually free-as-in-freedom version of Android, great!
In reality though, it doesn't really work on most of modern phones, and on the ones it works on, there is no WiFi support. And the latest commit on the Replicant git (excluding website changes) is 8 months ago. And it has just one guy committing.
My phone (Galaxy S3) uses Replicant, and I'm quite excited for the upgrade, which will fix a number of rather unfortunate issues. I'm more than willing to make such sacrifices, but it'd be nice (for example) to be able to take videos of my children, which the current version cannot do.
It's not a shortcoming of Replicant---the fact that these issues exist at all demonstrate how much value is placed on user freedom.
Most unfortunate is that few users will be willing to make these sacrifices.
Yeah. But again, it doesn't seem like there is a huge and vibrant developer community inspecting the code, implementing features and fixing bugs; looking at their gitlab and their redmine, it seems like there is almost no activity.
(It's possible I just don't understand the websites; looking at their GitLab and Redmine, I start to understand why is Github so popular; I cannot find anything there :(( )
>> Android is Linux on the phone. It's Linux kernel with stuff on top.
Android is just the Linux kernel on the phone -- that's the issue I have with it. It comes with none of the other stuff that makes GNU/Linux great: philosophically/socially it's different, but on a technical level it's missing rest of the GNU/Linux stack (e.g. package management, and the plethora of developer tools -- including languages and libraries). The GNU/Linux stack is developed by a diverse ecosystem of contractors, big and small business, and non-for-profits (e.g. Red Hat, Intel, Mozilla, Samsung, Canonical, Document Foundation, Fujitsu, Google, etc). Android is largely controlled by one company.
The lack of package management and standard kernel/modules is a huge issue from Android. It keeps it from being truly open. I wrote a post about this a while ago:
The TL;DR, Android needs to be fixed so ASOP can be installed on any phone, just like Linux/Windows. The current state is bizarre for what's essentially now a general purpose operating system.
I habitually think of it as 'aesop' of the fables fame in my head, even though I know it's inaccurate. Hard habit to break. Like eye-terator instead of it-erator.
Imagine Android with the Java Frameworks replaced by a similar C++ Framework, using Android IPC (not UNIX), bionic libc and Android's own Linux kernel fork.
I honestly don't know what's happening with Tizen these days -- Samsung has invested money into it, but it has (IMO) very little to show. Again, my bias is showing, but I think Jolla (SailfishOS) and Canonical (Ubuntu Touch) have achieved infinitely more with smaller teams and less capital.
Taking away those things doesn't make it not Linux. Adding those things wouldn't make it not Android. These guys could have had the best of both worlds.
It is, and it isn't. Android has controversial patches on Linux that aren't merged upstream. They are more significant than say the patches Linux distributions maintain in their releases.
And the android UI framework is still garbage, having to freeze and thaw activity state just to handle screen rotation is the most insane thing I have ever heard of. Hell, even the various Symbians handled this better (I loved my Symbian S60 devices, but programming for them was an exercise in frustration).
I'm assuming you're referring to the behavior where activities are restarted on rotation and onSaveInstanceState() gets called.
This behavior is the default because it prevents developers from needing to think about their UI changing dimensions (including runtime screen size/density changes!)... but it's certainly not required by the framework.
If you set android:configChanges="orientation" in your application manifest, your app won't be automatically restarted. However, you'll become responsible for swapping out any UI resources at that point.
(Keep in mind that Android lets you declare completely different UI layouts and drawables for different device configurations, so depending on how you wrote your app, you may need to re-inflate part of your UI.)
Or just implement onSaveInstanceState() and let the OS do everything for you.
>This behavior is the default because it prevents developers from needing to think about their UI changing dimensions (including runtime screen size/density changes!)... but it's certainly not required by the framework.
No, the framework uses it to let you automatically handle those changes, the reason it's there is because early Android devices were weak (obviously) and the pipe dream was that we'd write apps that didn't mind randomly getting their processes killed as long as we used onSaveInstanceState... man-centuries later and it's clear the dream didn't pan out. I wonder how many billions of NPEs it was worth to be able to say Android does what iOS don't (multitasking) back then.
And that android:configChanges line misses out on many other triggers that cause you to need to handle onSaveInstanceState (like someone plugging in a keyboard). Even with every flag set for configChanges you still need to implement onSaveInstanceState for process death to work as intended.
The Android framework really is garbage. I might be biased though, I spent the day trying to trick it into not going to 7(!) FPS because our designers had the audacity to request we translate a video in an animation (and don't get me started on the insanity that is animations on Android [the X ways we've now gotten to do it which all have their own limitations]).
Yet both Windows Mobile and iOS handle this flawlessly without having to wire all sorts of extra code up. Sure, it's possible to do it with Android, but it's a hell of a lot more work than any other platform.
Larry Ellison doesn't seem to agree with your "nothing to do with [...] JVM" assertion, to the tune of a 9.3 billion USD lawsuit, and indeed Google itself is developing Fuchsia with no java stack at all in it.
Moreover, it's not Linux if you have to use a Java API to do anything useful.
and I'm not a java lover as you can tell, but I can super-appreciate that for java guys, having some fork that tries to be java-not-java and confuses the ecosystem, is a pain in the butt. Be java fully committed and move it forward, or leave java well alone. Don't sit there and create a java version of the Python 2/3 mess that screws everyting up. I can totally appreciate that. Well put.
Look. The gist of the comment is that Android forces you to use java, or at the very least, a java API. You can dance around semantics as much as you like, but it will not change the fact that, unlike Linux, Android is intricately interlinked with java.
It's a subset of Java, with a totally different compiler, JIT, etc. Newer versions don't even use Dalvic, but compile/cache the bytecode into ELF/machine code.
This looks like a rehashed Casiopeia. (Actually the Casiopeia looks considerably sleeker in comparison.) This is the clunkiest-looking device I've seen in a long time. At some point can we acknowledge that shrinking a laptop to be palm-sized doesn't make for a good form factor? A tiny keyboard and a resistive 720p 5" touchscreen sounds like a terrible experience. The picture shows it literally rendering a standard desktop UI as if that's appropriate for a pocket device.
Also, does this thing even receive SMS? The page makes no mention of phone support.
A full Linux desktop screen wouldn't be used for long periods of time. The ideal situation is that we, as hackers, can build our own mobile UI free from the clutches of Apple and Google, and that you can just plug it into HDMI anywhere you are and get a full computer, which is something you can't do with any phone currently.
To your question regarding SMS, there are already people working on it. A Vim plugin sounds especially delicious.
By full computer, you mean something of 'low-end chromebook' spec. Usable mobile power management and thermal design isn't really going to achieve what you get with a good laptop or desktop.
Very true! This hardly holds up to, say, a CAD$600 laptop. But, it'll be very handy to take traveling around the world or to visit my parents/nephew to play some Minecraft.
I suppose the concern is more regarding the clunkiness of the design, as in, "it doesn't fit in my jeans pocket", not so much the functionality. Like you say, "phone" today is really just a moniker for "tech device I always carry on me".
I guess you have little experience with embedded bring-up, "without any power management features" is a fairly whopping qualifier, and quoting battery capacity is a far more useful indicator for a prerelease device.
I've been on projects where the dev builds would last 30 minutes on battery right up to days before initial factory run
It's in your own quote - it was on a prototype, without any power management features. Once power management features are enabled, it will last longer.
Yes, I sure hope we can use GNU/Linux on phone one day. It wouldn't be that hard to make, given an unlocked hardware platform and open source drivers for baseband and graphics module. Actually, I have done a device very similar to smartphone in its hardware capabilities, but it was a commercial product limited in functionality. If I could get such hardware at home, I would definitely make some crude, hackish GNU/Linux smartphone.
True true, I'm craving the day Ubnut Phone runs on my OnePlus 3. But I also used an loved Window Phone (so smooth, so intuitive and beautiful)... But the lack of apps kills you. Start with being able to run APKs, go from there please.
This is true, and I hope SailfishOS will one day be completely FOSS, but please have a look at the bigger picture.
Here's a comment I wrote about the situation on reddit:
---
Yes, I'd prefer SailfishOS to be 100% FOSS, but Jolla is helping GNU/Linux establish its roots on the mobile.
How is it doing this?
* libhybris has opened up a whole new world for GNU/Linux, by allowing programs developed against glibc (i.e. GNU/Linux) to run on top of proprietary Android drivers (i.e. phones).
* Jolla puts a lot of development into lipstick, which makes it easier to develop UXs for phones/tablets/other form factors [This involved developing Wayland support]
* Jolla have opensourced their browser (Qt5 + Gecko engine) and their office suite (Nokia's Calligra Office work, with a QML interface)
* Jolla develops a sychronisation framework (buteo-sync) that can be used for syncing emails, Twitter, CalDav/CardDav, etc (I think Ubuntu Touch might adopt it in the future)
If you're not satisfied with the "official" devices (e.g. Jolla 1, Intex Aquafish, or Jolla C [if you were lucky enough]), then there are a number of community ports at varying levels of maturity[1].
Otherwise, there's the possibility that the Fairphone 2 will receive official SailfishOS support. Finally, there's a number of yet unreleased devices with official SailfishOS support[2]
Android (and Apple) have a relatively rigid development toolkit. For Android you develop using the Java programming language against the Android APIs. The NDK is available, and you can always hack up methods to call the Android APIs from your favourite programming language (e.g. Python) but it's cumbersome.
I develop software for SailfishOS. It's like the Linux desktop. I SSH into my phone. zypper/pkcon install some dev tools (e.g. gcc, make, git). I initialise a Python virtualenv, pull down some libraries (e.g. Flask). I want to query SMS messages? I open an sqlite database on the filesystem. I can define services using systemd files. It really is "just Linux" underneath.
I do not work for Jolla. I am in no way affiliated with Jolla, other than being part of the Jolla/SailfishOS/Maemo/Meego community. I try to support SailfishOS development (by buying Jolla devices, developing software for the platform and evangelizing its benefits).
The paid ecosystem around SailfishOS is non-existent, having said that Jolla are looking to hire: http://jolla.com/jobs
Out of curiosity, is there any thorough Qt for mobile tutorial working nicely on Jolla C? I am even willing to pay for it if it teaches me how to do advanced stuff, like getting straight to OpenGL with the least amount of clutter etc. I would love to write some Sailfish-only apps cool enough to attract regular people.
As long as it is systemd based it is not "just Linux".
BTW, it was actually in the Sailfish IRC dev chat that the whole "hire an assassin to take out Poettering" thing was uttered as a late night, off color, joke...
Drivers, Google Play Services, Googles move towards locking down the OS (now you can't get the local device's Bluetooth MAC address without a system level permission(!)).
I work on Android daily on hardware that is as "hacker friendly" as it comes besides the driver issue, and it fights you tooth and nail.
I was at Phonegap Europe 2013 and there was a big noise about Firefox OS (then still known as Boot to Gecko) there. It looked cool but it was always targeted at low-end, low-cost devices.
The problem with that, from my perspective as a developer, is that I don't want to develop apps for low-end devices because it's an enormous pain in the ass. The lack of horsepower and features means you're pretty much required to compromise your vision, unless you really are developing something very simple, or with minimal finessing.
On top of this, and this was even more so 3 years ago, today's high end devices are 2 years' time's low-to-mid-range devices. If it takes you 6-12 months to develop your app (again, depends on complexity) on today's high end hardware you'll be targeting the mid-range when you release. Of course, there's a bit more nuance to this because single core performance isn't really increasing that much, but you get the point.
Short version: targeting high end devices means you're developing for the future and not incurring the compromises (and, in fact, support overhead) of dealing with low-end kit.
Well said, my problem with Firefox OS was exactly that it was always targeting the low-end of the spectrum.
People who buy the low-end smartphones do not usually care about the platform it's running on, nor can they afford to support 3-rd party app development.
That's a really good point. Whilst the goal of providing a good OS on low-end smartphones aimed at lower income economies sounds noble (is noble, in fact) it doesn't work commercially for developers because nobody will have the spare cash to buy their wares.
It's a real shame and it wasn't something that was immediately obvious to me at the time because I was very new to mobile development. Now of course I've experienced the same frustrations as every other mobile dev and realised that it's just not worth targeting anything but the top quartile. That is, unless it's a corporate app and you have a large number of lower end devices in the field that you don't plan on replacing before your app is deployed.
Yeah, that sums up a lot of their problems really well. They were basically attacking a market segment that wouldn't exist by the time that they had completed products on the market.
Ubuntu Touch is still going. It's up to it's 13th release now and I don't think it's a failed project.
However I do think it's something that isn't yet ready for primetime, and it's going to be more a year or more before it is.
In the meantime they are trying to iron out bugs, improve features and get more developer attention for it. Recently they've added support for React Native: https://github.com/CanonicalLtd/react-native
I didn't know that ubuntu had a phone. I wondered if it could be installed on my own phone? Doessn't seem to mention that on their website. Oh well perhaps I'll buy one "Note — all our devices are currently sold out"
I just looked at the Jolla devices as well and they are also out of stock. I imagine it's probably harder to coordinate selling these devices in small batches; I wish there was at least some kind of availability list I could sign up for.
Yeah, it is a pity all the phones are sold out. It can be ported to other devices though, you might get some useful info here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Touch/Devices
I know you're half-joking, but if this is something you're passionate about, there are things you can do (while there's still alternatives platforms...):
2. Develop software for the alternative platforms -- that's what I do. It's a lot of fun programming on a GNU/Linux mobile. I write software in Python with 3rd party modules from pypi, and Qt/QML.
3. Spread the word. Tell other like-minded developers about how fun it is to work on your alternative platform of choice. Plus since there's only 10s of thousands of users, your software actual gets used (and people appreciate it!).
I develop for SailfishOS. As I described in one of my other comments, it really is just "regular" GNU/Linux underneath:
>> I develop software for SailfishOS. It's like the Linux desktop. I SSH into my phone. zypper/pkcon install some dev tools (e.g. gcc, make, git). I initialise a Python virtualenv, pull down some libraries (e.g. Flask). I want to query SMS messages? I open an sqlite database on the filesystem. I can define services using systemd files. It really is "just Linux" underneath.
I had never heard of SailfishOS before this thread. Now I really want to pick up a device with SailfishOS, but I was planning on getting on GoogleFI compatible device in the next couple months. Decisions...
In any case, thank you for your efforts. I've been waiting for UbuntuOS for all the features I didn't know Sailfish has already.
The problem is that the majority of apps written on Android these days depend on Google APIs or libraries, to the point that an Android without Play Services is almost useless. (Yes, this is from experience.)
Even Google's direct competitors require Google to use an Android. Skype and Outlook are great examples of apps you'd be amazed to discover will not run at all without Play Services.
There are fake GApps that I have tried on experimental devices and they fooled the apps enough to enable them to run. I haven't run these long-term or tried on more than 3 apps relevant to me to say if that would be a good approach.
Not at all. A lot of people who gather at places like these don't seem to realise that ordinary people have much more pressing problems in life than running a phone OS they can tinker with.
Can you imagine what it would be like if every Linux distribution tried to build a competitor to Linux instead of a competitor to other distributions? That would be a hard problem even in the relatively small Unix desktop space.
That is how hard the problem was to solve for Mozilla OS. They were essentially building a competing OS when they could have just been building a competing distribution.
Android (AOSP) + Firefox + Firefox Market + Firefox Mail could have been amazing.
That's what Amazon went for, with very limited success (that said, not really targeting privacy conscious users or free software enthusiasts, so outcomes might not apply)
I don't count Microsoft out of the space over the long term. Unification of the Windows platform from microcontrollers to servers is fairly far along and mobile phone operating systems are, for Microsoft, just another application of the Windows 10 technology.
Windows 10 Mobile has some of the advantages of iOS in terms of security updates and the Microsoft developer infrastructure -- whether that's a good thing depends on one's technical opinion of Visual Studio versus Xcode and Android Studio in terms of programming ergonomics and features and languages.
All that said, that doesn't mean that Windows Mobile will ever be successful or that a world where it's Apple, Google and Microsoft would be significantly better.
True - they seem determined to plug away at mobile until they make a success of it, and fair play to them: Windows 10 Mobile is decent. They've obviously got an uphill battle ahead of them to win back developers and customers but I think they can do it eventually.
I'd still like to see a credible OSS alternative in the mix as well, and I wonder if Mozilla couldn't make that work if they dropped their low-end focus.
It has some parallels with Microsoft's strategy and could roll back into phones as just another device. And I think that getting a platform that works from embedded to server clusters has a good chance of how provisioning phones works ten years from now.
There's really nothing magical about phones. It's some compute cores, a bit of memory, some radios, a battery and a display. The only distinguishing feature of a phone is how the radio is tuned.
For the average non-technical user, a "pure Linux" phone with no sand boxing would be a security nightmare. Just look at jailbroken iOS devices as an example. Maybe sophisticated users know how to take extra precautions in exchange for more freedom, but the average user will happily use banking apps with no idea what the other processes on the phone are doing.
For this reason, Android is a good middle-ground. It's well-sandboxed by default and if you need more power you can root it. Nothing is stopping anyone from releasing "free software" open source android apps published outside of the play store. As is, they would get more adoption than any app on the Ubuntu/Firefox/etc store.
As long as Android exists and is easily rootable, and preferably as long as the iOS jailbreak community keeps up with major versions, I'm happy with the state of "linux" on mobile.
Sure, android might be good enough for most people. But that's like saying porridge is good enough for most people. I want a steak, or a burger. The problem is that I don't really have a choice right now, I don't want porridge.
Additionally, even if you trust Google today, they can turn evil tomorrow and then we'd have >75% of people who are using android without any options. Diversifying the available options in the market market is good for everyone except Google.
There are political avenues to explore. Just as Microsoft was hit hard by a number of anti-monopolistic EU decisions regarding Internet Explorer, Apple in particular could be the target of an action in that space.
But this is the kind of thing that requires citizen action. Also, expecting the EU commission to be the only political consumer protection for multinational corporations is not ideal, there ought to be more actions on the American side as well.
Until then, I highly doubt that there will be any hope of breaking the duopoly, at least until Google's or Apple's core business model starts failing them, which is unlikely to occur within twenty years.
From an economical perspective, monopolies are great for companies and for the country's GDP, but they tend to cause lower standards of living, because of the loss of competition.
>Apple in particular could be the target of an action in that space
Android's market share in Europe is 75%. Google's search market share is over 90%. Any action against Apple would be completely counter productive when it comes to fighting monopolies.
Also, you need to take into account that the Web is a third mobile platform for all intents and purposes, and Windows still dominates the desktop.
So the case for any anti-trust action is extremely weak.
I think that the conditions that Google impose on handset manufacturers are something that probably should be investigated by the Commission. The travel search thing, not so much.
"Apple in particular could be the target of an action in that space."
I never understood that people keep saying that. It's not because you make a lot of money that you will get under investigation for being a monopoly.
Microsoft was fined because it used it's marketshare to bulldoze into other markets. Apple marketshare is so small in comparison that it can do all the same stuff without disturbing anything.
> There are political avenues to explore. Just as Microsoft was hit hard by a number of anti-monopolistic EU decisions regarding Internet Explorer, Apple in particular could be the target of an action in that space.
That makes no sense whatsoever. MS was hit because they were leveraging their OS monopoly into driving out and destroying competitors in other categories, such as browsers. Apple is so far from a monopolistic position in the EU they have a minority marketshare.
There are political avenues to explore. Just as Microsoft was hit hard by a number of anti-monopolistic EU decisions regarding Internet Explorer, Apple in particular could be the target of an action in that space.
Why? In the 5 largest European markets, Android has 3/4th marketshare [1]. How can Apple be targeted for monopolistic behavior?
> How can Apple be targeted for monopolistic behavior?
Because they don't even allow other browser engines on their iOS platform, which is explicitly what was the subject of the "ballot box" ruling.
Monopolies are per-product class. Apple is responsible for both the hardware and the software. All it takes is having one of their products own half of its market.
… which, of course, could take a long time. It did happen for tablets circa 2011, I believe.
Probably. Historically, tech falls into a natural monopoly or natural duopoly with some other marginal competition.
Windows and OSX rule on the desktop/laptop with Linux a bit player.
Intel and AMD on x86 with Via, IBM, and Cyrix and the rest either no longer being able to compete.
ATI and Nvidia on the gaming GPU end, and even then ATI had to be swallowed up by AMD to remain competitive. Intel still a bit player for budget graphics and with no product that remotely compares with the GPU heft of even a many years old Nvidia card.
We'll probably see iOS and Android be the default mobile OS's for a while with MS's Windows as a third player. Surface tablets and Windows phones still sell. If anything, the Surface Pro might be the best mobile Windows device out there and one of the nicer mobile devices for sale anywhere.
That said, mobile is probably resistant to a foss solution as people expect all sorts of cloud and managed experiences. Maps, siri/googlenow, cloud storage of photos, ease of buying, sharing, casting, media, etc. Most people won't be happy with an unbuntu phone that doesn't have all these features and probably couldn't care less about the privacy argument here. Do default installs of Sailfish, Tizen, and Jolla have any of this? Joe Consumer won't buy these things if they can't compete feature-wise.
Microsoft mobile strategy might pay off on the hybrid laptops and the new netbook generations (4/8GB + 32/64 eMMC).
Also they seem to at least cater to those not caring about apps, not able to pay for iPhone and dislike for Android.
Overall Market share in Europe around 5-10% was around a few months ago, but they have money to spare, and might keep selling Windows Mobile devices just not to loose face.
You cannot sell mobile OS based on FOSS religion, normal people want the apps everyone has and convenience, while most developers care about tooling.
So whatever alternative comes, must have a very good selling point to consumers and developers currently targeting the established platforms.
Plus Microsoft still has inroads left into the enterprise-managed mobile device space. (Most of the more recently announced non-Microsoft branded Windows mobile devices are things like HP's enterprise focused phone.) Especially with the potential big win of a company's IT being able to manage Windows mobile devices from the same Windows control panels as any other Windows machine in the workplace. Not that there is much territory there to sustain long term (just ask Blackberry), but with all the carriers slowly dropping their phone subsidies it might not be hard to imagine corporate sponsored phones could make a small comeback.
iOS is a bit more complicated to value, but they've made more than $10 billion just in app store commissions (even not counting increased sales of hardware due to iOS). So if you consider the cost of iOS development as weighed against their hardware sales, and book the software as profit, you'd get more than $10 billion. The real profit numbers are probably higher.
Anyway, the point is that there's no reasonable way to assert that either one of them isn't profitable.
Marginal? Holy shit, how isn't this completely transparent and dead, like my post will be?
Samsung is pulling in about $4B profit per quarter from their smartphones. "Marginal"? In what universe is $16B per year "marginal"? Certainly not this universe.
Just as a point of reference, Samsung's smartphone profits are greater than Walmart's profits. It's greater than the overwhelming bulk of world corporations.
Yeah, and the bit you're missing is that Google basically forces them the hardware manufacturers to compete in a way that means only one can win for any cycle. It's a zero sum game - the last couple of years Samsung has done well, but it's also integrated in a way that means it offsets investments in other areas (e.g their chip business). Most of the others have no hope of this - look at the bath that HTC has taken in the last three years, do you see Sony saying that they make money from mobile?
At the scale of investment required to run a mobile business, Android is generally a bad thing, it's commodifying them in the way that Intel did to the desktop PC market.
> Samsung is pulling in about $4B profit per quarter from their smartphones. "Marginal"? In what universe is $16B per year "marginal"? Certainly not this universe.
I wonder if Samsung is holding that one close just in case Google irks them with Android. Right now, it probably makes more sense monetarily for Samsung to stay with Android.
<begin north american centric summary of problem>
Tizen has one of the same problems that Firefox OS had - no real foothold with users. I have a Samsung Gear, Samsung TV, Samsung phone, and 0 Samsung apps, other than what ships with the devices. My apps are all Google based, and the only two apps on my TV that get used are Netflix and Youtube, everything else gets served by the computer connected (and Netflix and Youtube get used there more frequently since I have a full keyboard there).
Google and Apple both rely on ecosystems to attract and retain users, and Samsung doesn't have a competitive (or compelling) ecosystem.
<end north american centric summary of problem>
I don't know if Samsung has the same problem in other markets, but I know that Firefox Marketplace does/did.
Only speaking for myself but I suspect others might feel the same way: I can't get excited about another essentially closed platform. I'm not interested in what are overpriced and underpowered devices that pretty much behave at best as slightly more open, yet still closed, Android-like devices.
I've been living this for the last several years both with Android and ARM devel/hobbyist boards and it isn't much fun. It would be nice these quasi-business entities (i.e. Mozilla, Canonical) would forget about their brand-exclusive strategies and try to rally around an open ARM-based platform (you know, with support for things like, I don't know, GPUs and such) they can all run on. THAT I could get excited about and we could all win. Short of that, I don't get what I want and they continue to lose relevance in the mobile era. Granted, I'm part of the 1% that runs Linux. But here's a newsflash: right now we're the only ones who care about Canonical, Mozilla, etc. and ~1% beats 0%.
What examples are there of an "open ARM-based platform" with support for GPU's etc?
I don't know of any situation where the ARM ecosystem works like that, the companies compete for differentiation, they have a very limited interest in standardisation. Maybe I'm missing what you're referring to. It also wouldn't get you a phone, it would get you a base board but all the other bits like radios compete on the different manufacturers platforms.
They're aren't, and that was my point. I think that is one of the reasons (there are others) why something like the Raspberry Pi has become so dominant. It's disastrously bad from the standpoint of openness as a platform, but they've gotten the needed technical info and binary blobs to make it work better than just about everything else out there right now on ARM. It seems like there ought to be a couple of 2nd tier GPU design houses (i.e. not nVidia or AMD) that would be motivated to cut a deal to ship on the order of at least millions of units in the relatively near term. And the larger supposed supporters of open source have funding on the order of over a billion dollars (Mozilla's last deal with Google was a billion dollars alone) that it seems like at least a fraction of could be directed to help make this happen. They don't need to build anything that competes with this or even last year's flagship devices, iterate nearly as quickly, or even play the 'we made it .00001mm thinner' industrial design game. They would just need to get something serviceable out there and the design costs could be amortized over several years with only minor revisions needed (i.e occasional bumps to CPU and memory specs etc.)
I'm not suggesting that this be done purely from the standpoint of altruism: for both the IP providers and the various foundations, this would provide them with a possible path to participate in mobile that is closed to them currently so it seems like it's in their interest from an existential standpoint. That said, maybe it really is impossible to motivate any of the players necessary to go down this path. In which case it seems worthwhile for the open source crowd to go all-in on something like RISC-V/OpenGPU and jettison the proprietary IP as completely as possible, as soon as possible.
I think an alternative will only come from a paradigm shift.
For the same reason DOS/Windows reigned on the desktop for decades, with Mac having a few percents and Linux repeatedly failing to grab any significant market share.
You forgot WebOS, which has been open sourced since HP killed it.
There was a brief flurry of activity around it, including getting it run on older Nexus devices, then it petered out.
I submit that a big part of the problem is fragmentation of effort. There was no reason for Ubuntu, Mozilla, and WebOS all to be aiming at the same target at the same time in very similar ways but by different people.
> Is it practically impossible? Are we stuck with Android and iOS forever?
I think it's pretty simple: people want to use apps on their phones, and no phone OS is viable without a competitive library of apps.
Most major apps are developed for both iOS and Android, and convincing app developers to develop for a third platform is going to be a tough sell, unless that platform is very attractive to users. However, to be attractive to users, it will have to have a lot of apps already...
I suspect that the only way to gain marketshare for a new mobile OS is to ship it with an Android or iOS compatibility layer, which would be pretty difficult to do well. The developers would have to re-implement the entire iOS or Android API, and keep up with all of the changes. If they did that, there would be no incentive for developers to target the native APIs of the OS, because they could just target Android or iOS like they do already. So, the compatibility layer could never be deprecated.
People aren't interested in backups. They're interested in restores.
People aren't interested in apps. They're interested in capabilities.
The apps markets are good for ... delivering a completely dizzying (that is: intentionally discombobulating and confusing) array of crappy software that sometimes works, always intrudes on your privacy and steals your personal information, and frequently goes titsup.com for no particular reason and with limited notice.
I don't want apps.
I want decent browsing capabilities with document management.
I want explicit control over networking.
I want a messaging capability. SMS, IRC, eMail, whatever -- there's no reason these need to be split out.
I want a multimedia player.
A basic set of utilities. The same ones as were on the Xerox Alto 48 years ago: A calendar, calculator, notepad type editor. Basic spreadsheet wouldn't hurt.
These days something with maps and an encyclopedia would be handy. Stills/video camera and gallery.
And since I'm not the 99.98%, I'd like a goddamned full-fledged shell running Linux or BSD.
But StuffMyCrapWebsiteIntoThisApp.com? Not so much.
I don't think it's impossible. It does take consistent investment, and consistently not screwing things up. Between Windows Phone 8.1 and Windows Mobile 10, Microsoft decided that 'one Windows platform' was more important than a dedicated mobile team, and as a result, Windows Mobile 10 arrived several months late and without polish. Their hardware refresh (Lumia 950, Lumia 550, etc) was held up waiting for the software and as a result, they lost momentum. Additionally, promised upgradability from 8.1 devices to Windows 10 came with a lot of caveats.
A great Windows Phone 10 launch would not have put them in the top two, but it may have solidified them as a third platform.
@Yoavm, what pisses me more is that both Apple & Google now have a yearly update of their OS and all they shamelessly showcase on stage is emoji's and notifications.
Maybe that's it? The product category of "smartphone OS" is now so well-defined that the possible improvements are evolutionary at best, not revolutionary, and hence there's also no space for a new entrant to provide a big enough improvement over the incumbents to gain significant attention?
Firefox OS promised to make app creation easier through web technologies, but "not enough apps" isn't the problem with Android or iOS, quite the contrary, so for an end user, that's pretty irrelevant.
Well, even at a tech conference, "we eBPF'd and ASLR-ized your app sandboxes even more and now you have even less risk of getting pwned" might draw a "meh" reaction. In very real terms it helps close the device security gap between Android and iOS, but it probably just can't hold people's attention.
My theory specific to iOS 10 is that it's actually a stability-focused maintenance build behind the scenes. The emoji are for cultural appeal while they hide the fact that the real features are not actually features- they're boring, hidden fixes to stabilize iOS after the previous few releases.
It is very unlikely we will see a third alternative on phones. But, who said smartphones will be a mainstay for ever? There is clearly a major drive towards voice as the primary UI and if you are not screen constrained then interesting developments might occur.
There gonna be a third option like ubuntu desktop is the third option after windows and macos. But It's gonna be for people who value control or privacy above everything else.
The key factor remains the timing for this third option to rise.
Offer something people want that the others don't. It's not enough to just not be iOS or not Android, that only appeals to the small segment of people that HN appeals to.
The selling point for Ubuntu, Mozilla and Microsoft's phone was just 'it's not them.' They didn't provide any value. Microsoft had apparently forgotten what they had to do to make the xBox viable against Sony and Nintendo when it first launched, because they didn't just launch it with 'Hey, at least we're not Sony, the developers will show up eventually.'
I don't know how practical this idea is, but I dream of an alternative world where Yahoo went all in on Firefox OS. I think Firefox was Yahoo's ticket to relevance, if they wanted it.
Yes, it is practically impossible, the same way there was a duopoly of desktop computers in the 90s and 2000s. Similarly to that era, there will be niche players (OS/2, desktop linux then, windows 10 mobile now), but the vast majority of the software and hardware will run the dominant OSes.
Hey, at least it isn't a monopoly and one of the OSes is freeish. Freedom wise, hardware is behind, but the software is ahead (of the desktop market).
I think the only option that has an even remote chance of success right now is to fork Android and do your own thing while maintaining compatibility with as many existing Android apps as possible.
So, something like Cyanogenmod but with more drastic changes. It's Linux under the hood after all. It's already compatible with GNU coreutils and a whole bunch of other free software. No need to start again from zero.
The problem is Android and IOS basically came at the same time and got almost same apps in them. For a new platform there is not much to innovate other than we have the same features, but not the same company. There is only way to win in this industry now. Its to create a OS which has compatibility with android apps and has excellent hardware integration.
People are worried about this now, but the time to have been worried was like 2009-2010, when iOS (I think??) could've claimed to have had a monopoly, at least in the US, and before iOS really got a mindshare into people going.
I could also say the same about people upset with Facebook-2009-2010 people!
I wouldn't write of Microsoft yet. There is great potential if they can nail this phone to desktop merged experience. Enterprise would find it super appealing. And I could see consumers buying in too.
This has to be one of the best ways into handset market for MS/Ubuntu or others.
Also, to move on an entrenched market you need to do a lot of things upfront. Android in, let's say, 2011 was much worse than iOS, today the gap has closed.
I think what Microsoft wasted on Nokia's phone business was something in the magnitude of >$8 billion, so money was not really the problem at least in their case.
we're no more stuck with those two than we were with blackberry. things change in less than predictable ways. next big os front will be bringing embedded (read iot) from the old school to the new.
Wasn't it snapchat that released some strange techno-hipster glasses with camers just now. Eventually we will see embedded oled in them and hand gesture interfaces for more augmented reality.
I'll say yes, we're stuck with the two. The resources required to create and maintain a decent, competitive mobile OS imply a need for a size of user base that no new entrant will be able to achieve in a reasonable time frame.
I still love my FirefoxOS Geeks Phone Keon 2013, it still is my go-to backpacking phone. ongoing long battery runtime, a decent browser for the https://mbasic.facebook.com/, gmail HTML, hacker news. necessary apps are there and work fine: For me that's HERE maps & alarm function.
I love it, because it's un-addicting. android and ios are designed to get your attention, all the time. FirefoxOS ist a tool that is there for you when you need it.
I wish they had succeeded, I even ran an FirefoxOS meetup in Vienna, I will miss it. Now back to my Android Phone, I think it beeped, vibrated or needs me in some other way.
Yes, thanks Mozilla for making a timer app that by default neither beeps nor vibrates. Thankfully I only lost one oven load of food before I noticed.
And thanks Mozilla for making an OS that glitches out if you use the power button in the wrong moment, nothing wakes you up better than having to reboot your phone to stop the damn alarm clock.
FirefoxOS is such an unfinished shitfest. I have no idea how 1.3 passed QA. (Nor why Alcatel still isn't releasing any update, even though they're still selling the phone in question.)
As a former long-time user of Windows Phone, it's not "unaddicting" in a way that's boring. There are plenty of apps to waste your time with. It's just that you don't need to. When I used Windows Phone, I didn't need to open an app to see the weather, or to see my text message, or to see my email. The live tiles made sure I could see all of that from the home screen. One glance across the screen and I knew everything I needed to know. Time, weather, headlines, new emails, new text messages, new Facebook posts, new tweets, next calendar appointment, and at the bottom, rotating pictures of my family. All without swiping, scrolling, tapping, or opening any apps. Ten seconds and I could lock the screen and get on with my day.
There's no other OS on the market that lets you do this.
I can't speak for the user you replied to but I can speak for myself: they stopped making good devices. I had a lumia 920, then I upgraded to the 930 which I still consider one of the best phones I've ever had, for its time. Then MS just... stopped. Took them forever to come out with the 950 and it was nowhere near competitive both in hardware quality and design with the ios and android competition. That was the last. Everything was awesome until after the 930 they simply stopped coming out with competitive devices for me.
Roughly at the time the 950 came out I switched to androidland. This year I wanted my upgrade to be the iphone but when the rumours about the lack of headphone port became undeniable I ended up by upgrading into a new android phone, which I'm using right now.
All of this sucks because there's absolutely nothing that comes close to the fantastic design and usability patterns of windows phone.
I left Windows Phone because of the hardware. I couldn't stand the capacitive buttons anymore, so I switched to an iPhone since it was the only flagship phone without capacitive system buttons. There is nothing that replaces Windows Phone live tiles though. The closest you can get is widgets but it's not even close to the same. There's no Twitter widget on iOS, for example. And the widget section is a completely different UI.
I took a major step back in UX because of poor hardware designs. I shouldn't be forced out of an app just because my finger slid a little bit off the screen and hit the home button.
I don't understand if you like Windows Phone so much why didn't you get a phone with on-screen buttons? I have a Microsoft Lumia 640 and with the buttons on the screen, you can swipe up and hide the button bar, so it doesn't get in the way.
I'm actually trying to get rid of it and move because Window Phone 10's UX is a mess. Nothing makes sense, and apparently most developers don't have a clue about UX in the WP10 ecosystem.
For example, the native app to watch video, doesn't have a control to swipe and fast-forward. Wut? So you have to actually click on the length bar to get to the minute you want. That's like UX 101. And it's like this with so many apps...
I did some research and all I could find related to capacitive was buttons out of the screen. But like I said before, you can hide the buttons bar, so it you would have to swipe up from the bottom of the screen and then touch the windows button to get to the live title stuff.. So I don't find your reason enough to do what you did, but anyway, it's your life! I'm looking forward to get my hands on IOS and see what's like
Edit: I was amazed by LG's UI on android 4.4. It's fucking cool. Those guys know how to make life easy and pretty for folks. It is actually a 14 bucks phone that kicks 100++ bucks phone assess
You can to an extent. If the app supports widgets, and the widgets are the right size to fit together on your screen, you can fit a small number of widgets. That doesn't mean they look good though. Android widgets look like widgets, Windows Phone tiles are just the interface. That's what it looks like, it was designed to be that and only that and nothing else.
Where is your Android doing notifications that your Firefox Phone wouldn't have? You can use Android with just a browser and selected apps just the same.
Interesting marketing formula. "Un-addicting". Might be useful in the future to justify the uselessness of a product. "but it's a feature! it's un-addicting". It was so un-addicting Mozilla killed the project dead.
I understand the feeling. Mobile phones are great for what they give you, but also great because they're just crappy enough to push you to use a more comfortable solution when one's available. It's great to have a Swiss army knife, but you'll still wish for your toolbox at home.
Not only that, they're ripping out support for it from the Gecko code base, which means that the only way to get security updates for it will be to fork Gecko. I doubt anyone has the resources to do that. It's basically dead. (Every non-Firefox consumer of Gecko has met the same fate so far.)
Mozilla of course has every right to determine how it wants to allocate its resources... but to me, this action speaks loudly that you cannot really count on them to stay the course. So, from an outsider perspective, every initiative must be analyzed skeptically, since they may leave you holding the bag.
This is always true to a degree, but the more true you think it is, the less likely you are to jump onto said initiatives.
>This is always true to a degree, but the more true you think it is, the less likely you are to jump onto said initiatives.
While I'm sad since I can't now run Firefox OS on my OpenMoko phone, while listening to my ogg vorbis files and rocking Chandler, the revolutionary PIM app and posting updates to Diaspora, this should have been the conclusion from the beginning.
It was pretty clear that nothing much was ever gonna come out of it.
Chandler (epic distraction) may have wandered off into the sunset but people are still running predecessors Lotus Agenda (DOS era) and Ecco Pro (Win 95 era) to this day. Ecco Pro has even been binary patched to enable Lua scripting. The computer industry has many commercial failures that shipped elements of technical excellence.
> this action speaks loudly that you cannot really count on them to stay the course.
To be fair, on whom can you count? Although Google has had a success with Android, my impression is that the ground is littered with the projects that it advertised heavily but then left behind, abandoned, or killed.
Seriously... I avoid Firefox on my (rather beefy) desktop because of how much it freezes. I don't want to imagine how it worked on a 50€ phone, which looked like it was their target.
Maybe they thought Gecko would be ready by the time the OS was going to ship?
> For most FF is very responsive and there are no problems what so ever.
Open dev tools, type `for (;;) {}`. Notice the whole browser becomes unresponsive. This has been improved upon (as in it doesn't block the whole Firefox UI, just merely every single content tab) thanks to Electrolysis partially reaching stable but "there are no problems whatsoever" simply isn't true performance wise (and this is the most obvious one, there are numerous other very well known performance issues with FF)
Besides that doing `perl -e 'for (;;) {}'` and watching your OS burn down in flames (which it doesn't) is the correct parallel, I'll assume you have overlooked that we have no control on what JS does in whatever page we're presented with, and if it's some heavy handed code it has a significant impact on whatever else I may be doing on an unrelated tab, which feels like going back to plain old cooperative multitasking, upon which the above perl code would effectively be a blight.
Run an infinite for loop and look at the performance degradation is about the dumbest test you could do. That's literally asking it to not stop executing. Yeah tab isolation would mean you only crash a tab but that isn't a good example.
I have an easy metric for that: when you're navigating, look at the "loading" spinner on the tab bar, and see how it almost always freezes every time a page is being drawn.
DOM painting/manipulation times in Gecko are a joke, probably the worst pain point of Firefox. And it's not the only one...
If you think FF is responsive, there are two options: 1) you haven't compared it to Chrome/WebKit/Edge, or 2) you don't run heavy applications such as TweetDeck on it.
And FF-OS was a complete OS that ran on Gecko, so yes, if Gecko (FF) is slow, the entire FF-OS is slow.
A direct Firefox to Firefox OS comparison is not reasonable. For one, FxOS was a greenfield ecosystem, so it was built with multiprocess from the start, whereas the e10s project moves relatively glacially toward a multiprocess world so that nothing gets broken.
I quite like Firefox on Android. It's fast, supports a wide range of plugins (including uBlock Origin), and syncs well with desktop Firefox.
The one downside is that it's memory-hungry, so on my very underpowered phone, it gets pushed out of memory a lot when switching apps. On a more powerful device I'd never notice.
No, they shouldn't enter a market by trying to out do the established players at their own game. Microsoft didn't dethrone IBM by making a better mainframe.
How about having acceptable performance to begin with? Even the medium spec Flame developer device feels laggy and generally unresponsive in use. Actual consumer devices like the $35 Firefox phone were literally unusable: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/10/testing-a-35-firefox-...
Number 1 reason why I didn't pick up an Panasonic 4K TV, because i knew Firefox OS will be dead some day. And number one reason why I REALLY want an APPLE TV Set rather then Apple TV STB.
Most of the Smart TV on the market today are total piece of Junk. They are what "Smart"phones were before the iPhone came out. As a matter of fact, SmartTV from China are pretty good on the software front, and lacking ( price cutting too much ) on the hardware.
Just wanted to mention about Mozilla leadership. And so call leadership in general, HOW DID these *&@^$% ever got to their position? This is speaking from a user who has been with them before the Firefox era.
Also a fair point. But then I want a Real DUMP TV. Or a Display Panel only with speakers. A Single Port for the STB, and have everything attached via the STB, including the TV Aerial line. Why? Because i dont want a Remote for my Dump TV, another Remote for my STB, a remote for DVR etc. I want a single user interface to control my experience on my TV. We are well into 2016 and i dont see any improvement in sight.
The UX we currently have TV Sucks.
P.S - The problem with this solution is that no manufacture is willing to sell you a display panel only.
Twirrim is stating that "ignoring the smart stuff" doesn't necessarily mean buying a dumb TV, and that they buy a smart TV, ignore a bunch of the TV's features, and replace them by using a separate set-top box.
But it doesn't have to be that way, even if it is right now. I wish there were a way to explicitly signal "I bought this Smart TV as a dumb display, and I'm using smart features, just not the ones provided by the TV". If enough people were known to be doing that, it might suggest a market for high-end dumb TVs.
All I want is a high-quality, instant-on 55" IPS LCD panel with four HDMI inputs, proper support for HDMI CEC (ARC, power on/off, and input changing), and maybe an ambient light sensor.
I don't want smart features, a fancy remote with two dozen buttons, TV tuning, or anything. I'd be happy with a thin TV but I don't need one.
Just give me a way to put my PS4 on the wall and I'll be happy as a clam.
Well, in fairness, David Bryant joined Mozilla in mid-2015 and Ari Jaaksi in late 2015; Firefox OS was dead in the water before either joined. The leadership problems exist above them.
Mozilla has no technical leadership problems, but they have some huge people and business leadership problems, and until they figure out a path forward, the path will continue to be a meandering trail to the bottom :(
I agree. Examples: they abandoned their Persona project. At a time where identity, sign-in, authentication and security are as important as ever, they've left the field wide open to privacy-invasive companies like Google and Facebook.
Rather than build an OS, why not create the foundation or platform for others to build on? I am thinking of Electron here. Although, I am not a fan of Electron, the framework and approach are gaining a lot of traction with developers. Where is the slim, fast, embeddable Firefox engine that's easier to deploy and develop than Electron (and superior to the heavy embedded Chrome)?
What about offline capabilities for web apps? Firefox should be trailblazing in this space. This is a huge privacy advantage (amongst other things) over cloud-based systems.
I really want to see Firefox succeed, but am worried they have lost direction and focus, or even the ability to excite and inspire developers with their future plans.
They abandoned Persona because nobody used it and it cost money to operate. They tried promoting it, it wasn't enough to overcome social media SSO. I hate it, but they just lost.
UX were bad, it wasn't a marketing fault ( Although they did a poor job promoting it also ). User didn't understand what was going on, and therefore reluctant to use it.
You may not get updates after sometime, even for security issues. That's a big issue if you use the TV's "Smart Features" and someone is spying on everything you do with it or everything you watch on it.
This is a problem for TVs and other home appliances that are usually replaced by people once every several years or even once a decade or longer, on average (this does vary across regions and on incomes, but it's definitely a whole lot longer than people's replacement times for smartphones).
A major shame that we are moving our technology from open playforms built to empower to walled gardens built to consume. One day maybe it will shift towards something more progressive again.
> A major shame that we are moving our technology from open playforms built to empower to walled gardens built to consume. One day maybe it will shift towards something more progressive again.
In order for a solution to be successful it must be good at first place. FirefoxOS wasn't good at first place no matter how open it was.
The PC was sure "open"... ever since IBM released the complete schematics and BIOS source code for the PC, XT, and AT. Maybe not in the OSHW/FOSS sense, but it was certainly open enough for tons of clones to flood the market. It's only been getting more closed since then.
Compaq, on the other hand, was the first “PC clone” company. It’s a term that sounds rather quaint today. At the time, though, Compaq sent a shudder through the industry. Compaq reverse-engineered the IBM PC BIOS without ever looking at the BIOS code. That was harder than you might think, because IBM actually published the assembly code for the PC BIOS in its technical reference manuals. Compaq was able to prove that its engineers never looked at the code or disassembled the original BIOS to come up with their own.
So the code was available but certainly not permitted to be used in a competing product without licensing. The BIOS had to be clean-room reverse engineered to legally build PC clones. If anything, the availability of the code made things more difficult for Compaq!
Sure, but the conversation is wandering now. The original comment wasn't about Compaq. (It didn't even mention it.) It was about the IBM PC and whether IBM "schematics and BIOS source code". Which they did.
And regarding the burden that IBM's choice strained Compaq with, in the overall impact on the industry, any difficulty was by far offset by the benefits. If we're going to focus on BIOSes, for example, the fact that the source code was available certainly helped Phoenix.
All computers on those days had such manuals and extension slots.
Had Compaq not done a clean room reverse engineering, everyone would have to license from IBM just like in other computer systems and the PC market would never have blossomed as it did.
In fact we are just going back to those days in what concerns selling packaged hardware and software as one single product.
Original commenter mentioned IBM's publication of its source code and schematics. You spoke up to dispute that it happened. You took action. As if to call them out and say, "Hey, just as a point of fact, that isn't true". But as a point of fact, it is true.
If you have some commentary that focuses on some other market/industry forces that you think were more salient, then fine, let's have that conversation. But don't dispute facts and then try to rewrite the record as if that's not what you did. This is text. We have the conversation on record, you know.
This makes me sad, not because I wanted to use Firefox OS, but because JanOS[1] (a hacked up FFOS) turned cheap Firefox phones into really powerful Javascript-based hardware hacking platforms. It's really quite fun, and I love the idea of abusing the economies of scale of cheap consumer electronics to make creative hardware tools. Most dedicated hardware development boards with all the features of a phone would cost 4 times as much.
I've had a developer phone and was quite disappointed with the system. If you really want to sell the advantages of HTML/JS apps, the default ones should've been a lot nicer and full-featured.
I bought two of them. Different. They never worked, and were both slow. Mailed one to a fellow HN'er in India, used the other for awhile but was unable to recompile the OS to get things fixed and received zero support online. Felt like the whole thing was compromised from the word go by business people, from my perspective.
I will repeat my take here, for the last time, on where they screwed up: They screwed up by pretending to target low end devices but still only supporting centralized communications. They should have had Ad-hoc/Mesh Wifi as a requirement, and designed the OS API to give those features to developers. Developing world people want to send things between one another, not huddle around shared wifi or pay premiums to carriers. I wrote this up in some detail at https://bug945047.bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=840... ... nobody bothered to reply, except for "wifi supports in FFOS is relied on wpa_supplicant which is provided by partner mostly", ie. the business setup within Mozilla was that the actual device manufacturers were the ones who had control of the wpa_supplicant build, and there was no way for the developers to rely on, require or enforce features in that software being present. Nobody took ownership, everyone lost.
A real open source OS? Youd equally well have asked what the point of Linux was before it picked up steam.
Of course the big difference is that Linux succeeded while Firefox OS failed. But thats after the fact.
I think something like Firefox OS is important, but probably wasnt something Mozilla should have undertaken when their key asset was under massive threat and it keeps dropping other stuff that, admittedly small numbers of people are using, were still successful in Theur niche and could have continued with minimal effort (examples of projects that affected me directly are Thunderbird and Prism).
>Of course the big difference is that Linux succeeded while Firefox OS failed. But thats after the fact.
The relevant big difference is that Linux filled a need and had a particular niche that had nothing to do with being "libre": it was good and costed nothing to run servers on.
Big UNIX vendors charged an arm and a leg (and often required their own hw platforms to run), and their software was behind the times (to the point that loading the GNU userland was necessary for getting them remotely comfortable to admin/program on).
Otherwise, Linux has been a failure on the Desktop too (statistically, nobody cares if someone here personally uses it -- the original idea of most Linux advocates was that it would conquer the desktop, overtaking Microsoft. Not that "it would get good enough to be used by some users on their desktops". It was already that, back in 1999).
>Also, Linux has never been "a failure" on the desktop: you seem to think that the definition of being successful is to have a complete monopoly.
Complete strawman.
First, I used the Linux advocates' own definition of "success": Linux overtaking MS on the desktop, and the fabled and continuously moving "Year of Linux on the desktop". Which never happened.
Second, what "complete monopoly" rubbish, which I never alluded to? Linux has less of 2% on the desktop (by all browser-based stats). For a completely free OS, that's a failure. 10-20% would have been a great success.
And with "compete monopoly" I was referring to Microsoft who has abused its position on the market multiple times to thwart competition.
You have to understand that "Linux" differs greatly from Microsoft Windows(R) because of its philosophical underpinnings of being "free as in freedom" software.
BTW I've heard the market share of Linux on the desktop has steadily been rising for the past few years... just give it some time ;)
I told Mozilla people on this forum for many years that it wasn't going to work, anybody can check my history. It didn't fail because they were using web techs but because they were releasing low end phones. Firefox OS phones should have been "geek" phones, phones for people who already own 2/3 phones and want something they can "hack" and boast about. The product itself wasn't bad, the strategy was. Again targeting emergent markets was stupid, people in emergent markets either have "feature phones" or android phones, because of what's app and co, Firefox OS should have targeted geeks and hipsters , with high end models... That's how you make a brand or a product desirable.
If you took 30 seconds to read the first result after Googling "Firefox OS", it would be very apparent what their goal was and why they thought it was worth pursuing.
I'm not even a web dev, but I'm sad to hear that it didn't pan out.
All of the phone features were available from web apps. Including the dialer, camera, accelerometers etc. It's a big improvement because if you only know HTML and JS, you can access all the features of the platform. You don't have to write a version of your app for each platform and maybe submit your app to a store. Just push your new page to the web and presto, you're on every platform.
The title here is really misleading. Commercial development stopped a while ago. What was announced today is the removal of some code from Mozilla's codebase that will make it impossible for the community to keep working on b2g OS.
The main issue with FirefoxOS was the performance(of the devices and perhaps also the OS itself). I had the first firefox phones(I think the brand was ZTE) and they were basically rubbish(i.e. they had a 1sec or more lag). I would take a Nokia 6600 over that any day.
Mozilla tried to market it as a low cost alternative but nobody wants low cost rubbish. You are better of with a feature phone.
I think the biggest mistake was the reliance of the OS on javascript. It was dead on arrival or better said from start.
The problem with FirefoxOS was that you could already run web apps on iOS/Android; there was no compelling value besides the "privacy" component, as low-cost Android phones already existed. And as I've noticed on other Moz-centric threads, privacy is not enough of a benefit for people (even the tech savvy!) to use a poorly-performing product.
So the pattern seems that zippy-compiled-modern-language-strongly-typed stuff works as a basis for a framework on devices, No? Why not just go with that paradigm for a new Firefox OS but call it "Phoenix OS" or something? Would be cool if they abstracted that for JS developers with ReactNative-like developer experience on top of it so it was more approachable as well or just let Facebook do that. Dumb idea? Good? This is probably not taking into account the cash buckets raining from the two ivory towers that already did it though.
I'm super grateful to Mozilla for trying. I think we'll eventually get to an open source web phone, but we're not quite there yet.
It's a tough market because as soon as you release something, there is a ticking clock until all of the low cost manufacturers release something cheaper and faster. Moore's law is not your friend when you're trying to differentiate a mobile product.
Beyond that general difficulty, a web phone faces some specific inevitable challenges:
1) No access to the "app world" of Instagram, Snapchat, etc
2) Can't optimize performance to the same degree
3) Web app access to hardware devices is limited
I think those are things you can't fight, you just have to accept them, but they are really hard to accept. This is the key psychological hurdle in any new web phone design project.
But let's get over them for a second and see what we're left with. The web also has some indominable advantages:
1) Instantaneous installation/startup of new "apps"
2) Long tail of web content can be a first class citizen in the UI
3) Novice-friendly development platform, i.e. "show source", embeddable HTML widgets, etc
4) Cloud-based by default
5) A community who will deploy infrastructure for free, so long as it is open source and decentralized
If I squint my eyes, I can imagine a web browser that really tries to capitalize on these things. From first principles, I think a development platform where the infrastructure for getting started is free-ish, apps and development environments all load instantaneously, data is never lost because it always lives in the cloud, emerging standards allow data to federate freely between services... you just float around allowing app access to your cloud data... such a platform would have substantial advantages over something like iOS or Android.
Those advantages may or may not be able to outweigh the inherent platform weaknesses I mentioned, but I can at least imagine it becoming a major player on mobile.
I think the trouble for Mozilla is there are still quite a few research projects there:
How do you federate data between services?
How do you host open source web apps in such a way that neither the programmer nor the end user has to be a sysadmin?
How do you make it easy to write performant, mobile friendly apps?
How do you organize a decentralized global community to adopt good usability practices?
How do you design a web browser so that web developers can make simple, fully integrated apps that fit into a more unified mobile experience?
I think if you could design something that at least solved all of these problems in a simplistic way—not fully robust, but a proof of concept with a few core apps, messaging, video, etc—and you really leaned in to the kinds of experiences that become uniquely possible on a platform like this, and then refine the shit out of it in an empirical Apple-style user-centered design tsunami, I think you might have a leapfrog product that could put Android and iOS on their heels.
Maybe.
If you could make it fundamentally easier to build and deploy web apps, you could get a huge store of long tail apps, which would form a kind of exclusive content moat. Not because those apps would be inaccessible on iOS or Android, but because they would be second-class citizens there.
To different extents Google and Mozilla have both been trying to tackle some or all of these research projects in different ways. But I'm not even sure if it's time yet. Maybe we just need to wait a little until some more of these answers shake out. Or maybe Mozilla just lacked the strategic vision to really know what to hammer hard on here.
But I am totally grateful to them (and Google) for trying. I still am drinking the Kool-aid. I still think the web is the future. Thousands of people are working on these problems all over the world. I think as Ethereum matures, it will fill in a lot of the gaps.
So, I think the Firefox can rise again. We'll see.
While I was very excited for FFOS and it's sad to see it go because I generally follow Mozilla endeavors.
I prefer my phone to be a phone and not a general purpose computer. The less complexity the less problems incurred. Few vendors are willing to put in the really hard optimization to make a lowend device work well.
The lowend target of FFOS was an additional concern because it meant the software had to be that much better.
While yes, it's kinda sad, I also think this was obvious the second the first Firefox OS phones were shipped. The idea was good, but the execution and result was completely underwhelming.
And after the dud launch, whatever momentum had been there, simply dried out. Nothing major has happened since launch for Firefox OS, while Android and iOS have had several major releases.
That it took Mozilla this many years after the fact to admit this failure, is (as other comments) a sign of bad leadership.
The effort spent here could have been much better spent elsewhere. And these days Mozilla needs to spend its resources efficiently more than ever.
IMO the whole "connected devices" initiative which Mozilla also mentions here (I had completely forgotten about it) will suffer the same fate. It's not connected to anything they currently do, or anything they have a natural ability to reach out to. Whatever drives this initiative, it seems completely disconnected from engineering.
Unless they kill it now, we'll see a similar announcement in a few years. And that too will be resources that could have been spent more wisely.
> it took Mozilla this many years after the fact to admit this failure
The first Firefox OS phones shipped in early 2013. After spending around two years trying to make the project work, Mozilla stopped releasing new versions in May 2015 and officially started winding down the project by the end of 2015, as mentioned in the linked newsgroup post. So it wasn't really many years at all; also, it's hard to place the blame on "bad leadership" when the current CEO didn't come on board until the middle of 2014.
By middle 2014, many FirefoxOS phones were already months behind on updates and neither Mozilla nor the hardware vendors were putting any effort into supporting their own flagship devices. By that point, the app store was useless, because you couldn't install any apps on most devices due to ABI breakage between versions and a fragmentation worse than Android.
Neither CEO did anything to mitigate this issue. I don't know how that's not bad leadership.
(Not that updates would have helped much: 1.3.0, the last and only FxOS version my phone received – which is still sold by Alcatel – was much worse than Android 2.0 in terms of UX and stability. I have no idea how anyone thought this was in any way ready to ship.)
> Neither CEO did anything to mitigate this issue. I don't know how that's not bad leadership.
Arguably that's great leadership because the CEO knew instantly to cut his or her losses, and not give into the sunk cost fallacy by pursuing this failing venture "because we're so invested in it already; we just have to try harder you see!"
Maybe part of the idea, because the bit about targeting low-end phones was completely stupid from the beginning. It was launched at the same time that Nokia was crashing and burning while similarly targeting "emerging markets" with obsolete phones.
This was pointed out right away, and they just shrugged. There was (and is) a feeling that a lot of Mozilla employees are just looking for excuses to hack on something fashionable; that's a natural geek instinct, but an effective leadership should be in place to crack the whip when people go astray.
> Maybe part of the idea, because the bit about targeting low-end phones was completely stupid from the beginning
This really stood out for me as well. My impression was that they used it as a scape-goat for not having to immediately deliver a completely polished experience.
I mean... Who's going to be paying for a phone with top-tier hardware when the software limits it to do less than most Androids out there... since ever? No-one would buy that phone. So it would be impossible to get a hardware vendor to fund such a venture.
If they (at first) targeted lower ends phones, chances of getting something out would improve. And they did get something out! So that part worked.
Obviously from there on they should have made improvements, and when the software platform had become good enough to sell itself, you should expect it on higher tier phones too. That's at least how I envisioned that they planned to execute, which IMO wouldn't have been a terrible plan if they had followed up.
But ofcourse, we saw what happened, and it was obvious at launch that this wasn't going anywhere anytime soon. Touché really. I would have a liked a third platform, based on open standards.
i would like ff to implement commonjs modules and support nodejs lib and modules in a elevated mode.
users would be able to host a chat server by visiting an url, settings could be saved in localstorage or local db.
When they ditched the Firefox phone I new it was over. They didn't really give it an earnest try. Smells a lot like HP's destruction of webOS. I would not be surprised if powerful players in the industry pressured them to drop it.
So when I signed up for FF sync last night that was a waste of my life? The only reason I was giving them a shot is Chrome's goofiness. It crashes my GFX card on Win10 (constantly) and always has threads open for hardly-ever-used extensions.
> While work at Mozilla on Firefox OS has ceased, we very much need to continue to evolve the underlying code that comprises Gecko, our web platform engine, as part of the ongoing development of Firefox.
So, according to the history of past announcements, if I translate from Mozilla speak to normal English, Gecko will be abandoned in March 2017.
However, WebKit and Chromium are. They are already experimenting on an Electron based browser called Tolfino and on iOS Firefox is built using the WebView.
The point is Mozilla previously said FirefoxOS would live on through Internet of Things projects when they discontinued Firefox phones. They are using the exact same PR when shutting down FireFoxOS relative to Gecko. The question is, is Mozilla capable of maintaining its own browser engine today? both from an engineering perspective and from a financial perspective ? Let's see where Rust and Servo are going in the next 3 years.
Right, but your comment made it sound like they would be experimenting with an Electron-based browser as a replacement for Firefox and that they were using WebKit on iOS voluntarily, which is both not true. You might not have meant it like that, but it's how misinformation is born.
1) Tofino (which has now ended) was just an experimental testbed for trying some new browser concepts. It was easier for them to use Electron than to contend with Gecko's ossified embedding APIs. Hopefully positron (https://github.com/mozilla/positron) will allow us to use Gecko in the future.
2) Firefox iOS uses WebView not by choice, but because of Apple's App Store restrictions.
Is it practically impossible? Are we stuck with Android and iOS forever? This tiny selection of options worries me.