I wonder if a main reason why they shut it down might not be financial but rather related to focus:

Firefox the browser was falling behind. While it was always my favourite it was totally eclipsed by Chrome for a while.

After they started focusing on Firefox again a number of great things have happened:

- Firefox is getting faster

- Firefox is getting safer

- Firefox is gaining mindshare

- Techies are starting to use and recommend Firefox again

- etc

All this puts Mozilla in position where they can do things like they now announce: they will make big improvements again, this time by squelching 3rd party tracking.

Still they could have kept alive the low level underpinning (what is called the "gonk" port) to let a community project go on. Mozilla's leadership choose to not do so for reasons that were never substantiated by any data.

Also, which other approach are you talking about?

> Also, which other approach are you talking about?

Other approaches to furthering their mission: if getting their own phone to market is to expensive, regroup behind the main product(s) and use them to launch new approaches like we are seeing in the linked article.

Yeah but there's a fundamental difference -- FFOS is a non-profit. They have to make money, of course, to stay afloat, but making it seem like a binary decision between FFOS and Firefox is a mistake.

I haven't looked at their books but surely there was enough money to fund FFOS if they just stopped their rapid expansion into every single emerging market they could find. Make 1 high quality, expensive headset, that nerds will buy (OnePlus did this), and keep working on the software.

IMO There are more than enough nerds out there (myself included) who will fork out $400/500 for a FFOS phone with how much of a difference it was from other OSes.

> IMO There are more than enough nerds out there (myself included) who will fork out $400/500 for a FFOS phone with how much of a difference it was from other OSes.

Very good point.

But you really need to nail the marketing on such a thing:

- you really want people to buy it to support mozilla and FFOS

- but you don't want to look desperate

- you want people to talk about it

- but there are a number of reviews and articles you don't want to be written. ('FFOS phone arrives and is already outdated', 'Too late, too little from Mozilla')

- etc

It is still early on the morning and I'm in a hurry so I cannot name any but I have a strong hunch that this has happened to comparable initiatives in the past few years.

You're right -- but I think initially you could drop a lot of those requirements and just market to the diehard F/OSSers out there. It's exactly what Librem is doing, and Ubuntu Phone, and all those other things -- the mainstream will follow once you're established in some niche, especially when the blowback from tracking on all the other platforms (well less so iOS) is so prevalent.

I know it's naive to think so, but fuck marketing posturing, just make a good thing, in a strategic market, and stick to it. They literally did the hard work, making the platform, getting big apps to add compatability (LINE, a huge messaging app here in Japan had a FirefoxOS app) -- which was also easy for them... Then you just throw up your hands because of rough waters in literally the hardest arena you could have gone into (the low margin arena)... Also, people in other developing countries were starting to use the phone and it is way easier to develop for.

They really let go of something that could have changed the game. I see how their other products have benefitted but it really doesn't seem like they didn't have the money to do it, it seems like they didn't have the money to do it the stupid way they were trying to do it.

There's the firefox team, and the thunderbird team. I know mozilla does a lot of other shit, but maybe stop doing that other shit if you want to be an alternative to google/microsoft/amazon level players a mobile OS is strategic. Maybe stop trying to get clicks with IoT shit (gateway is cool though, so props) and just hunker down? They don't have a board in the traditional for-profit company sense so I dunno wtf.

I can't remember where I read (assuming I did) that mozilla's C-level team suffers a lot of turnover because people just come in, do whatever they want with mozilla's direction and then leave to some for-profit company.

Sorry this is more of a rant but I dunno, I just really feel like mozilla screwed the pooch. I literally flew to another country to try and buy the highest spec FFOS phone I could find (LG's FF zero phone I believe), and bought multiple because I didn't want one to die eventually. I can't be the only one who felt that way.