When you can buy something that looks like a decent(512MB, 4.5",dual core) android phone[1] at less than $100, and many similar models are coming from china , why bother with this phone ?
You've never used Android 4.3 on 512 MB of RAM, right? I have and it is unusable. The base OS and the base apps, like the stock Android browser do run, but nothing is left for other apps. A minimum of 1024MB is needed.
Also that phone is $100 in the US. To get the price in EU or most other markets multiply with an amount between 1.5 and 2
An android phone without 'Google Apps' does not offer much more than FxOS in my opinion. I test drove an AOSP build of android for some time, without Google Play and other 'non-free' Google apps, and there's not much you can do.
Very few application vendors provide .apk's to install outside of Google Play and they don't provide them from other markets available internationally. f-droid has some applications but not a huge amount.
Basic functionality like Facebook, Twitter, 'sharing' photo's to social media,etc don't work if you can't install those apps.
What I ended up doing was installing Firefox (Mozilla provides apk's and it's available from f-droid) and using web apps.
Firefox OS on the other hand provides all this functionality out of the box.
Because it's not the price that is at the heart of the debate. FxOS is an attempt at an alternative to the current mobile OS behemoths in iOS and Android and their anti-consumer features and policies.
Not in the current stage of FxOS, since Gaia (the UI) seems to fail to deliver anything 'new' to a plain consumer.
For FxOS to really stand out in developing countries it would require a lot more than what it is providing now. In my opinion, since we are partly already doing communications for free trough Facebook and Twitter, something like P2P connections between the FxOS devices does sound doable for me, both for text and voice. In addition, if you could implement something like Twilio for actual calls it would strip down costs both for mainland and international calls. For reference, where I live calls trough Twilio are six to sixteen times cheaper than what my carrier can provide. This way, you would also avoid the need to sign a contract with a carrier. I believe that this form of carrierless phone would appeal to the crowd the FxOS is trying to reach.
I'm not trying to be rude but do you know anything about FxOS and its goals and architecture?
1. Does the current admission by the US government of comprehensive NSA spying on the entire internet interest plain consumers? No, it doesn't. "Plain consumers" don't understand the implications nor the technology behind it. So to ask if a "plain consumer" would be interested in FxOS is to miss the point. The "plain consumer" does not have the knowledge to judge the issue and Mozilla is not trying to become a billion dollar corporation to rival Apple or Google.
2. The architecture of FxOS is completely different for a reason so IMO, no, it wouldn't make sense to fork Android.
[1]http://www.pandawill.com/simdo-d98-smartphone-mtk6577-dual-c...