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.
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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.
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.
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.
This perfectly explains the demise of BlackBerry phones too.
User experience beats everything else. It sounds like some essential components were never finished
They timed it right so that they fucked up both ways, in the browser and in the low end web-connected phone market. They are clowns.
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.
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
I haven’t looked into those specifically, but I’m pretty sure there are alternatives that do the exact same things for FF
I use Tab Session Manager and Session Sync add-ons with Firefox and I’m quite happy with them.
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.
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.
I had a Windows Phone (NOT the older Windows Mobile) for a while back around 2011 thanks to my job as a multi-platform mobile developer. I loved that phone and the OS and developing apps for it was a lot easier and faster than for Android or iOS. I was surprised at how quickly Microsoft kicked the whole thing to the curb.
Nokia Lumia 700 in bright blue was stunning! I really liked it, the tiles were different and it felt funky. Pity they abandoned the project.
BlackBerry OS 10 was my favourite one. They way it used widgets and gestures was really cool. Hub application was awesome. Android and iOS copied a lot of it later but I liked how simple and minimalistic BBOS10 was compared to them. Never tried developing for it though.
Developing for BB was a complete nightmare. Despite the fact that you write in Java, the app still had to be compiled and deployed onto a device for testing out any code changes (the emulators were worthless) and the compiled app had to be digitally signed - by servers that were often/usually down, so sometimes you’d change literally one line of code and then have to wait 45 minutes to test it. Or sometimes you’d just give up and go home.
And the standard app components were shit. The only time I enjoyed coding for BB was when I wrote a TV guide type of app using the basic Java graphics classes and drawing everything on the screen with my own code. I was actually extremely surprised by how powerful and flexible BB processors were. You’d never have any idea of that from using the standard apps.
I never liked the touch stuff for BB, though, and they were in their death throes when that stuff came out anyway (the worst was that model where you pressed in the entire screen to click). For me the old track wheel was absolutely brilliant since it allowed extremely precise control over the cursor. And hey, they had 16-bit color!
But that was the old OS, right? Not the BB 10? I’m talking about phones like Q10, they were completely different from the old phones with cursors.
The phones were different but the development process was the same.
Had a BB10 Z10, loved that phone! It was a but sluggish to be sure but I was gutted when they pulled the plug.
There’s a Linux phone, but I’ve heard it is a beautiful mess.
We have GNU/Linux on smartphones now. There is PinePhone and Librem 5. Some Android phones can run GNU/Linux too.
It’s KaiOS now, completely independent from Mozilla
People talk about FFOS like it was a failed project while in reality it was successfully commercialized and is so popular it has a native WhatsApp client. It has ~70x more users than LineageOS. Maybe Mozilla didn’t knew how to make money out of it but it’s definitely was a great OS project.
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IDK, I still like them. Definitely still managing not be evil. And keep in mind they are competing with multi-billion $ corporations that pretty much control how the web works today. Google (and others of course) first turned the web into ad funded business and then used their huge ad revenue to build a really good browser and promoted it using shady practices. What was Mozilla supposed to do? Sometimes simply having better software is not enough.
I always thought it’d be more of a feature phone type os. Couldn’t compete with what Android had to offer to the mainstream Western market at the time using primarily HTML, but I’m glad to find out that is what it turned into.
KaiOS runs on feature phones, with some advanced stuff like WiFi, 4G net and an app store. It should run on low-end smartphones, but I don’t think any have been released yet.
there are a few like postmarketos and ubuntu touch for specific phones, among others
We have PinePhone and Librem 5 now.
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.
Downfall? It has 150M active users today.
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 :)
How is PinePhone Pro now? It’s been over a year since its release and reading on reddit a few months ago it still seemed behind the original PinePhone. I would like to upgrade to the Pro version, but I’m worried it will be another year for it to be stable.
I think its on par with the original PP now. I also own PP and I would recommend to upgrade, performance is way better.
But if you do, I would recommend to use megi’s u-boot fork to improve your battery life.
That’s cool! So there aren’t any issues with phone calls anymore? I think people complained about audio quality, but I guess my PinePhone also has some issues like that.
But if you do, I would recommend to use megi’s u-boot fork to improve your battery life.
Doesn’t everything use Tow-Boot now?
No call issues at all, I daily drive it.
Doesn’t everything use Tow-Boot now?
Yes, but it’s a distribution of U-Boot and it some releases behind. Megi recently implemented many cool features for U-Boot for PPP and it will take time until they appear in Tow-Boot. So I would recommend to use provided binaries from Megi for now, see his blog for more details: https://xnux.eu/log/091.html.
Didn’t know about this, thanks!
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.
bad link ?
Sorry, forgot that I need to use exclamation mark: !linuxphones@lemmy.ml
:)
Nah. just not properly linked instance.
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.
Ah, nostalgic! I loved the Firefox OS! I even preached about it to family and friends. Good times.
Unfortunately it never felt like a finished product.
What is this? A phone for ants?
I remember a time when all of the companies were striving to make cell phones as small as possible. But as soon as touch screens came out that trend reversed.
When we realized we could watch porn on them.
The nexus 5 was peak size for a phone imo, it’s a nightmare trying to find a decent 5" phone nowadays.
I got a oneplus one, that was good too
I want to see something like this but without the bezels
Nexus 5 was just peak EVERYTHING for that time. Badass hardware, badass display, size, design, everything about it was amazing even if it had no fingerprint sensor until the Nexus 5X and 6P.
God I miss when they made phones with love.
Iphone mini apparently is pretty good.
decent 5" android phone
That size is discontinued
People have been praising some smallish Asus thing lately
Reminds me of the original 3.5” iPhone. Absolutely tiny by todays standards.
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 was thinking of getting one of these when they were very cheap. I really wanted FF OS and other alternatives to succeed or at least exist, because Android was just never very good and I foresaw how Google is just gonna abuse its monopoly and make life difficult for everyone.
But Mozilla was like “now it’s not the right time to introduce a mobile OS” - wtf, when if not exactly at the time when markets were still forming? It was now or never, and Mozilla threw in the towel so quickly it almost feels like someone got a nice paycheck from Google or something.
And while I never got that phone at the end, it did look like it had some decent basis and ideas in it that could’ve developed into something cool. Alas.
What ever happened to the Ubuntu mobile OS?
Canonical stopped development and ubports took over
Am I the only one that misses a thick bezel?
Thick bezels are great for actual comfortable usage, but they don’t look sexy so they’re no more
It’s nostalgic for sure, but from a UX perspective I am so happy with the edge to edge displays.
My only gripe is that they work best with at least a little Bezel. Too little side bezel especially, and the edges of your palms will give you false input. Incredibly annoying.
The iPhones have been really good with this thankfully.
That being said, I fucking love my Galaxy S5. I miss the days of rooting and custom roms on practically every android device.
Isn’t the software supposed to correct for such false input in most cases?
Sometimes. Depends on the vendor really. Samsung sucks at it.
I wrap my $1200 piece of hardware in a good case. Basically gives me a bezel. Check out the OtterBox Commuter.
That’s what bugs me about modern phone design, though. They could put Otterbox-type protection right on the phone and that’d be fine for most people. Personally have an S23 and I think it’s unnecessarily ugly, thin, and easy to drop, when it’s not in a case.
I don’t mind it, gives me the choice of whether to put a big bulky case on it. Personally I like it but I understand not wanting to use one.
I also don’t mind having the choice of whether or not to use a case, but it might be nice if it were an included accessory.
Samsung has their XCover and Active lines; They’re just not flagships.
I’m so cheap, this one plus nord POS for 250 suits me pretty good, comes with a case and screen protector sticker from the factory. I’m more thrilled to have a regular headphones port and memory card slot.
I definitely miss simple rectangle displays. Curved corners and notches annoy me to the point of giving me anxiety. For bezels, one can at least put the phone in a case.
Do you actually get anxiety from a curved corner or was that just hyperbole?
I do lol. I got used to it on my phone because they’re so tiny and it’s a taller screen than 16:9, so it doesn’t cut into videos and such. But on a PC screen I wouldn’t stand it.
I also can’t stand the rounded squares buttons that are now “standard” in Android. I keep a lot of apps out of date just because the newer versions changed circles to that abomination. I even asked the dev of Infinity for Lemmy to bring the option for circle button, and they did! 😃
Nobody understands my suffering lol.
Lol I really don’t. I am trying to figure out what condition would lead to actual anxiety for something like this.
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I think I hate it mostly because 1) it needlessly ruins a good thing, 2) of the general implications of “we are changing something fundamental like a rectangle, and make it standard, and you can’t do anything about it”.
And also the general corporatisation of design. Everything has to be lifeless and smooth and just enough friendly and appealing to everyone. So what we get? A mix between a circle and rectangle. My artsy soul is crying.
So, it’s dumb and pointless, it ruins a good thing, it offends me, I hate it, and yet I’m somehow supposed to accept it as the new standard? Fucking 1984 this is.
I don’t know if this is satire or serious.
Of serious, I envy your life. I wish my lifewas privileged enough that I could focus on hating rounded corners as much as you. Lol
Are you on the internet? Then you are probably not a starving child in some Somalian village. You privilege.
They’re coming back. The Galaxy S 23/22 Ultra both are squared.
Still a hole punch tho
You can still get phones like the pixel 7a, which has thick bezels, so I’d say they aren’t completely gone from the market yet.
Unfortunately they still won’t put in a headphone jack which is a deal breaker for me. It’s a real shame because i would otherwise really like a pixel phone.
My Pixel 4a 5G has a headphone jack.
Sometimes, makes using a tablet easier & I liked “chins” on iphone for the fingerprint reader.
I still want to go back to my Moto G6. The fingerprint reader on the chin is perfect. It replaced all the buttons so I didn’t need the virtual chin or finicky edge gestures.
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.
today there are comparable projects with like postmarketos and ubuntu touch for specific phones, among other linux mobile projects
Ubuntu Touch has been pretty decent, and because of how it’s built, device support is a lot more widespread. Although it’s in this perpetually broken state now, because of the transition to the Focal base.
No luck at all with Postmarket though, on any of my devices. One is marked as bootable but unusable, but I can’t even install it fully
Ahh, my appraisal might be the opposite, PMOS seemed to have better software and support for things like the Pinephone and I thought it ran on more devices, but I am happy to see both projects and it’s nice to see both designs
On a device that supports PM, it will without a doubt have better software support. Current UbPorts runs on Ubuntu 16.04 base, so it basically can’t run anything new until they fully migrate to at least 20.04
Also Sailfish OS (though it’s not fully open source), which I use.
I sincerely hoped Jolla would at least continue to make one technology demonstrator hardware model available for purchase by enthusiasts. The current situation where I have to buy a phone and then buy OS separately is not feasible for me.
I mean, the license cost me $50 (maybe €50, not sure). It’s not that much, just pretend the phone cost $50/€50 more.
Jolla can also be purchased and used in very few countries. 4 according to their list. I don’t mind paying for an OS and a phone, but their phone support is also only for very expensive Sony Xperia phones. So I can see why it is not feasible for a lot of people
If you mean the OS, it can be purchased in all of European Union plus some other countries. With VPN you can purchase it everywhere. Though I read that the Xperia phones don’t have the necessary bands for USA.
I really wish they had opened all of the system.
I mean: what is it they can still lose? I’m pretty sure a few licenses are not making them break even. Do they fear some third parties would copy the OS and release phones with it? Would that not be a sign that other companies trust in the OS and help them land bigger contracts?
/e/ managed to get a business off with a full opensource stack, without building the phones themselves. What prevents Jolla to try the same approach?
They could have been the main developers of the true Linux opensource phone OS. Instead, they’re going to get passed by Plasma Mobile, and then they’ll have nothing left to offer.
I think they can’t open the Android part because of aome 3rd party licensing, but yeah, the rest should be open source.
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
I completely forgot Firefox had a phone.
Facebook has phones too back then, though they’re just Android with Facebook button.
Not long before Amazon came out with their spyware phone.
Seriously - they bragged about how the Fire Phone was always spying on you and still tried to charge $600 for it. Like three months later, they had to discount it to $99 and include a year of Prime.
