Firefox OS's story from a Mozilla insider not working on the project (2024)
148 comments
·June 11, 2025nicoburns
toast0
> - Targeting low end devices first was a huge mistake. The web stack they were building on was simply too inefficient for that to work with the devices at the time. If they'd targeted high end devices then it would likely have worked on low-end devices by the time they were ready to ship it anyway (perhaps this plays into them rushing and having unrealistic timescales)
The problem with targeting high end first is sales / production risk. A phone based on a new OS is a risky purchase, and it's hard to convince someone to spend $500 on a high end phone without much software available. A $100 low end phone without much software available is an easier sale.
If you can get important software built for your platform, sales are easier, but sales/usage numbers drive developer interest. Also, it helps if the platform offers capabilities developers need; maybe it's my bias, but the number of platforms that launch without everything a messaging app needs was mind bogling --- everyone seems to understand that messaging apps sell phones, but they don't find out the requirements for them until very late.
Apple does just fine without targetting low end (although they do sometimes target mid range), but they live in a different world, and it took decades to build that market placement.
ksec
>A $100 low end phone without much software available is an easier sale.
Except they didn't target $100 dollar phone. They were aiming at $20, but giving headrooms to $35. And in about 2 years time they finally believed they made a mistake, and raised the target to ...... $50.
Silicon Valley at the time was all about software. They believed in Bill Gate's vision where all hardware cost will drop to zero and software will subsidise it. And Apple's business model is not sustainable.
It was then I learned Silicon Valley has absolutely zero understanding of anything hardware. Apple was somehow the best and the outliner.
toast0
The math works even better at $35. If you're in a high income economy, and your phone breaks, you might buy a $35 phone as an impulse buy to use while you wait for the phone you want to arrive. Then, when it works better than you expect, you might give it to a late adopter. Or if you're a late adopter, maybe you dip your toe in with a $35 phone.
For low income economies, which is where the majority of people are, and the majority of late adopters of smart phones are, a $35 phone is affordable --- or much closer to affordable than the rest of the market.
If you make a smartphone that works at that price point, the addressable market share is huge. And it could be subsidized by carriers in low income countries, too (see the JioPhone). The class of hardware they were targetting could provide a good experience --- similar specs provided good UX on iOS and reasonable to good UX on Windows Phone.
If you make 1 million $35 phones and none of them sell, that's a waste of $35Million (maybe less, because you presumably have some margin, but maybe more, because R&D). If you make 1 million $500 phones and none of them sell, that's a waste of a lot more money. Around this time frame, I bought several $500 phones for $100 each when they failed; the Amazon Fire phone, the Nextbit Robin, the Essential PH-1; all were a great deal for me, and a colossal waste for the hardware team.
Shalomboy
> The problem with targeting high end first is sales / production risk. A phone based on a new OS is a risky purchase, and it's hard to convince someone to spend $500 on a high end phone without much software available. A $100 low end phone without much software available is an easier sale.
I mean, skate to where the puck is going, right? It sounds like Firefox OS started development as mobile component prices started to fall in price dramatically. By the time B2G was ready to go to market, the baseline for hardware would be dramatically higher than when they started.
1oooqooq
except this analysis don't survive the real world.
living in California and contributing code to gaia, i could only have a dev phone (not being involved with moz) when i went to an alley in Mexico city known for selling black market (no tax) computers. there i could finally pay usd50 to buy the crumiest bright orange plastic phone to use for dev work.
would i have spent usd200-500 on my hobby to get a good phone months before i had a trip to mexico city? probably. would i pay the usd300 retailers in the us were charging for the crummiest low end phone? hell no.
roywashere
It’s a balance. I guess they needed to target low end because they were 4 years too late. If they did this around the time of Android 1.5 or even 4, those phones were not so expensive and they could have targeted that or similar hardware.
I guess around 2012 I bought a Firefox OS phone from a Spanish company for I believe 150 euros, which was quite reasonable. FirefoxOS was unusable though. Plus it lacked WhatsApp so I could not use it as a daily driver. In 2025 I would also need to have a banking app on mobile so it’s impossible to use an “alternative” phone OS for me
fabrice_d
I think you are wrong on both points: - low end devices were the only ones we could start from to get official support from chipset vendors and other partners (because they segment their market). And you need that to get eg. performance fixes in their graphics drivers. On the exact same devices performance was on par with Android overall. - I don't understand how "Rust UI" would have helped with anything, since the whole UI (including the system UI) was web based. Breaking out of the web platform is the opposite of what FxOS aimed at.
nicoburns
> Breaking out of the web platform is the opposite of what FxOS aimed at.
I think this is part of what Mozilla missed: the key value proposition of FxOS wasn't that it was web-based specifically: it was that it was open in the way that Linux and the web are but Chrome and Android aren't (one might also compare RISC V vs ARM). The promise was that it could bring this openness to graphical operating system (mobile/desktop) environments and installable app development.
ndiddy
Honestly I think the whole Firefox OS idea was a major mistake, especially if the points the article makes about how the project changed Mozilla organizationally are true. Trying to make a new mobile platform in 2014, when iOS and Android were already entrenched, was never going to work out. Even if the performance was on-par with Android, why would anyone buy a Firefox OS phone over an equivalent Android phone with a far larger library of apps? The right time to try a new smartphone platform would have been at least 5 years earlier.
fabrice_d
The project started in 2011 and shipped first in 2013.
Yoric
> - It's really unfortunate that Rust wasn't a bit further along during the Firefox OS era. A lot of the Rust UI pieces that are now being developed would make a really strong foundation for something like Firefox OS. And could perhaps also have enabled a better story for "breaking out" of the confines of the web platform.
What do you mean, "Rust UI"? In FirefoxOS, the idea was that all applications were developed solely with web technologies.
More Rust would have been nice, but would only have made sense with the support for compiling towards wasm (or asm.js, at the time).
nicoburns
> More Rust would have been nice, but would only have made sense with the support for compiling towards wasm (or asm.js, at the time).
Rust would have been used for implementing the web technologies, not by end users. I would note that many of the "web" technologies did not exist before Firefox OS (and Chrome OS) started adding them in a flurry, so really almost anything was on the table. The key thing was that they were open and specified.
ksec
>Rust would have been used for implementing the web technologies, not by end users.
It wouldn't. Another reason for Firefox OS's failure was their insistence of doing everything in Javascript. Do not bet against Javascript mentality. They quite literally wants to write most part of OS in JS.
A few developer actually blogged about this once Mozilla announced they will discontinue the development of Firefox OS.
owebmaster
> The key thing was that they were open and specified.
And nowadays Firefox is the only of the "major" browsers that doesn't even support PWA anymore.
FireFoxOS could have won the battle by just existing. 5% of the smartphone market would be worth much more than only 5% of the browser market.
woodrowbarlow
but did they choose the correct path for their org to get there?
> [Mozilla] hired someone from the mobile industry to run the company, this led to some culture changes : no more a flat org, but a pyramidal one with middle managers. Culture became way less engineering centric, and started being a bit more top -> down. Focus was now solely on B2G.
when i think about the occasional anti-user decisions Mozilla has been making in the past several years (most recently, AI training policies) i wonder now if it's all residual from this structural shift.
nicoburns
> when i think about the occasional anti-user decisions Mozilla has been making in the past several years (most recently, AI training policies) i wonder now if it's all residual from this structural shift.
I don't know enough about Mozilla to say, but the OP certainly makes it sound that way.
khuey
Eh, as someone who was there at the time I would say that these people largely left when B2G was shut down. I don't think there's much of a connection to whatever gripes you have about Mozilla today.
officeplant
>Targeting low end devices first was a huge mistake.
Personally it was the only reason I ever gave Firefox OS a try.
ZTE started selling the ZTE Open[0] on ebay direct to buyers, super easy for me to obtain even in the US. The phone had miserable specs but still ran fairly well in my opinion, to the point of using it as my daily phone for months.
Eventually it was let down by most of the early Firefox phones not getting the updates to add in features like MMS support.
It was a sad day when they called it quits, and what remains in KaiOS just reminds me we could have had a strong competitor in the budget market.
extra88
> If they'd targeted high end devices then it would likely have worked on low-end devices by the time they were ready to ship it anyway
Based on my understanding of Alex Russell's info, that's not how the mobile market works. Low-end device performance in 2023 was at least 8 years behind flagship phones.
soapdog
I was there. Firefox OS devices outsold all predictions in target markets in South America. They were a lot cheaper than the competition and worked well enough. What caused it to fail was, I kid you not, the lack of WhatsApp. People in South America rely heavily on that messaging app for everything. SMS and other messaging apps were not viable options cause the people whom Firefox OS users needed to message were all on WhatsApp.
rickdeckard
There was a second issue:
The reason why the phones even landed in South America (and Spain) was because Telefonica heavily invested into Firefox-OS and lobbied several HW-vendors to provide devices for it.
The idea for Firefox-OS to carve-out its niche was to go lower in spec than Android could, providing a solid entry-level Smartphone experience at a price an Android device could not match just due to Hardware spec alone.
Google understood the threat, and indeed they couldn't lower the bar that low anymore and have Android provide a decent experience on a device with 1GHz single-core CPU and 512MB RAM.
As a fast measure, Google created "Android Go" as a stripped-down Android variant for lower-spec hardware, exactly to respond to Firefox-OS.
--> The fact that WhatsApp was missing on Firefox-OS was the final deathblow, yes. But even before launch of the device, the wave of "Android Go" devices matching/undercutting Firefox-OS in price was already building up, and carriers not confident in Firefox-OS were starting to order those devices.
Then, at the moment the Firefox-OS device faced its major setback after launch, that wave already came crashing down into the procurement departments of all the carriers, and so the gap to threaten Android was closed.
Just to reiterate the scale: Google made a "Go" variant of Android and ALL it's GMS-applications just to close this gap. After the threat was gone, "Android Go" was discontinued again
someone7x
> As a fast measure, Google created "Android Go" as a stripped-down Android variant for lower-spec hardware, exactly to respond to Firefox-OS.
> After the threat was gone, "Android Go" was discontinued again
Sometimes the invisible hand of the market is just a middle finger pushing on the scale.
potato-peeler
The entire thread is debating on reasons for fos failure, even attributing that rust could have saved it, while the actual reason is right here!
Normal folks just want to use phone to help them with their lives, and as such if they can’t find apps which helps them, they won’t use that phone as their daily driver.
They don’t care if it was built with rust or js or java or anything obscure.
mmsimanga
WhatsApp is the Internet in two countries I reside in Africa. South Africa and Zimbabwe. Anecdotally this is true for most African countries. Businesses and families depend on WhatsApp.
alfiedotwtf
Unless you are Russian or have worked in crypto, you can’t fathom how many people and businesses rely on Telegram too
jeroenhd
I always found it very interesting how WhatsApp kept its Symbian app alive for so long but didn't build an application for FFOS. They had a KaiOS app but it seems like they dropped KaiOS too.
I do wonder, though, did Mozilla ever try to convince Facebook to build a FirefoxOS build of WhatsApp?
rickdeckard
> I do wonder, though, did Mozilla ever try to convince Facebook to build a FirefoxOS build of WhatsApp?
Yes, they tried.
From what I know, a big difficulty in convincing them was that FFOS didn't have actual native applications, it was running everything on the Firefox Gecko Engine (on top of Linux). WhatsApp would have had to develop their application as a WebApp in Gecko, to run on quite low-spec hardware, which would have been a huge undertaking at that time.
(FYI, the first FFOS device was launched in 2013, Facebook acquired WhatsApp in 2014)
fabrice_d
Disclaimer: I was at Mozilla working on FxOS and then at KaiOS where I worked with the WhatsApp team to add some apis they needed.
The problem was never technical, only business. WhatsApp was basically saying: "We'll build an app if we think we can get XY millions new users". FxOS was just not shipping enough to reach the bar. KaiOS shipped in India with Jio, Facebook saw the traffic coming from KaiOS devices using the basic FB app and decided to move forward with a WhatsApp app.
hiAndrewQuinn
This doesn't actually surprise me, WhatsApp is fantastic at what it does. I seem to recall another story about a company which got a desktop browser running in a mobile browser and getting flooded with Indians using the site because it let them access WhatsApp without a data surcharge or something.
fidotron
The real reason Firefox OS was doomed was the timing was all wrong with the explosion in graphics capability of the devices, as anyone that worked on anything performance sensitive during the iPhone 3GS -> 4 will tell you: the same GPUs were being asked to drive 4x the number of pixels. Users didn't care, they just expected it to work.
FFOS was doomed because the pixel explosion wasn't just stretching the GPUs of that time, it had also made CPU rendering a serious bottleneck, a fact the Android team also struggled to accept. Mozilla lacked the resources to do anything about it, although I didn't get the impression they actually understood the problem at all (as shown by it not being mentioned here), while the Googlers resorted to that most Googly of activities: arguing via walls of text that try to deny the obvious truth.
I have long maintained that what Mozilla should have done was a Firefox OS based e-reader. The mania that exists for all things e-ink in the tech industry is real, and if you combined that with a proper open platform you could leverage it into being a self sustaining business.
bgirard
> FFOS was doomed because the pixel explosion wasn't just stretching the GPUs of that time
Actually this is the reason that I, at the time working at Mozilla on the rendering team and helping with Firefox OS, proposed will-change. To solved this exact problem. With it, I managed to get the home screen to be perfectly smooth using pure web technologies and no hard coding on low end mobile hardware. Here's the original proposal: https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2013Nov/0414....
alfiedotwtf
It’s a sad shame that in 2025 I’m using Chrone on my e-ink reader. I still get upset these days at what could have been with Firefox and Mozilla :(
lipowitz
I don't think video mattered at all to their failure. FirefoxOS was never going to eat Apple's lunch it was going to eat Google's.
If thousands of vendors had made something Android 2.X level for the entry level market and the technical people who actually want what Google engineers wanted the ecosystem by volume would have been mostly FirefoxOS instead of mostly out of date Android and the ecosystem by revenue still Apple's.
fidotron
> FirefoxOS was never going to eat Apple's lunch it was going to eat Google's.
Aside from all else, and what about the very responsive Windows Phone 7 or similarly flawed WebOS? Let alone all the feature phones, Blackberry etc. This was an enormously competitive era, and Google had to do some serious fighting to secure the future of Android at that time.
Phone manufacturers do not exist to serve the bidding of the software builders, they actually have to make money, and doing that requires looking at least superficially competitive. The primary way users experience that is through the graphical interface on the device, hence why my then employer made incredible amounts of money selling game builds for all these other devices to demonstrate how close to iPhone equivalent they were.
It's no accident that the Android golden age began with fusing the UI concepts of WebOS that worked with a rendering pipeline that started to make sense for the hardware it was on.
krige
Yeah, what about Windows Phone? From a user's perspective it felt like it was good, very good even, but MS kind of... gave up on it suddenly? Like they pulled a google on it.
lipowitz
The next billion users for each billion after the first were not enterprise workers who wanted to connect to some email server so windows and BlackBerry missed the volume market entirely. Users wanted a phone that lasted 3 years, could browse and could bank. A small number of power developers that dont despise the platform are simply needed to keep the user base at all and a browser OS that wasn't Android had that by default.
Mozilla ignored the autonomy of the parties that should be in an ecosystem and tried to make them wait for Mozilla's choices and implementations on things. I bet they had more than enough people on every one of their waiting lists for being involved but they discouraged actual involvement.
wkat4242
It kinda ate the feature phone market for a while as KaiOS. It was way better than normal feature phones like Nokia Series 30.
Unfortunately there's very few KaiOS phones on the market anymore. Nokia stopped making them and reverted back to Series 30 and 40. I wonder why.
bgirard
I worked on the rendering team at Mozilla during that time and contributed a lot to improving performance and reducing memory usage for B2G. I remember I was optimizing the experience for 256 MB devices, then one day we're told to start optimizing for a 128 MB reference phone. The very next day I open up HN to see Ars Technica reviewing a Firefox OS 64 MB phone. Predictably I knew that the experience would be terrible because I was still optimizing rendering for 256 MB two days priors. Us shipping devices that our software wasn't tuned for shot the very little remaining faith I had in the project.
Coincidentally I was profiling and tuning the keyboard pop-open for 256 MB devices at the time. Profiling and tuning the trade-offs of when to render and animate the graphical layers. Knowing that these trade-offs would be very different and incorrect for a 64 MB device.
khuey
I was also there for the memory usage side of things.
B2G management was driven by a mix of "the web is the platform" ideology[0] and a willingness to promise whatever carriers and OEMs wanted to close a distribution deal regardless of whether it was feasible or made any sense.
My own personal "this project is hopelessly doomed" moment was roughly 48 hours before the 1.4 code freeze when I was contacted by a colleague asking how feature X was coming along. Feature X was needed to fix Bug Y, and Bug Y was in the critical bug list for the code freeze. But it turned out the B2G project managers had decided to manually track their critical bug list outside of Bugzilla, and didn't make any effort to track the transitive dependencies of those bugs, or notify anyone that they should be working on these. "ngmi" hadn't been popularized yet but that was very much my feeling at that moment. Active development ceased by the end of the year.
[0] which I think could have panned out at least technically, given sufficient resources, time, etc
dcminter
> ... a willingness to promise whatever carriers and OEMs wanted to close a distribution deal...
That always struck me as one of the more impressive things that Jobs achieved with the original iPhone - getting buy-in from Cingular to do things Apple's way and not Cingular's. Pre-iPod Apple probably couldn't have done it.
rickdeckard
...and have Cingular pay a revenue-share of the monthly user-bill back to Apple in exchange for exclusivity.
It cannot be overstated what a gamechanger it was to have a recurring revenue stream incrementing with each new user. Beside Blackberry, no cellphone company was able to finance maintenance based on its userbase AND hardware sales, they all only worked (and mostly still work) based on hardware-sale alone.
fabrice_d
The Ars Technica review was for the 128MB phones (the Tarako project if you remember, shipping from the 1.3t branch). We never did a 64MB version, which was just a pipe dream from some BD folks to save a few cents of BOM costs.
masfoobar
I was a Firefox OS user around the 2011-2016 era -- somewhere around there. I was using it for about 5 years.. and very happy!
To me it was money well spent. About £50 (CTE Open???) for a firefox phone and it covered all I needed at that time. Calls, Text, Games.. and allowed html5 projects, which I created to do things with my home server. At the time, it was just a WIN-WIN as I could not be asked to create Android apps.
I was sad when Firefox no longer supported it. Evenutally, I finally jumped in the Android world. I dont think my reasons were entirely about Firefox, but because I was changing my roles and resposibilities at work and had to make/answer more calls that ever. My Pay as you go scheme was not suitable anymore so decided to buy contract.
I was proud holding off for as long as I could but in todays world where I need WhatsApp, MSTeams, VPN, etc.. I doubt I would have stayed on FirefoxOS if still going strong today. Alternatively I could just ask for a Company Phone. LOL.
Overall, the Firefox phone was nice. A bit quirky in places but for the hardware at the time (compared to what was on the market) it was pretty cool.
Some people laughed at me with their IPhone of Galaxy.. but I didn't care.
I do keep my eye on other Open Source/Free phones. Honestly, if there is a performant phone that is affordable and runs GNOME smoothly (and nice experience) I honestly would consider it.. as long as the apps mentioned above can run.
afavour
I have no insider knowledge but from my perspective the reason Firefox OS failed is the same reason WebOS failed and the same reason Windows Phone failed: apps. If you didn't have the apps users wanted they wouldn't buy into your platform, it really was as simple as that.
That said I think Mozilla were right to try. The phone ecosystem we live in today is locked down and tightly controlled by tech giants. Leveraging web tech to bridge that gap made sense, even if it had drawbacks. But it was a competitive environment where they needed to nail absolutely everything first time and just couldn't pull it off.
arcbyte
I actually think Windows Phone was close to a breakthrough when Microsoft shut it down. Apps were always important, yes, but wayyy less so outside the tech blogger circle for everyday users. Normal people loved the hub experiences and it had enough apps for them, with missing ones eventually coming out by the time normal people knew they wanted them.
Tech Bloggers couldn't stand that a startup would launch on Apple (not even Android) and they couldn't download them and write about them. They made a lot of noise about this. But it was always nonsense.
afavour
I think Windows Phone was just wildly mismanaged. I say this as someone who bought a WP7 phone very early on because I found the UI so compelling.
MS were obviously caught on the back foot. WP7 was based heavily on Windows Mobile because that was all they had ready to go at the time. Then they rebooted the OS entirely with WP8 (based on NT, should have always been that way), removing backwards compatibility for existing apps and phones. Personally I gave up on Windows Phone right there and then: they'd obsoleted a phone I bought (IIRC) a little over a year previously.
You might be right that as time went on they might have made it a success. Certainly, they had the resources to keep throwing money at it until they did. But those early missteps really hurt them. You need passionate evangelists for your product, I’m only half joking when I say they should have swallowed the cost and upgraded every WP7 owners phone for free.
Marsymars
> removing backwards compatibility for existing apps and phones
That’s not true; I developed a WP7 Silverlight app that worked with just minor bugfixes through Windows Mobile 10.
What they did do was bungle the marketing on it, so the public conciousness mixed up “WP7 devices can’t run WP8 apps” and “WP8 devices can’t run WP7 apps”.
protocolture
>I think Windows Phone was just wildly mismanaged. I say this as someone who bought a WP7 phone very early on because I found the UI so compelling.
I like to think that WP7 was a smart dumb phone. I had a great UI, that I loved. And just enough smart stuff to make me happy. Maps. Unified messaging. Cortana wasnt completely enshittified yet either. Small package (L520) and I loved it.
WP8 tried to incorporate Windows 8 design features, and everything got worse. Vendors pulled out of the unified messaging. Cortana would send my maps to the advertisers address rather than closest requested. And the L525 that ran it actually went backwards in specs.
I would still, today, go back to a supported, bugfixed, WP7 in a heartbeat. And I bet there are dozens! of people just like me.
sillystu04
In hindsight, it would've been worthwhile for Microsoft to tolerate heavy losses for a decade on Windows phone. Like they did with Bing or Azure.
In the 2020s every serious app developer from Epic to Spotify to Facebook to Tinder is desperately concerned by the platform policies of Apple/Google, and would gladly support Windows phone as first class platform. And so would consumers - enterprises would love to have their AD groups work neatly on employee devices and many individual buyers would love to have more open freedom too.
lproven
> In hindsight, it would've been worthwhile for Microsoft to tolerate heavy losses for a decade on Windows phone. Like they did with Bing or Azure.
Absolutely right.
It gave up too early.
And Mozilla gave up on B2G too early. KaiOS has been quite a big hit and it's still making money. In time, the hardware came down to meet the requirements of what wasn't a really lightweight OS when it was launched in 2013 or so.
cosmic_cheese
I think it would have continued to struggle simply due to Microsoft’s inability get its dev story straight. Devs had largely fled to iOS and Android because those platforms weren’t nearly as bad about pulling the rug out from under devs as Windows Phone was. A lot of goodwill had been burned and wasn’t coming back.
toast0
Microsoft was burning devs on each major release, and that was a big issue. But IMHO, windows mobile 10 was a disasterous release and that doomed it.
WP7 and WP8 weren't amazing (although three of us liked it), but they offered tremendous value on the low end. You could get a $100 WP8 phone that was more responsive than a $250 Android phone. Microsoft was telling people that most WP8 devices would be upgradable to WM10, then they removed low memory devices from the list, then they released WM10 in such a state that upgrading anything was a bad idea.
In particular, (trident) Edge was so awful, it was almost unusable. Mobile IE had a terrible rendering engine, but at least the UI was responsive. Edge queued inputs, so when a page was busy loading, it wouldn't respond to the back or stop buttons or navigating to a new page until the page finished loading... Not sure what the stop button is there for when it waits to stop until after everything is done.
When you are driving developers away by launching a different development model every release, users are going to be driven to the browser, and if it sucks too, what are they going to do?
WM10 had Continuum for high end phones which is neat, but it neglected the low end market where WP7 and WP8 shone.
It wasn't until the final build of WM10 that they got performance to be good on my test phone. (Edge still sucked) But that was way too late. They needed to have WM10 come out of the gate as good or better than WP8. AFAIK, WM10 never got bigger installed base numbers compared to WP8 even though many WP8 devices were upgradable to WM10.
Perhaps moving phones into the overall Windows org wasn't the right choice for the product. Almost certainly eliminating dedicated Test engineers reduced the quality of the product.
In an alternate reality where Microsoft provided a usable WM10 base install, tested and fixed WP8 -> WM10 upgrades before release so apps didn't fail on upgrade, had an option of a reasonable browser (letting android or chrome into the store or at least offering the old mobile ie), things would have been a lot better. If Intel hadn't pulled the plug on Atom for phones days before the Continuum demo, it might have been buy a high end x86 Windows Phone and run win32 apps on it when you're at your desk... Maybe WM10 would have still failed, but it would have put up a good fight.
fidotron
There were curious incidents like this: https://www.computerworld.com/article/1494461/why-is-google-...
But I tend to share the view that WP was, with the Nokia WP8 devices, finally getting somewhere. The fact not everything had to go through Silverlight to get on the screen was a big help!
There was a lot of noise in the industry back in that era that suggested this whole fight was far more intense and nastier than many would imagine (and I have to be careful to not be any more specific than that), but ultimately I believe Android only reached an acceptable state because of the need to defend from iOS and Windows Phone/RT.
dahauns
> Apps were always important, yes, but wayyy less so outside the tech blogger circle for everyday users.
From the perspective of a European carrier back in the day: This would probably have been true in the early iOS/Android days, but by then we were wayy in the "There's an app for that" era. All metrics we had back then showed potential app availability being the tie-breaker and the "WP has no apps" perception the biggest reason for consumers to avoid it.
mort96
Sorry but nobody is going to use a phone where they can't chat with their friends via whatever chat app they're already using or transfer money via whatever money transfer apps their social group is already using or transfer money between their existing bank accounts with their bank's apps or check in with their flights or use their city's public transport infrastructure apps or parking payment apps or car charging apps or taxi hauling apps or food delivery apps.
I think the average non-technical user uses a whole lot more apps than what you give them "credit" for. The technology industry has pushed for more and more everyday services to be app-based. And most of these apps work only on iOS and Android.
KingOfCoders
We had a hot e-commerce app in Germany at the time of Windows Phone (exit to eBay). Microsoft pressured us to port to their platform with several visits (pre Covid :-) I (CTO) told them they could send us some phones and devs would start a port on the side. They didn't sent us anything but still kept pressuring us. It was insanity. I loved my yellow Lumia 920.
xuki
That is indeed strange, Microsoft Singapore was practically giving away phones (Lumia 920) for anyone who asked.
mrweasel
> I loved my yellow Lumia 920.
Still the best mobile device I've ever owned.
halo
I’m convinced a major reason Windows Phone failed is because Google didn’t support it for self-serving reasons. It rarely gets mentioned but no YouTube or Google Maps apps is a big deal and a major barrier to adoption. The tech giants don’t want competition.
jeroenhd
I'm convinced FirefoxOS would've stuck around a lot longer if WhatsApp had an app for it. Maybe it wouldn't have made waves in the US, but in other countries it was a great alternative to other low-cost options, except the messenger everybody used for everything didn't work on it.
dblohm7
> I have no insider knowledge but from my perspective the reason Firefox OS failed is the same reason WebOS failed and the same reason Windows Phone failed: apps.
I was at Mozilla during this time, and I remember a huge blocker was WhatsApp. They were not interested in porting, but at the time it was essentially the killer app in the same emerging markets that Firefox OS was targeting.
akdev1l
Ironically, WhatsApp created their web client years later
If the web client would have existed back then it might have helped
derf_
> But it was a competitive environment where they needed to nail absolutely everything first time and just couldn't pull it off.
They didn't need to and couldn't have expected to. The real problem was that to get to a successful product, you needed to be willing to lose money for a long time. Android and iPhone were years ahead in terms of polish and optimization, and were not exactly sitting still. Firefox OS was going to be bad for a long time before it could ever be good, and did not have the luxury of its competitors being in the same state any longer (people don't remember how bad Android used to be). These are necessary growing pains for any incredibly complex system: mythical-man-month stuff that should be familiar to anyone in software development.
At the time, Mozilla had just renegotiated their search deal for $900 million over 3 years [0], with guaranteed payments that did not depend on actual search traffic. That was a lot more money than the project had ever seen before, and meant there was a limited window in which Mozilla could neglect the desktop browser in the hopes that the mobile OS would take off. In hindsight it proved to be too limited.
When Firefox OS was finally killed, management told us [1] something along the lines of, "The growth expectations we had going in to the project turned out to be unrealistic." I think it is okay to stop doing something when it is not working. This is just the inverse of Charlie Munger's advice to, "Figure out what works and do it." One wonders what could have been done with more realistic expectations, though.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2011/12/firef...
[1] I was also there, although outside of fixing a few media-handling bugs, I never worked on B2G directly.
cosmic_cheese
> If you didn't have the apps users wanted they wouldn't buy into your platform, it really was as simple as that.
And conversely, to have apps you need developer buy-in, and to get that you need to demonstrate potential for wide adoption or be so intriguing that devs want to build for your platform regardless.
This is where starting low-end hurt. As noted by others, this made it difficult for Firefox OS to perform well in users’ hands, but additionally the users willing to take a risk on a new platform generally aren’t usually the ones who are interested in low-end hardware. People buying cheap phones primarily want a high value proven workhorses, and anything running an experimental OS is the opposite of that.
As a result, buzz around the project was minimal and quickly dissipated. Devs weren’t excited about it and didn’t talk about it and thus didn’t develop for it.
owebmaster
Had Mozilla kept developing Firefox OS, today it would be a commercial success. They were simple incapable of betting on the right horse.
fabrice_d
You can even remove the plural on "apps". The biggest commercial hurdle was the lack of WhatsApp support, which was a must have in many countries. Chicken and egg situation unfortunately.
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i80and
I had a Firefox OS phone for hobby development. The initial release wasn't amazing, but 2.0 was actually surprisingly smooth and snappy on the anemic-even-for-the-time hardware!
Great little device, genuinely.
EDIT: It was a ZTE Open
tecleandor
I had two development devices, one was the Geeksphone Peak, and the other one (IIRC) was the Geeksphone Keos. One of them developed battery problems quickly (or something like that) and I think I didn't get to test v2 in the other one.
I have to check if I still have it around...
Qem
I still keep my Alcatel One Touch Fire, from circa 2014, as a keepsake.
One funny detail I noticed recently was that its battery was made by BYD, back then an unremarkable brand. So its operating system stalled, but at least the maker of another component became immensely successful since then.
owebmaster
Now you got me hoping for a BYD phone
Groxx
Yeah, honestly I still like some things about it better than other OSes. And the web/native fusion was much better than anything similar that iOS or Android have tried (though not perfect either).
Though I am very unhappy to see that its bounce-and-stretch animation at the end of scrolling is appearing everywhere :/ It was uncomfortable and weird looking then, and it still is now.
rjsw
Firefox OS is available on phones today, just rebranded as KaiOS.
I have a Nokia 6300 4G, it works fine for what I want: A small dual SIM phone with good call quality and a 4G router when away from home. Any apps are a bonus though Meta recently withdrew the WhatsApp one.
gaazoh
I tried using a Nokia 6300 4G for a while a few years ago, because I don't use phones for much else than phone, SMS and a bit of Wikipedia.
I had a terrible experience, nothing worked correctly, basic, fundamental apps such as phone, contact, alarms, had lag spikes of over a second for any action and randomly crashed, it had no CJK support (kind of a big deal for me, and like 20% of the world)...
Some apps worked remarkably well, but having Youtube work better than messages is kind of pointless given the sVGA screen size. And the app ecosystem was basically dead. I tried developing a bit for it (apps are a simple html+css+js package), but at the time publishing to their app store required integration of their advertising solution, which absolutely sucked (in 6 month of use, I was never served any other ad than "hot MILFs in my area"), which meant that neither commercial nor OSS apps would target the platfom. IIRC side-loading sort-of worked depending on phones, which means it doesn't work for the average user.
Oh and sometimes the Kai Store app would send advertisement through push notifications.
I loved KaiOS on paper, but using it was a chore. A 2010-era "dumb" phone could do most of what a KaiOS phone can, but better, except for connecting to 3g/4g networks, and older networks are deprecated in many regions, which means they're not an option anymore.
Maybe they got better over time, but what a huge disappointment that was.
mort96
KaiOS is closed source though. That makes it completely uninteresting; the exciting part of Firefox OS wasn't just "yay more HTML and CSS".
lproven
It is, which is interesting because it's a fork of B2G which is explicitly FOSS under a licence written by former CEO Mitch Baker herself.
How can a FOSS project based around Linux and Firefox be picked up and closed? That ought to be impossible -- this isn't BSD-licensed stuff.
fabrice_d
Gecko is MPL licensed, and KaiOS abides by that license.
The front-end part of FxOS was always under an Apache 2 license, much to the dismay of some employees, but that was forced by commercial partners to allow them to differentiate while keeping their changes private.
mdaniel
heh https://github.com/kaiostech/gecko-b2g says
> This branch is 400945 commits ahead of, 15894 commits behind mozilla-b2g/gecko-b2g:b2g48_v2_6
and it seems they're still using bugzilla, so they're obviously hard-core
Here are the list of their 74 supported devices https://www.kaiostech.com/explore/devices/
bandoti
Nice I would like to explore KaiOS more. I have been thinking these days: what is the bare minimum people need today in a mobile digital experience.
Browser, phone, email/contacts, maps, payment, authentication, file manager, networking (NFC, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, cellular).
Seems like with the progression of web APIs and WASM, most of this functionality can live in the browser.
qingcharles
I see and use these devices when I help newly released parolees, who are sometimes prohibited from having any apps while on parole, and these are the "dumbest" phones you can currently buy.
They're honestly pretty horrible. Everything is just so much effort on them. Nothing makes sense. And I'm no dummy. I worked for Nokia for a while on prototypes in the mid-2000s, which is the kind of era these Kai phones hark back to.
owebmaster
What I know is that nowadays, having less apps is a feature. A lot of people would buy a phone that does not have TikTok and Instagram
Aeglaecia
kaios is disappointing , feature poor , and buggy - dumb phones running it are mere echoes of their predecessors
seba_dos1
My biggest gripe with Firefox OS was that it just wasn't all that different from Android - both technically and philosophically. Aside of a bunch of selected developer-targeted devices, it was usually being just as locked down as Android was. This was done because of the strategy of partnerships with carriers and vendors, but ultimately it just made it uninteresting for the broader FLOSS community to embrace, as it just boiled down to replacing Java-based stack with Web-based one without making any significant progress in device openness and user freedom. It didn't even help Linux, as B2G was made to use Android-specific layers to ensure compatibility with blobs and unmaintainable vendor-provided kernel trees.
akdev1l
There is literally no way Firefox could have fixed the entire OEM landscape.
OEMs are not going to release the driver source code. They simply will not, at best they do random code dumps of whatever kernel version they were using at the time.
This is still true today and even Google tried to make it better with Project Treble. If Google cannot fix this even after all these years with total market dominance then literally Mozilla couldn’t do a single thing about it
seba_dos1
Nobody can "fix the entire OEM landscape".
Mozilla could have nudged it in the right direction. They didn't try. Not even a step forwards. The entire value proposition from non-technical standpoint was "we're not Google".
Others are trying with much less leverage or resources and actually progressing. Firefox OS was born, lived and died without making a dent.
cosmodev
When I was just starting to learn programming years ago, I wanted to build apps for mobile devices. But my computer couldn’t handle Android Studio, so I started exploring alternatives and that’s when I discovered Firefox OS. The idea of building apps with JavaScript was really exciting. All I wanted back then was to make a simple WebView app. It’s fascinating to learn the story behind Firefox OS all these years later
Benjamin_Dobell
This takes me back. Whilst I was studying at university, I developed Heimdall, open source firmware flashing software for Samsung Android phones. I don't know that it was ever official, but I remember being pretty stoked when I realised some Mozilla employees were using Heimdall to flash Firefox OS onto Samsung devices: https://developer.mozilla.org.cach3.com/my/docs/Mozilla/B2G_...
fabrice_d
Yes, thanks for Heimdall! Indeed we did a lot of the initial dev on Samsung Galaxy S2 devices flashed with your tool!
NetOpWibby
This basically confirms my suspicions that:
— Firefox OS would've worked
— Mozilla leadership has always been interested in chasing fads
— Letting smart, motivated people work on cool shit is necessary to create the future.
cries in Bell Labs
qingcharles
Firefox OS would not have worked, IMO. It fitted a specific place and time (cheap, crappy phones) that quickly evaporated and users demanded a lot more than Mozilla would ever have had the resources to provide.
I wish there was a (good) third option. I actually liked Windows Phone and was sad it was canned.
dblohm7
I worked at Mozilla during this time, originally on desktop and later on mobile.
I think the fundamental problem then (and still a problem today) is that Mozilla only ever had the budget to do Desktop XOR Mobile. Not both.
They basically mortgaged Desktop Firefox to build Firefox OS, but when things didn't pan out was quickly as they liked, they had to revert back to Desktop to save the cash cow.
After that experience, upper management became averse to mobile, to the extent that it was (and probably still is) very difficult to get resources allocated to mobile implementations of Gecko features that are supposed to be cross-platform. In practice many of those features are never implemented with mobile in mind.
> With retrospect, I think B2G was a good idea - challenging Apple would also have been a good idea, as we had an internal demo of gecko powered Firefox for iOS. Owning the complete stack was the right approach. It gives you the power to have something that work nicely on the devices you support. I think the development approach we took was the wrong one. We were too in a hurry and that ended up neglecting Desktop. I believe we should have engaged potential partners way later, with a better, more finished and more QAed product.
I think this is basically correct.
I also think:
- Targeting low end devices first was a huge mistake. The web stack they were building on was simply too inefficient for that to work with the devices at the time. If they'd targeted high end devices then it would likely have worked on low-end devices by the time they were ready to ship it anyway (perhaps this plays into them rushing and having unrealistic timescales)
- It's really unfortunate that Rust wasn't a bit further along during the Firefox OS era. A lot of the Rust UI pieces that are now being developed would make a really strong foundation for something like Firefox OS. And could perhaps also have enabled a better story for "breaking out" of the confines of the web platform.