Why I care about Firefox OS fading away

fxos-fading-away.md

Why I care about Firefox OS fading away

Now it's official, Firefox OS moves into the „Tier 3“ support category.

Tier-3 platforms have a maintainer or community which attempt to keep the platform working. These platforms may or may not work at any time, and often have little test coverage.

Quote from MDN — Supported build targets

… So this basically means there won't be any extended effort to make Firefox OS more stable, or to make it even more user friendly. Also, there won't be any new advertisements to get a wider user base.

Don't understand me wrong, this should not be a post of any upset Firefox OS addicted. Even if I'm one, I will try to be objective.

The lost of Firefox OS as phone operating system means to loose some diversity. So why should I care about diversity? If everyone just uses Android, doesn't that mean more development work is moving into Android and at the end, every user will benefit from that? Short answer: no.

So why ist the lost of diversity so important to me? Less diversity means less competition. And competition keeps companies to focus on features that are important to users. Let's say Android does not implement the new cool feature, that iOS has. So users will shift to iOS. Let's say this feature has to do something with your car. So if Android implements this feature in their own style, car manufacturers now have to implement two proprietary technologies: Android Auto and Apple CarPlay.

If there is more diversity, like with Windows Mobile, Firefox OS and so on, these companies have to talk to each other and try to find a general standard. Because car manufacturers won't implement four+ technologies that basically do the same thing.

So the lost of diversity, at the end, means the lost of improvement / development of standards. And there's no way for „newcomers“ to get into the market (without paying a lot fees to use those proprietary technologies).

One small example, I've a new car with some fancy radio. This radio has a hands-free phone system based on Bluetooth. This was standardized some time ago, so now I can connect my Windows Mobile and my Firefox OS without any problem. This radio also has Android Auto and Apple CarPlay support. I simply can't use it, because it's proprietary technology. Android and iOS together have so much market share, that it's not necessary to develop and implement a better standard.

With no competition, companies can basically „do what they want“, because there are no alternatives for users.

Firefox OS also brought a lot of APIs to the browser it might not have otherwise had. It's not just innovation for the platform's own sake, Firefox OS was innovation for the sake of the web, and no other platforms bring such powerful deeply rooted externalities with it.

I never even glanced at Firefox OS, simply because it sounds uninteresting.

Firefox OS failed because it is ideology-first, and technology-first. iOS, and to a lesser extent Android, prioritize human-centered design.

Ideology cannot sell a platform to the mass market. What human-centered problems did Firefox OS solve that iOS and Android didn't? The only differentiators I can think of are openness and a focus on web standards. As a developer, I think those are awesome, and as a fervent believer in a diverse open web, I think those are crucial. As a person looking for technology to integrate into my life, I'm at a loss for a reason why I'd pick up Firefox OS. (Cost is a bad differentiator.)

It isn't enough for a challenger to solve the same problems. Any new contender has to offer a real alternative that meaningfully improves its users' lives in measurable ways.

The question is not: what alternative operating system can I run on my smartphone?

The question is: what comes after smartphones?

While I understand your concern with diveristy, you are sidelining what the diversity is required for! The most important reason diversity is important is that it ensures competition, which is supposed to create a positive feedback to improve all competitors over time. To do that, you must be...wait for it...competitive and competent. Which is what Firefox OS was not. It is casualty of natural selection in the wild. So no regrets there.

For me, one of the main failures of FirefoxOS was that it was simply impossible to install on other devices easily. Look at the supported devices list, there is nothing there. Cyanogen Mod proved that a success is possible if you support mainstream devices and make an easy install possible. I still can't install Firefox OS on my Galaxy S4 which I would consider a mainstream device and this is why it never really took of...

Tried developing for FFOS, but 1.1 was simply unusable. Unstable and hardly any APIs were final.

Support for my ZTE Open (the first FFOS developer phone) was canned a few months in, so i could not update to 1.2 (did not work at all) or 2.0 (completely unsupported).

Early adopters like me were just abandoned despite a critical lack of hardware platforms. So the phone ended up in the obsolete electronics drawer and i vowed to never touch anything Mozilla again.

Firefox OS was never seriously competing against Android/iOS, because it arrived too late for that, and Mozilla doesn't have the same business impetus and formidable resources that Google/Apple wield.

However, it is a clever piece of technology with some very nice and unique properties, e.g. a very light software base with better performance potential, and the proven privacy and security models of the web. I also like to believe that the project helped with and pushed others to standardize many mobile-related features.

Note: I've been using Firefox OS as my only phone for more than 2 years, and I intend to continue using it as long as it's not broken (although as a developer and Mozillian, I'm arguably more receptive to its ideology and technology rather than human-centered aspects).

What human-centered problems did Firefox OS solve that iOS and Android didn't?

One example: Bringing the web's fantastic permission model to mobile apps. On Android/iOS, you need to grant every permission an app might ever need at install time, forever, without any granularity. Instead, a web app (even installed apps in Firefox OS) will ask you for a specific permission when it actually needs it (e.g. "can I geolocate you?", "can I read your contacts?"...) and you can say "no" whenever you want (I'm looking at you, Twitter).

For me, one of the main failures of FirefoxOS was that it was simply impossible to install on other devices easily.

These issues were going away. I think Mozilla recently gained official support for Firefox OS on Nexus devices, and there is a CyanogenMod-based porting solution somewhere in the pipes to support many more devices (only rumors here though, don't take my word for it).

Early adopters like me were just abandoned despite a critical lack of hardware platforms. So the phone ended up in the obsolete electronics drawer and i vowed to never touch anything Mozilla again.

I agree that the Mozilla/ZTE partnership was bad, and caused many users (including myself) to buy junk ZTE devices with basically no support and a very short lifetime before they became obsolete (especially the first Open). I'm very sorry that Mozilla failed you @emente.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/os/devices/#zte_open Wow, it's still listed as a supported device.

Mozilla, please remove that tombstone gallery, it's laughable, nearly all of those phones are no longer in production and cannot even run a current FFOS version. That page is only a testament to your failed OEM efforts.

I hope there will be further community based open development of Firefox OS, not only builds like fxpblog fortunately offers.
I like Firefox OS for it's openness, ease of development of own HTML5-Apps which is as easy as putting up some HTML-Page on the web and for it's simplicity. I'm always getting sick with those thousands of options in Android, often it wasn't clear to me what the option really does (especially regarding app permissions), and I don't want to have to sign up for a google account to install apps.
In short, I don't like Google, so I don't like Android.

I'm positive: Come on! There's life in the old dog yet!