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Mozilla announced earlier today that they will be cancelling the Firefox OS effort, and will cease creation of new smartphones.
From Techcrunch:
To differentiate from Android and iOS, Mozilla and its carrier partners focused on a web-first platform, with no native and only web apps. Sales, however, were always poor and the devices themselves failed to ignite a lot of consumer interest, and a number of OEMs cornered the market with a flood of cheap handsets. In a business that depends on economies of scale, it was a failure.
This comes a week after gauging interest in spinning off Thunderbird. Is Mozilla's new focus on becoming privacy-oritented enough to save the struggling company? What experience did SoylentNews users have with FirefoxOS? I'll admit, I was optimistic and even owned a ZTE Open for a few months back in 2013, but it was a step down from my feature phone at the time (Nokia Asha 311) and ZTE never delivered on the promise to provide updates to the OS.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Thursday December 10 2015, @12:20PM
The mobile world just doesn't have room for also-ran operating systems. Both iOS and Android are overwhelmingly complex beats that take all your development effort and then some. If you're not trying to learn some baroque, obscure framework like Chromecast's casting, you're running to stand still reimplementing working code to support version x + 1's total rewrite of a feature.
So someone has a new operating system that is both complex and obscure. As a developer, you have to choose between doing work that affects 99.99% of your installed base, or a pilot project for the new operating system which has almost no users. Who's going to win? Not the also-ran. You can't keep up with iOS and Android, let alone learn some other platform with a new way of doing the same thing. No one has the time to do that, especially for little or no future payback.
So the ultimate cop-out is to try to get Android apps running on the also-ran platform. Sounds like a good idea, but everyone who has tried it has failed. They don't support Google Play services, so my app won't run as-is. The process for building, running, and publishing an Android app on the also-ran platforms is too complex and if I don't want to learn your complicated API, I also don't want to learn your 1000-step process for publishing an Android app.
Amazon is the only viable Anrdoid platform left that doesn't support Google Play services, and I frankly think they've given up on third-party apps and are concentrating on the platform as a way to serve their own content.
So the rule of three hasn't worked with mobile development. It's the rule of two. Mainly because platform complexity. Two is about all you can handle.
And then there's the side of why a device manufacturer would want an also-ran mobile OS when worldwide capacity can barely keep up with iOS and Android. MS had to buy a mobile device company to make phones.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)