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: 2) by Celestial on Thursday December 10 2015, @03:03PM
Is there any viable alternative mobile OS to iOS and Android in North America? Not even Windows Phone is surviving here, at least not well. I wanted to like and support Jolla, but it's complete and utter disregard for the North America market made it a non-starter.
(Score: 1) by jpkunst on Friday December 11 2015, @10:19AM
Up until a month ago I would have said Blackberry 10 (note: not the old Blackberry OS), but Blackberry went Android with its latest phone and the future of its own OS seems uncertain.