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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: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 10 2015, @06:12PM
I love my ZTE Open C. It doesn't have a 500 dpi screen or anything, but it gets the job done (web browsing, email, XMPP, sms, phone calls, calendar, music player). Once I figured out how to update it with the 2.2 channel I was set. I've been using it for a year now and am quite please. Needless to say, I'm disappointed Mozilla won't be developing FxOS for phones anymore.
(Score: 1) by petecox on Thursday December 10 2015, @11:01PM
I'm a daily user of a Flame running a nightly. On decent hardware it runs acceptably but the OS will be tainted by reviews running on ill-specced 'developing world' devices - a strategy Mozilla abandoned some months back.
I hope they keep a skeleton staff maintaining builds of the OS for Flame with stable versions of Gecko even if they don't proceed with new features of Gaia. (for security fixes etc) I tried building my own copy once but the download went awry in trying to download some 20GB (?) of sources.