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: 1) by Fledermaus on Thursday December 10 2015, @12:11PM
I like options too, that's why I bought Jolla :)
But Firefox OS was never really an option; I feared it would get worse as time went on, as has been the case with their browser. Firefox is still my main browser (with pentadactyl), though slowly being replaced by qutebrowser.
And Whatsapp. Their hostility towards non-standard client users is a bit mystifying. You would think that more users the better?