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Mozilla to Cease Development of Firefox OS

Accepted submission by joekiser https://soylentnews.org/~joekiser/ at 2015-12-08 21:03:13
OS

Mozilla announced earlier today that they will be cancelling the Firefox OS effort, and will cease creation of new smartphones. From Techcrunch [techcrunch.com]:

"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 [soylentnews.org]. Is Mozilla's new focus on becoming privacy-oritented [venturebeat.com] 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 [gsmarena.com] 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.


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