Firefox OS Will Become the Mobile OS To Beat 205
mattydread23 writes with an opinion piece naming a few reasons Firefox OS is likely to succeed "It's geared toward low-powered hardware in a way that Google doesn't care as much about with Android, it's cheap enough for the pre-paid phones that are much more common than post-paid in developing countries, and most important, there are still 3.5 billion people in the world who have feature phones and for whom this will be an amazing upgrade."
I'd push greater commitment to keeping the essential components of the system under FOSS licenses onto the head of that list.
Re:Firefox OS Will Become the Mobile OS To Beat (Score:4, Interesting)
Firefox OS Will Become the Mobile OS To Beat
Flamebait and hopelessly wrong.
I wouldn't go that far. Its entirely possible that Firefox OS could become a major player in the market segment the article indicates. The problem is that saying "...will become the Mobile OS to Beat" implies the major players like Android, iOS, and Windows even want to win that game in the first place. Absolutely there are lots of people who cannot afford the top of the line smartphones out there, and it would be nice if someone serviced their needs, but the problem is time. In time, technology will improve and costs will continue to drop relative to computing power. Its very dangerous to target a market Moore's Law is scheduled to destroy.
For Firefox OS to be the mobile OS "to beat" requires a lot of things to happen that aren't trivial exercises. First, Firefox OS has to become the dominant player in the low end market. Second, it has to achieve a level of brand loyalty comparable to iOS and significantly higher than Android itself (Android users are typically more loyal to their smartphone manufacturer than the operating system itself in my experience). It then has to be able to parlay that brand loyalty into a way to maintain their hold on those users as the smartphone industry advances to the point where the $20 phone of tomorrow is the $600 phone of today. And it must do this in a way that doesn't give the major players an easy way to encompass Firefox's feature set: if FirefoxOS's major innovations are based on open standards and HTML5 applications, anything it can do today Android and iOS could easily do tomorrow if they wanted to.
So much has to go right besides "sell a lot of low end feature phones" that to me it would be like predicting that the company that supplies most of the paper to print air travel tickets in kiosks was a threat to take over the entire travel industry in a decade.
Meh... (Score:5, Interesting)
Just for reading the summary I can say this looks fishy. The latest Anroid release 4.4 was mainly dedicated to make Android run on smaller devices, adding tools to debug memory footprint, adding compresion of pages, sharing of things, etc. Google claims that now Android can run on a 512 MB device (which is fairly low end right now). And with ever decreasing memory prices is hard to imagine there's a place for a "lower than lower end" OS.
The "being open" reason is also not good enough. As a technology (i.e. removing Google services) Android is 100% free software. And the reason some telcos might want Firefox OS is to have a more closed environment which they can control.
Maybe Firefox could have been working to create its own Android fork, replacing Google service with Firefox services. That would be, IMO, much cooler.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
The entire premise of this article seems to revolve around the unsubstantiated claim that Android is poorly optimized for low-end devices. I disagree with that claim, so the entire premise of the article seems suspect to me.
Android requires OpenGL ES, both in the 1.0 and 2.0 flavors. For devices in developing countries, that's a very high bar.
That's also not a knock against Android. For higher end devices that's a very sensible requirement. But just looking at the minimum requirements, it's not compatible with low end in the developing world.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
I've seen this before though and this is the same wheel that everyone goes through.
"Look we got our system to run with 50% less memory!"
"Ok, so we sacrificed all of the features people expect these days, and in the last 3 years prices have dropped sufficiently that our product is no longer needed, but just wait for our next version!"
The better approach is to tackle low end devices like Microsoft and Google are already doing (And WP8 runs very well on low end systems) but not let it be your driving focus. Because inevitably what's a "high end" phone today will be a $5 prepaid phone in 3 years.