> Firefox OS, also known as Boot2Gecko from the "Gecko" rendering engine of Firefox, was a surprisingly clean and smooth experience, and its official deprecatio

> Firefox OS, also known as Boot2Gecko from the "Gecko" rendering engine of Firefox, was a surprisingly clean and smooth experience, and its official deprecation in 2016 was probably more of an adoption issue than a technical problem. > > Even Firefox OS's user interface was very nicely designed, with visible inspiration from HP WebOS and Palm OS. Clean lines, a lively flat design, and an easy-to-use app development toolkit made it a compelling alternative to Android and iOS. Except nobody adopted it seriously, and it died in 2016. …did the author ever try to use a FirefoxOS as their daily driver, or did they just play around with it for a bit? • The SDK had constant breaking changes • Update policy from hardware vendors was worse than Android's (Alcatel never updated their "flagship" FxOS phone outside the US) • Together, it meant that most users couldn't use the app store • The UI/UX was very obviously just half-assedly cobbled together. It was flat only because that's easier to do when you have no designers on staff, and none of it was clean compared to stock Android 4 I never tried writing an app, so I can't comment on the quality of the SDK, but since it broke constantly and most app authors apparently gave up, going by all the incompatible corpses rotting in the app store, I also question the "easy-to-use SDK" part. The default apps were also kinda awful, I still remember the camera app having an overflow issue where too bright pixels were rendered as black, e.g. Overall, FxOS failed not because people didn't understand its hidden genius, it failed because it was awful.