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Canonical tried pretty hard. The reality is that you're going to fight with the two richest companies on Earth, on a field where commercial relationships with
by toyg 3y ago
Canonical tried pretty hard.
The reality is that you're going to fight with the two richest companies on Earth, on a field where commercial relationships with OEMs (phone manufacturers) matter more than anything else - and OEMs like to talk with big, reliable companies, not scrappy startups. Your competitors have a 15/20-year head-start, in a field where such head-starts are practically unsurmountable. Your OS will be judged on its first few releases, which means you better have it on a beefy flagship phone; except no decent OEM is going to bet their flagship on your unproven OS, so they're going to give you a second- or third-rate model instead, which will make your OS feel slow and glitchy. Oh, and you can't make any real money from the whole effort, because otherwise they will go Android.
- user_7832 3y agoIn the light of all this, the success of a company like framework honestly seems even more impressive.
- chasil 3y agoWould Firefox OS have a difficult task in securing a 7nm production run of processors from TSMC (or Samsung, or even SMIC in smaller quantity) to be assembled by Foxconn? China domestic devices use Android without Play, and iOS is now discouraged for government workers. Is the bar for Firefox OS still quite so high?
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y agoI wish the OS wasn't so tightly coupled with the hardware. Mozilla shouldn't need to secure a 7nm production run of processors and produce a whole device. I should be able to grab a phone that I like and install an OS that I like. I think that we have been robbed of so many possibilities. Perhaps we are slowly getting there. Historically, phones were never used in this way nor were they expensive or powerful enough for users to demand it.
- chasil 3y agoA similar situation has emerged with UEFI. Gone are the days of BIOS booting and easy bootloader upgrades to GRUB. On modern Windows, getting out of secure boot is much more difficult, and most will opt for a WSL variant. Neither Apple nor Google would ever tolerate even that.