4 ms·

I don't, because it was on my corp email. I remember the gist being that we were trying to compete against the two biggest companies on the planet, and (outsid

I don't, because it was on my corp email. I remember the gist being that we were trying to compete against the two biggest companies on the planet, and (outside of some concerns about security) nobody seemed to really be complaining about the two options. If our goal was to bet the company (financially) on it, it made no sense to try to undercut Android... at the time Android was open source and ran on dirt cheap phones. I remember a big part of it being "nobody wants a phone that doesn't have Angry Birds on it". I wasn't specifically worried about that one game (although it was insanely popular at the time), but rather all the apps – Uber, Facebook, etc. We had no ability to make parternships of that level happen. Especially since some of those companies (like Facebook) were trying to build their OWN phones at the time. I just didn't think there was a market for a phone with no apps, that was positioning itself as the "cheaper" version of an already cheap (and ubiquitous) competitor. And I wouldn't have cared, if it wasn't for the fact that we had to move the entire company towards building this – which we did for a few years.

JohnFen 3y ago
Interestingly, though, FireFox OS was forked to become KaiOS which can now be found on just about every feature phone on the market that I've seen.
- diggan 3y ago
  > FireFox OS was forked to become KaiOS Damn, I wasn't aware of this. I had a big interest in FirefoxOS when it was developed, so much that I named one of ours dogs after one component of it (Gaia). I was always sad that FirefoxOS (tried) to pivot to IoT instead of continuing to iterate on the idea, seems KaiOS is worth looking into.
  - fabrice_d 3y ago
    There was no IoT pivot. This was just a corporate play to get rid of the FxOS team. Ari got a nice exit package from doing that.
  - Delk 3y ago
    A couple of years ago my elderly parents got feature phones with KaiOS. It was slow (at least on those devices), cumbersome, and some basic things such as SMS felt quite unintuitive and complex to operate. Think old feature phone OSes where you have to navigate from one menu to another with arrow keys, a few buttons and limited screen space, but without the relative polish of those actual old phone OSes from the days when they were standard. And with tangible sluggishness added. n = 1 and I don't know how much phone vendors customize KaiOS. Maybe it was only cumbersome due to customizations or limitations from that vendor. Maybe it works better on touch devices. Maybe the hardware just wasn't up to the task. But it didn't leave a good mark.
- dangus 3y ago
  Which has a 0.16% global marketshare. I guess feature phones have to use something though.
- qingcharles 3y ago
  It's also terrible. Source: I used it extensively last year as my primary phone OS.
panick21_ 3y ago
I think there was kind of a need for such a software, not just phones. But not sure why Mozilla was the company to deliver that. And not sure it would be a money maker. Nokia also had an internal 'next gen small OS' that they also killed during that time.

JohnFen 3y ago

Interestingly, though, FireFox OS was forked to become KaiOS which can now be found on just about every feature phone on the market that I've seen.

diggan 3y ago
> FireFox OS was forked to become KaiOS Damn, I wasn't aware of this. I had a big interest in FirefoxOS when it was developed, so much that I named one of ours dogs after one component of it (Gaia). I was always sad that FirefoxOS (tried) to pivot to IoT instead of continuing to iterate on the idea, seems KaiOS is worth looking into.
- fabrice_d 3y ago
  There was no IoT pivot. This was just a corporate play to get rid of the FxOS team. Ari got a nice exit package from doing that.
- Delk 3y ago
  A couple of years ago my elderly parents got feature phones with KaiOS. It was slow (at least on those devices), cumbersome, and some basic things such as SMS felt quite unintuitive and complex to operate. Think old feature phone OSes where you have to navigate from one menu to another with arrow keys, a few buttons and limited screen space, but without the relative polish of those actual old phone OSes from the days when they were standard. And with tangible sluggishness added. n = 1 and I don't know how much phone vendors customize KaiOS. Maybe it was only cumbersome due to customizations or limitations from that vendor. Maybe it works better on touch devices. Maybe the hardware just wasn't up to the task. But it didn't leave a good mark.
dangus 3y ago
Which has a 0.16% global marketshare. I guess feature phones have to use something though.
qingcharles 3y ago
It's also terrible. Source: I used it extensively last year as my primary phone OS.

panick21_ 3y ago

I think there was kind of a need for such a software, not just phones. But not sure why Mozilla was the company to deliver that. And not sure it would be a money maker. Nokia also had an internal 'next gen small OS' that they also killed during that time.