6 ms·

> - Targeting low end devices first was a huge mistake. The web stack they were building on was simply too inefficient for that to work with the devices at the

by toast0 1y ago

> - Targeting low end devices first was a huge mistake. The web stack they were building on was simply too inefficient for that to work with the devices at the time. If they'd targeted high end devices then it would likely have worked on low-end devices by the time they were ready to ship it anyway (perhaps this plays into them rushing and having unrealistic timescales) The problem with targeting high end first is sales / production risk. A phone based on a new OS is a risky purchase, and it's hard to convince someone to spend $500 on a high end phone without much software available. A $100 low end phone without much software available is an easier sale. If you can get important software built for your platform, sales are easier, but sales/usage numbers drive developer interest. Also, it helps if the platform offers capabilities developers need; maybe it's my bias, but the number of platforms that launch without everything a messaging app needs was mind bogling --- everyone seems to understand that messaging apps sell phones, but they don't find out the requirements for them until very late. Apple does just fine without targetting low end (although they do sometimes target mid range), but they live in a different world, and it took decades to build that market placement.

1oooqooq 1y ago
except this analysis don't survive the real world. living in California and contributing code to gaia, i could only have a dev phone (not being involved with moz) when i went to an alley in Mexico city known for selling black market (no tax) computers. there i could finally pay usd50 to buy the crumiest bright orange plastic phone to use for dev work. would i have spent usd200-500 on my hobby to get a good phone months before i had a trip to mexico city? probably. would i pay the usd300 retailers in the us were charging for the crummiest low end phone? hell no.
- roywashere 1y ago
  It’s a balance. I guess they needed to target low end because they were 4 years too late. If they did this around the time of Android 1.5 or even 4, those phones were not so expensive and they could have targeted that or similar hardware. I guess around 2012 I bought a Firefox OS phone from a Spanish company for I believe 150 euros, which was quite reasonable. FirefoxOS was unusable though. Plus it lacked WhatsApp so I could not use it as a daily driver. In 2025 I would also need to have a banking app on mobile so it’s impossible to use an “alternative” phone OS for me
Shalomboy 1y ago
> The problem with targeting high end first is sales / production risk. A phone based on a new OS is a risky purchase, and it's hard to convince someone to spend $500 on a high end phone without much software available. A $100 low end phone without much software available is an easier sale. I mean, skate to where the puck is going, right? It sounds like Firefox OS started development as mobile component prices started to fall in price dramatically. By the time B2G was ready to go to market, the baseline for hardware would be dramatically higher than when they started.
ksec 1y ago
>A $100 low end phone without much software available is an easier sale. Except they didn't target $100 dollar phone. They were aiming at $20, but giving headrooms to $35. And in about 2 years time they finally believed they made a mistake, and raised the target to ...... $50. Silicon Valley at the time was all about software. They believed in Bill Gate's vision where all hardware cost will drop to zero and software will subsidise it. And Apple's business model is not sustainable. It was then I learned Silicon Valley has absolutely zero understanding of anything hardware. Apple was somehow the best and the outliner.
- toast0 1y ago
  The math works even better at $35. If you're in a high income economy, and your phone breaks, you might buy a $35 phone as an impulse buy to use while you wait for the phone you want to arrive. Then, when it works better than you expect, you might give it to a late adopter. Or if you're a late adopter, maybe you dip your toe in with a $35 phone. For low income economies, which is where the majority of people are, and the majority of late adopters of smart phones are, a $35 phone is affordable --- or much closer to affordable than the rest of the market. If you make a smartphone that works at that price point, the addressable market share is huge. And it could be subsidized by carriers in low income countries, too (see the JioPhone). The class of hardware they were targetting could provide a good experience --- similar specs provided good UX on iOS and reasonable to good UX on Windows Phone. If you make 1 million $35 phones and none of them sell, that's a waste of $35Million (maybe less, because you presumably have some margin, but maybe more, because R&D). If you make 1 million $500 phones and none of them sell, that's a waste of a lot more money. Around this time frame, I bought several $500 phones for $100 each when they failed; the Amazon Fire phone, the Nextbit Robin, the Essential PH-1; all were a great deal for me, and a colossal waste for the hardware team.
  - ndiddy 1y ago
    The problem was that in 2014, a $35 phone would get you specs worse than the original 2007 iPhone. Trying to run a mobile OS where the entire UI is written using web technologies on those specs basically made it unusable. Here's a review of one of the Firefox OS phones: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/10/testing-a-35-firefox-os-phone-how-bad-could-it-be/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/10/testing-a-35-firefox... Some choice quotes: > If the lock screen pops up while reading a webpage, you'll need to reload the page again. If you start the stopwatch and leave the app, the stopwatch stops. You can set the e-mail app to check for mail every five minutes, but there is never any free memory, so the mail check never runs. There isn't even anything to keep the crucial alarm process alive. If the phone is busy when an alarm is supposed to go off, it just doesn't go off. An alarm you can't trust to work 100 percent of the time is useless. > Typing on the Cloud FX is pure agony, and this is one of those really crippling deal breakers that makes the Cloud FX a bad phone at any price. The keyboard doesn't support multitouch, so you if press "Q" and "P" at the same time it splits the difference between the touch points and enters "Y." This means you can only ever carefully hunt and peck at a slow rate. It's very easy for the Cloud FX to slow down, so if anything is going on while you're trying to type, buttons will take a few moments to register. There's also no auto correction and no copy/paste. > Navigating webpages is a nightmare. The problem isn't just that the phone is slow, it's that scrolling is nearly impossible. A lot of times the phone is busy, and scrolling doesn't do anything. When it does scroll, you'll find the rest of the page often isn't loaded and you'll get a gray screen that takes a few seconds to be loaded into memory. The other problem is that scrolling is often interpreted as pressing on a link. This, combined with the speed of the device and the often-frozen scrolling, means the Cloud FX is frequently doing things you don't want—and doing them very slowly. > The performance of the Cloud FX really cannot be understated. Screen taps sometimes take seconds to register. Firefox OS has a recent apps screen, but there is never any free memory, so nothing other than the current app is ever open. During particularly slow freak-outs, the screen will just turn black. If the phone falls asleep, or the alarm pops up, or a phone call comes in, your app closes and you lose your progress. Even something as simple as opening a folder of apps has a load time measured in seconds. > Getting devices out to the developing world will be a big focus for many OEMs, since the market is just so huge. There are billions of people out there that still need access to the Internet. We know we can't expect something so cheap to hold a candle to the high-end devices we normally review, but all we ask is that the device be executed well and that the decisions that went into the product make sense. The Cloud FX doesn't make any sense, though, even at $35. It doesn't seem like anyone set out to choose the best software for this device, and that was really the crippling decision. Low-end smartphones need a low-end-appropriate operating system, and Firefox OS isn't up to that task. We get the feeling there are relatively good, sub-$50 devices out there—but this isn't one of them.

by toast0 1y ago

1oooqooq 1y ago

except this analysis don't survive the real world. living in California and contributing code to gaia, i could only have a dev phone (not being involved with moz) when i went to an alley in Mexico city known for selling black market (no tax) computers. there i could finally pay usd50 to buy the crumiest bright orange plastic phone to use for dev work. would i have spent usd200-500 on my hobby to get a good phone months before i had a trip to mexico city? probably. would i pay the usd300 retailers in the us were charging for the crummiest low end phone? hell no.

roywashere 1y ago
It’s a balance. I guess they needed to target low end because they were 4 years too late. If they did this around the time of Android 1.5 or even 4, those phones were not so expensive and they could have targeted that or similar hardware. I guess around 2012 I bought a Firefox OS phone from a Spanish company for I believe 150 euros, which was quite reasonable. FirefoxOS was unusable though. Plus it lacked WhatsApp so I could not use it as a daily driver. In 2025 I would also need to have a banking app on mobile so it’s impossible to use an “alternative” phone OS for me

Shalomboy 1y ago

> The problem with targeting high end first is sales / production risk. A phone based on a new OS is a risky purchase, and it's hard to convince someone to spend $500 on a high end phone without much software available. A $100 low end phone without much software available is an easier sale. I mean, skate to where the puck is going, right? It sounds like Firefox OS started development as mobile component prices started to fall in price dramatically. By the time B2G was ready to go to market, the baseline for hardware would be dramatically higher than when they started.

ksec 1y ago

>A $100 low end phone without much software available is an easier sale. Except they didn't target $100 dollar phone. They were aiming at $20, but giving headrooms to $35. And in about 2 years time they finally believed they made a mistake, and raised the target to ...... $50. Silicon Valley at the time was all about software. They believed in Bill Gate's vision where all hardware cost will drop to zero and software will subsidise it. And Apple's business model is not sustainable. It was then I learned Silicon Valley has absolutely zero understanding of anything hardware. Apple was somehow the best and the outliner.

toast0 1y ago
The math works even better at $35. If you're in a high income economy, and your phone breaks, you might buy a $35 phone as an impulse buy to use while you wait for the phone you want to arrive. Then, when it works better than you expect, you might give it to a late adopter. Or if you're a late adopter, maybe you dip your toe in with a $35 phone. For low income economies, which is where the majority of people are, and the majority of late adopters of smart phones are, a $35 phone is affordable --- or much closer to affordable than the rest of the market. If you make a smartphone that works at that price point, the addressable market share is huge. And it could be subsidized by carriers in low income countries, too (see the JioPhone). The class of hardware they were targetting could provide a good experience --- similar specs provided good UX on iOS and reasonable to good UX on Windows Phone. If you make 1 million $35 phones and none of them sell, that's a waste of $35Million (maybe less, because you presumably have some margin, but maybe more, because R&D). If you make 1 million $500 phones and none of them sell, that's a waste of a lot more money. Around this time frame, I bought several $500 phones for $100 each when they failed; the Amazon Fire phone, the Nextbit Robin, the Essential PH-1; all were a great deal for me, and a colossal waste for the hardware team.
- ndiddy 1y ago
  The problem was that in 2014, a $35 phone would get you specs worse than the original 2007 iPhone. Trying to run a mobile OS where the entire UI is written using web technologies on those specs basically made it unusable. Here's a review of one of the Firefox OS phones: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/10/testing-a-35-firefox-os-phone-how-bad-could-it-be/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/10/testing-a-35-firefox... Some choice quotes: > If the lock screen pops up while reading a webpage, you'll need to reload the page again. If you start the stopwatch and leave the app, the stopwatch stops. You can set the e-mail app to check for mail every five minutes, but there is never any free memory, so the mail check never runs. There isn't even anything to keep the crucial alarm process alive. If the phone is busy when an alarm is supposed to go off, it just doesn't go off. An alarm you can't trust to work 100 percent of the time is useless. > Typing on the Cloud FX is pure agony, and this is one of those really crippling deal breakers that makes the Cloud FX a bad phone at any price. The keyboard doesn't support multitouch, so you if press "Q" and "P" at the same time it splits the difference between the touch points and enters "Y." This means you can only ever carefully hunt and peck at a slow rate. It's very easy for the Cloud FX to slow down, so if anything is going on while you're trying to type, buttons will take a few moments to register. There's also no auto correction and no copy/paste. > Navigating webpages is a nightmare. The problem isn't just that the phone is slow, it's that scrolling is nearly impossible. A lot of times the phone is busy, and scrolling doesn't do anything. When it does scroll, you'll find the rest of the page often isn't loaded and you'll get a gray screen that takes a few seconds to be loaded into memory. The other problem is that scrolling is often interpreted as pressing on a link. This, combined with the speed of the device and the often-frozen scrolling, means the Cloud FX is frequently doing things you don't want—and doing them very slowly. > The performance of the Cloud FX really cannot be understated. Screen taps sometimes take seconds to register. Firefox OS has a recent apps screen, but there is never any free memory, so nothing other than the current app is ever open. During particularly slow freak-outs, the screen will just turn black. If the phone falls asleep, or the alarm pops up, or a phone call comes in, your app closes and you lose your progress. Even something as simple as opening a folder of apps has a load time measured in seconds. > Getting devices out to the developing world will be a big focus for many OEMs, since the market is just so huge. There are billions of people out there that still need access to the Internet. We know we can't expect something so cheap to hold a candle to the high-end devices we normally review, but all we ask is that the device be executed well and that the decisions that went into the product make sense. The Cloud FX doesn't make any sense, though, even at $35. It doesn't seem like anyone set out to choose the best software for this device, and that was really the crippling decision. Low-end smartphones need a low-end-appropriate operating system, and Firefox OS isn't up to that task. We get the feeling there are relatively good, sub-$50 devices out there—but this isn't one of them.