20 ms·

Yesterday I Wrote My First Firefox OS App

204 points by kvz 13y ago

gbraad 13y ago
My experience: I wrote a google authenticator app in 'HTML5' a year ago and it just worked on FirefoxOS. It is the whole purpose of the OS. Is this news?
munchor 13y ago
I too have written an "app" for Firefox OS[1]. It was a game I had written for browsers using the HTML5 canvas and porting it to Firefox OS was as easy as 1, 2, 3. This, for me, is what makes Firefox OS promising - apps are simply HTML pages that work pretty much as computer webapps work. [1]: http://munchor.tumblr.com/post/46774157520/party-build-for-firefox-os http://munchor.tumblr.com/post/46774157520/party-build-for-f...
- PommeDeTerre 13y ago
  How is being able to do a small subset of what Android and iOS devices (among others) have been able to do for many years now seen as "promising"? I can somewhat see the price argument, but that's tenuous, at best. Even in developing nations it's possible to get used or older, yet still relatively modern and still useful, Android and iOS devices quite inexpensively. They can run HTML5/JavaScritp/CSS apps, in addition to native apps. Otherwise, only offering a small subset of functionality that has been offered by other devices for years now doesn't make me think of a word like "promising" when describing Firefox OS. Instead, I think of terms like, "extremely limited", "outdated", "obsolete from the start", and "pointless".
  - oinksoft 13y ago
    When you make authoring applications trivial and don't impose weird restrictions on distribution, you should see a more diverse ecosystem. Lowering the bar makes experimentation by programming novices possible.
    - shinratdr 13y ago
      Or you end up flooded with low quality applications by amateurs. Both are equally likely.
      - mwcampbell 13y ago
        If both are equally likely, then we might as well be optimists; the glass is half full.
        shinratdr 13y ago
        I kind of chose "equally likely" as a way to avoid rattling any cages. Obviously, I don't personally feel it's equally likely. I think the scales are heavily tipped towards irrelevancy.
      - kbenson 13y ago
        Just because we don't know the likelihoods doesn't mean they are equally as likely. Don't confuse quantity of information (little) with quality or content of information.
      - ux-app 13y ago
        Are you suggesting that the iOS App Store and Google Play Store aren't "flooded with low quality applications by amateurs"? To me it seems that a (relatively) high barrier to entry, and an approval process (in Apple's case), haven't really stopped lots of crappy apps from making it in. Personally I'm all for lowering barriers to entry. It's arguably one of the greatest things about the web.
        shinratdr 13y ago
        No, if I wanted to say that I would have said that. I'm saying, lowering the barrier to entry is barely needed. If anything you've just outlined my point. The barrier to entry is apparently so low that all app stores regardless of developer complexity are already flooded with crap. So the barrier needs to be lowered... why?
  - harrytuttle 13y ago
    Most of the bells and whistles aren't required for the product to be successful. Also this is version one. You're just bullying the new kid. One day he might grow up to kick your ass.
    - shinratdr 13y ago
      > Also this is version one. Windows Phone was version 7 and it didn't seem to make a difference. It's pretty safe to say that at this point, you need to make a splash or you're going to end up an afterthought. You can't just stumble in, you need to offer something compelling enough to convince others to get on board. Slow, evolutionary growth is fine for some things. It's not OK for a mobile OS launching in the year 2013. Call it bullying the new kid all you want to rally support, we're just being realistic. When the vast majority of mobile phone users really couldn't care less about how "open" their phone OS is, FFOS brings little to the table except catering to amateur developers. Considering what is holding back OSes like Windows Phone isn't lack of apps from amateur developers, quite the opposite. They have those, but lack the heavy hitters. I haven't heard "No thriving development environment for small developers" once when covering the downsides of Windows Phone. I have heard "No Instagram" about a thousand times. Maybe it's just me but I don't really remember an instance of any OS becoming popular by catering to small devs. It's a part, but it usually comes AFTER enticing users to come aboard. People didn't develop for iOS because Apple made it painfully easy for them, they developed for iPhone because millions of users bought them, said "Isn't this so cool, but I wonder if it could do <blank>?" and the rest is history. Likewise, developers weren't chomping at the bit to go messing about in Eclipse, but millions and tens of millions of Android phones ended up in users hands. Suddenly, there was a market and then the popular apps came.
      - janjongboom 13y ago
        Contrary to Windows Phone, FxOS is not aiming to be competing against the high end Android or iOS devices. Nor will it be appealing to current consumers who have a smartphone in their pockets. It's targeting consumers that currently hold feature phones (mostly Nokia) that can either not afford a smartphone, or just a very low-end Android that performs terrible. FxOS is not here to be the ultimate OS for developers, but to bring a fully featured smartphone experience to Latin America, South East Asia, Balkans, etc.
  - Ygg2 13y ago
    Ahem. Remember this? - http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/android-evolution/ http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/android-evolution/
    - shinratdr 13y ago
      Of course, we also remember the landscape & competition at the time. The world has changed. This is like linking to a page showing the evolution of Windows to justify someone releasing an OS with the capability of Windows 98 in 2013. Yeah, it evolved. But we're actually two steps ahead of the end of that page now. iOS & Android are leaps and bounds ahead of what they were at 1.0. Really the only point you've demonstrated is "Wouldn't FFOS be sweet compared to Android 1.x?" and the answer to that is yes, it would be. Android 1.x was terrible. But that isn't the landscape it's being judged against, and nor should it. Not only that, FFOS wouldn't even be possible then. What made FFOS possible was the mobile revolution and renewed interest in pushing the limits of what ARM and associated mobile technologies could do. Turning 1GHz ARM chips into commodity hardware, which was the direct result of the growth of iOS & Android. Will FFOS evolve and grow? Of course. The question is will it do so fast enough, well enough to catch up, exceed it's competitors in a manner that's so compelling, it stands a chance to actually gain a foothold? Judging by Windows Phone, WebOS, Symbian and Tizen, the answer is almost certainly no.
      - Ygg2 13y ago
        Missed my point entirely. Android was ridiculed claiming it will never reach feature parity with iOS (let alone surpass it), the same argument you used is pretty much same as iOS users when Android was initially released (compare Android 1.0 to iOS around that time). Let's not jump on FFOS neck especially in lieu of recent news. If anything it's way more open than Android is.
        shinratdr 13y ago
        > Android was ridiculed claiming it will never reach feature parity with iOS Not really, Android was ridiculed for its severe lack of polish and poor performance. iOS lacked plenty of features, arguably Android 1.5 surpassed it in terms of a bullet list of features, the experience was just awful. I saw your point just fine and my comment related to it directly. The part you're ignoring is the landscape surrounding those two events. There simply weren't established players in the smartphone market at the time that bothered innovating. Currently, there are. That makes what FFOS is trying to achieve in their 1.0 and what Android was trying to achieve in their 1.0 completely different and nearly incomparable, which was my point.
  - daleharvey 13y ago
    Firefox OS is not a small subset of Android and iOS, in the most part there are equivalent API's for the functionality, in a few places there is more available on iOS / Android, in some places there is more available on Firefox OS (quite a lot in the case of iOS), anywhere were there is missing functionality it is no doubt in the works. (disclaimer, I work on Firefox OS)
    - anon1385 13y ago
      So FirefoxOS extends the existing web standards with non-standard APIs Yes I'm sure you will 'submit' them as potential standards, but until the other vendors agree to them they are not standards. That is the huge and debilitating price that you pay by tying yourself to 'standards' - anything you want to do can be vetoed by your competitors. Anything not agreed upon is not a standard and can't be relied upon in a 'standards based' platform.
      - daleharvey 13y ago
        Yup, Remember this is how every web standard came into being, it was not a standard at some point, By definition it needs 2 interoperable implementations. Some of these are already long on their way to being interoperable standards (getUserMedia), some of them may never be standardised, but that is the aim.
      - kbenson 13y ago
        This is an OS on a phone, not an app on a phone or desktop. Since their audience is specifically people buying the phones and the app makers are targeting only those people, there are no other implementations to worry about. FirefoxOS is the standard for these devices at this point, and whatever they do is then standard.
        daleharvey 13y ago
        This isnt necessarily true, even with telephony pretty much all the API's have implications, existing standards and/or prior art outside of the mobile. All of the API's are available via Gecko, the same Gecko that is used for desktop and android firefox, a lot of them already work on desktop (I have installed a few apps build for firefox os on my desktop).
  - sp332 13y ago
    It's not limited, it's actually pushing to standardize APIs to more phone features than anyone else. Right now, some phone features (like the dialer) aren't available to web apps at all.
  - threeseed 13y ago
    Simple. 1. Most people don't need or want complexity like what you see from the typical low cost Android devices. Remember most of these people are still upgrading from Nokia style feature phones and aren't after a computer in your pocket (just yet). 2. Android in particular is really nasty at the low end. The quality of experience you would get from a tightly optimised and simplified Firefox OS would be immeasurably better. Again. You don't need to have X, Y and Z instead just have X implemented really, really well. 3. The barrier to entry and cost for developing HTML/JS apps is far lower than Java and Objective-C. You really do need a decent PC/Mac to program for either. And we all agree that custom, locally developed apps is vital.
    - koolkao 13y ago
      great points. I've been a big fan and advocate of android for some time. But I've have been disappointed and still am disappointed by how much hardware is necessary to run even basic tasks like getting onto the Internet and reading a static page, how even scrolling through the basic launcher interface stutters, even on the new nexus 7, how switching between apps can take so much time. it seems that Android as a solution to the problem of a mobile phone is overshooting a big chunk of the market. in that sense I think FxOS is in a good position to disrupt the mobile space. now how can I get my hands on a phone??
      - threeseed 13y ago
        Seriously the only people who think Android is great for low end devices are those that have never used it. I've built a number of apps that needed to support those devices and it was a nightmare. And it's not just pure specs everyone involved thinks of the people using them as cheap and therefore less deserving of a polished experience. Breaking free from all of that and getting back to simple, well executed basics is the way to go IMHO.
    - slacka 13y ago
      1. So you limit complexity by limiting them to running everything inside of Firefox. Mozilla knows what best. Deny them access to fast native apps on entry level hardware. Sounds like the GNOME 3 philosophy. 2. I have the original Galaxy S and it runs CM 10 Jellybean like butter. Sure bloated skins like touchwiz can slow down phones, but there's nothing wrong with AOSP on similarity spec'd hardware. 3. So you're saying people who can't afford a low-end PCs will be developing web apps with their $79 FF OS phone/tablet? LOL. I can hardly wait for this new paradigm in mobile development.
  - Millennium 13y ago
    Where does this "small subset" bit come from? What exactly is it that you see FirefoxOS as being unable to do that other mobile operating systems can?
    - PommeDeTerre 13y ago
      Not supporting real native apps is a massive lack of very critical functionality. This alone makes it far more difficult to write apps that perform well, especially those that are doing something that's resource-intensive. Developers are also limited to basically using JavaScript. Yeah, I know about Asm.js and Emscripten. They're hacks, at best, and nowhere near being proper replacements for actual native app support.
      - mwcampbell 13y ago
        I suspect that your objection to asm.js is primarily that it strikes you as an ugly, byzantine hack, rather than any problem with the practicality of it. It may seem bizarre to encode a cross-platform intermediate representation of low-level code as a subset of JavaScript, but it works. It may still be 2x as slow as native code, but the implementation in SpiderMonkey is still a work in progress. If GCC or LLVM can take a cross-platform IR and generate efficient native code, then why can't SpiderMonkey do the same with asm.js?
        binarycrusader 13y ago
        Personally, my primary objection is it removes the ability for dedicated application developers like John Papandriopoulos to write marketplace-leading apps like SnappyCam: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6137979 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6137979 Many developers working in the area of games or video and graphics decoding/encoding need access to native-level instruction sets to get maximum performance. Nevermind that I have no desire to attempt to debug my emscripten-translated C/C++ application instead of just debugging the original source. There's an entire ecosystem around supporting native apps in terms of tooling, debugging, libraries, etc. and FireFox OS seems to ignore all of that. Personally, I believe FireFox OS will fail in the mainstream market without native application support. I'd love it if they prove me wrong, but ignoring the need for native applications seems like an obvious mistake. A well-coded native application can make or break its success on having access to the full functionality of the underlying platform.
- mhurron 13y ago
  Isn't this what the iPhone tried before the release of the App Store?
  - TazeTSchnitzel 13y ago
    Yes, but the iPhone provided very few APIs and so web apps had little power and couldn't integrate with the OS.
  - asadotzler 13y ago
    The iPhone tried it 6 years ago. That's a long time on the Internet. Since then, JS has gotten about a billion times faster across pretty much all browsers. Also, "HTML5" was still woefully incomplete back then but browser vendors have since filled out support for key enabling technologies -- especially the wide variety of device access APIs that Apple never even tried to provide. When I hear this refrain, I'm often tempted to ask how old the poster is because it seems to show a lack of historical knowledge of long-term Web trends. Six years is a LONG time.
    - mhurron 13y ago
      > I'm often tempted to ask how old the poster is Go ahead. You might find there is a lot more to computing then web programming and not everyone works as a web developer.
    - kllrnohj 13y ago
      > Since then, JS has gotten about a billion times faster across pretty much all browsers. JS has gotten slightly faster, but not much. JS isn't really a bottleneck anyway. Six years has also increased the pixel count by 10x (150k pixels in the iPhone 1 vs. 2 million in the SGS4). The hardware has barely gotten faster relative to pixel count, and in some respects (such as memory bandwidth) has gotten slower. The web is no more viable on mobile today than it was 6 years ago. Web doesn't do efficient - never has, probably never will.
    - giardini 13y ago
      "Since then, JS has gotten about a billion times faster across pretty much all browsers." 1 billion = 10^9. If what you say is true, then the average length of JS code must have increased about 10^10, because despite increased bandwidth, most sites seem to run slower than they did 6 years ago. That is some pretty prodigious coding(8-)) Or maybe it's write delay caused by the NSA.
jvehent 13y ago
ZTE phones are coming this friday for $79: http://stores.ebay.com/ztemobileus http://stores.ebay.com/ztemobileus This is the phone that was launched in Spain. The Ebay version will be vanilla FxOS, unlocked and upgradable!
- ippisl 13y ago
  When you can buy something that looks like a decent(512MB, 4.5",dual core) android phone[1] at less than $100, and many similar models are coming from china , why bother with this phone ? [1]http://www.pandawill.com/simdo-d98-smartphone-mtk6577-dual-core-android-40-45-inch-qhd-screen-4g-tf-card-white-p76921.html?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=ql&utm_campaign=41955 http://www.pandawill.com/simdo-d98-smartphone-mtk6577-dual-c...
  - JungleGymSam 13y ago
    Because it's not the price that is at the heart of the debate. FxOS is an attempt at an alternative to the current mobile OS behemoths in iOS and Android and their anti-consumer features and policies.
    - ippisl 13y ago
      Does that debate interests plain consumers ? Edit: and wouldn't it make sense to fork a version of android, like amazon did, to achieve openness and privacy , than to start over ?
      - Jhsto 13y ago
        Not in the current stage of FxOS, since Gaia (the UI) seems to fail to deliver anything 'new' to a plain consumer. For FxOS to really stand out in developing countries it would require a lot more than what it is providing now. In my opinion, since we are partly already doing communications for free trough Facebook and Twitter, something like P2P connections between the FxOS devices does sound doable for me, both for text and voice. In addition, if you could implement something like Twilio for actual calls it would strip down costs both for mainland and international calls. For reference, where I live calls trough Twilio are six to sixteen times cheaper than what my carrier can provide. This way, you would also avoid the need to sign a contract with a carrier. I believe that this form of carrierless phone would appeal to the crowd the FxOS is trying to reach.
Robby2012 13y ago
I've also developed a Firefox OS App. I've done a compass and a lantern and I love Firefox OS because it's so awesome and easy to develop an app with HTML5. By the way, I have a Geeksphone Peak and it works great, next month they're launching Geeksphone Peak+, it seems promising. Geeksphone is making much much better phones with FFOS than ZTE.
treenyc 13y ago
Where can you get the $50 version of the phone that he mentioned?
- michael_h 13y ago
  I think it may be a typo? The Keon is still 91 euros (http://shop.geeksphone.com/en/phones/1-keon.html http://shop.geeksphone.com/en/phones/1-keon.html).
  - sadris 13y ago
    Also it says its "Not available now"...
    - vvpan 13y ago
      Yeah it hasn't been available since the first time it came out, and no mentions of it coming back. Makes me sad.
eertami 13y ago
Is FxOS usable as an everyday phone at this point?
- janjongboom 13y ago
  I'm using it as an everyday device. It's not perfect, but it's usable, especially when considering the low price point.
  - koolkao 13y ago
    what are some issues you observed?
- mhd 13y ago
  Lots of minor features that are missing, but I expect most of that to be taken care soon, if it isn't already in some branches. Right now, there are lots of minor niggles that make me miss my iOS/Android devices of the past (heck, even my old Palm Pre). But the basics do work, you can take calls, multi-task, browse, tweet etc. Right now what bothers me most is the lack of badges on icons, I'd really like to quickly see how many calls or messages I've missed, without going to the notification pull-down. A 24 hour clock wouldn't hurt either, and the organisation of the Music players is a bit off (no albums under artists, pretty but useless main view etc.). In my release you can't control it from the lock screen, either, but I think that's going to be in the next version, judging from the wireframes.
  - eertami 13y ago
    Mmm ok. I currently use an N900 so I'm a little used to features missing, I think FxOS is a slightly safer bet than Maemo!
Tichy 13y ago
That geekphone seems to cost 150€ at the moment. 50$ would be really exciting.
- vanni 13y ago
  No, the 149€ (tax excl.) model is the Peak+, now in pre-order. The post makes use of the Keon, not available now, but listed at 91€ (tax excl.) [http://shop.geeksphone.com/en/phones/1-keon.html http://shop.geeksphone.com/en/phones/1-keon.html]
daleharvey 13y ago
Whie these articles are great (and thanks for it), One of the biggest reasons I am excited about Firefox OS is the aim for these articles to not exist, if you do a good job building a mobile friendly web app then on Firefox OS it should 'just work' The amount that this has proved true already is amazing, I have loved doing Firefox OS app days and seeing people spending a long time building phonegap / mobile web based applications and seeing it just work on Firefox OS, there is still a lot of work to be done but it really is the ubiquitous platform dream of mine come true.
- jemeshsu 13y ago
  Not sure if HTML is the ubiquitous programming platform for client side. It's a dream since 1990s (write once for all clients) but fail to compete decidedly by native clients of iOS/Android in this era. It's going to get worse for specialize smart devices such as smart watch, smart glass, smart car panel, real smart TV etc.
  - daleharvey 13y ago
    I am slowly transitioning to a web based IDE, my email, spreadsheets, chat client, all my communications platforms, my maps are all written in web technologies, not my entire phone is powered by web technologies (which includes most of the functionality on my desktop) I have 3 non web based apps that I use on a daily basis (iterm, emacs, spotify), emacs I am moving away from, spotify I will move to the web based player once we have hardware media keys support. My ubiqutous web based dream is very close to true, I think momentum and history suggests that it is going to carry on moving in that direction.
TimJRobinson 13y ago
I ported my game http://www.towerstorm.com http://www.towerstorm.com to FirefoxOS over the weekend too (at campjs). It was surprisingly easy, the only difficulties was making it run on such a small screen and dealing with no longer having window.location or navigation buttons.
untog 13y ago
As a counter point to the (justified) positivity: Firefox OS is still rough around the edges. The app I threw together (basically just packaging a mobile site) doesn't look right on the higher-resolution phones, as Mozilla haven't sorted out the scaling yet. The OS itself feels really very slow. But it's an interesting project. Just not ready for the primetime yet.
- DonGateley 13y ago
  If it is rough around the edges now then it always will be. Witness the Firefox browser. There is a huge backlog of problems with it yet they have the resources to start something new.
  - bad_user 13y ago
    Did you really create your account to post this? Wow. I really don't get the negativity around Firefox OS or the Firefox browser. In regards to Firefox, I consider it the best browser right now; Chrome has many problems of its own and considering the resources that Google has, you'd think they would find a way to make Chrome be less of the resource hog that it is or to provide something like the awesome-bar or extensions for the Android version - and don't even get me started on iOS or Safary. Truth of the matter is, Firefox OS directly benefits Firefox the browser, in ways that Android will never benefit Chrome - all APIs that are experimented in FxOS will make it in the browser, XUL is gone, the architecture is multi-process and better sandboxed, etc...
franze 13y ago
i coded this for use on the Keon (FFOS geek phone) and demo-ed it at the local JS meetup http://replycam.com/m/ http://replycam.com/m/ (also on github https://github.com/franzenzenhofer/masel https://github.com/franzenzenhofer/masel) will extend it someday do also encode/decode SMS messages ... but as i will never probably come around to it, just steal the idea, fork the project (it's zlib license, as soon as i come around to write a readme)
asselinpaul 13y ago
I have written an app for the Firefox OS too, the experience was good but at the end of the day, the hardware feels too cheap and the OS isn't responsive enough. If there is anyone in London looking for a phone, send me a mail.
Mikeb85 13y ago
What Mozilla is doing with Asm.js and Firefox OS is nothing short of impressive. Web apps that can be downloaded from anywhere, and cached offline with full access to native APIs? This is the democratization of app programming at its finest, especially since JS has become a 'platform', and now even has a bytecode target (asm.js). Not to mention, offering unlocked phones at such low prices, with potential feature parity (at least when the app ecosystem gets better) to iOS and Android is huge. I would personally love to never sign another long-term contract...
josteink 13y ago
I'll be getting my phone(s) when I get back from vacation in about one week (imported from Spain). Can't wait to get a look this thing! Finally something new and refreshing in the mobile-sector.
dpeck 13y ago
Like many here I picked up one of the Peak developer preview phones with every intention of dogfooding it, creating some basic apps to get familiar with it, and enjoying something simpler. But, and I feel like I'm back in 2007 saying this about the first iphone, the lack of copy and paste is a deal breaker. Going back to a phone without it and not being able to copy a url into an email, paste a friends phone number to some one else in a txt, or have a reasonably useful password manager is much too far of a step back for me to take these days. I'm hoping this is something the core team puts in before too long, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=747798 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=747798, but until then the phone is really useless to me for day to day.
- bad_user 13y ago
  The Firefox browser on Android does have copy/paste and this is relevant because Mozilla wants to make Firefox a portable mobile platform for apps, so it is safe to assume that FxOS should have feature parity with the Firefox Android soon.
  - dpeck 13y ago
    is copy and paste support a function of the application on android? eg, something it has to specifically allow? seems that copy/paste/clipboard support for firefoxos is going to have to be implemented at the is level and not each individual app, there's already hacks for the latter but the former is what is actually needed
sodelate 13y ago
nice try,keep sharing,guys
rayaway 13y ago
XIAOMI MI phone: 4.7 IPS, 312 ppi glorilla second gen screen, 1.5GHz MT6589T CPU, 1GB Ram, 4GB storage, support at most 32G TF card, 8mega pixel camera, 1.3 mega pixel front camera, 2000mAh battery, Android 4.2.2 MIUI V5 Os And guess what? Sold only 799RMB at China which is about 135 dollars. For simplicity, if I cut every feature listed half, and just assuming the price drops to half too, say 70 dollars. Compare to FFOS phone, which one will user pick? This calculation surely is wrong. But my point is, the hardware is really cheap today, which makes the sweetest point of FFOS phone - the price - not that sweet.

204 points by kvz 13y ago

My experience: I wrote a google authenticator app in 'HTML5' a year ago and it just worked on FirefoxOS. It is the whole purpose of the OS. Is this news?

munchor 13y ago

I too have written an "app" for Firefox OS[1]. It was a game I had written for browsers using the HTML5 canvas and porting it to Firefox OS was as easy as 1, 2, 3. This, for me, is what makes Firefox OS promising - apps are simply HTML pages that work pretty much as computer webapps work. [1]: http://munchor.tumblr.com/post/46774157520/party-build-for-firefox-os http://munchor.tumblr.com/post/46774157520/party-build-for-f...

PommeDeTerre 13y ago
How is being able to do a small subset of what Android and iOS devices (among others) have been able to do for many years now seen as "promising"? I can somewhat see the price argument, but that's tenuous, at best. Even in developing nations it's possible to get used or older, yet still relatively modern and still useful, Android and iOS devices quite inexpensively. They can run HTML5/JavaScritp/CSS apps, in addition to native apps. Otherwise, only offering a small subset of functionality that has been offered by other devices for years now doesn't make me think of a word like "promising" when describing Firefox OS. Instead, I think of terms like, "extremely limited", "outdated", "obsolete from the start", and "pointless".
- oinksoft 13y ago
  When you make authoring applications trivial and don't impose weird restrictions on distribution, you should see a more diverse ecosystem. Lowering the bar makes experimentation by programming novices possible.
  - shinratdr 13y ago
    Or you end up flooded with low quality applications by amateurs. Both are equally likely.
    - mwcampbell 13y ago
      If both are equally likely, then we might as well be optimists; the glass is half full.
      - shinratdr 13y ago
        I kind of chose "equally likely" as a way to avoid rattling any cages. Obviously, I don't personally feel it's equally likely. I think the scales are heavily tipped towards irrelevancy.
    - kbenson 13y ago
      Just because we don't know the likelihoods doesn't mean they are equally as likely. Don't confuse quantity of information (little) with quality or content of information.
    - ux-app 13y ago
      Are you suggesting that the iOS App Store and Google Play Store aren't "flooded with low quality applications by amateurs"? To me it seems that a (relatively) high barrier to entry, and an approval process (in Apple's case), haven't really stopped lots of crappy apps from making it in. Personally I'm all for lowering barriers to entry. It's arguably one of the greatest things about the web.
      - shinratdr 13y ago
        No, if I wanted to say that I would have said that. I'm saying, lowering the barrier to entry is barely needed. If anything you've just outlined my point. The barrier to entry is apparently so low that all app stores regardless of developer complexity are already flooded with crap. So the barrier needs to be lowered... why?
- harrytuttle 13y ago
  Most of the bells and whistles aren't required for the product to be successful. Also this is version one. You're just bullying the new kid. One day he might grow up to kick your ass.
  - shinratdr 13y ago
    > Also this is version one. Windows Phone was version 7 and it didn't seem to make a difference. It's pretty safe to say that at this point, you need to make a splash or you're going to end up an afterthought. You can't just stumble in, you need to offer something compelling enough to convince others to get on board. Slow, evolutionary growth is fine for some things. It's not OK for a mobile OS launching in the year 2013. Call it bullying the new kid all you want to rally support, we're just being realistic. When the vast majority of mobile phone users really couldn't care less about how "open" their phone OS is, FFOS brings little to the table except catering to amateur developers. Considering what is holding back OSes like Windows Phone isn't lack of apps from amateur developers, quite the opposite. They have those, but lack the heavy hitters. I haven't heard "No thriving development environment for small developers" once when covering the downsides of Windows Phone. I have heard "No Instagram" about a thousand times. Maybe it's just me but I don't really remember an instance of any OS becoming popular by catering to small devs. It's a part, but it usually comes AFTER enticing users to come aboard. People didn't develop for iOS because Apple made it painfully easy for them, they developed for iPhone because millions of users bought them, said "Isn't this so cool, but I wonder if it could do <blank>?" and the rest is history. Likewise, developers weren't chomping at the bit to go messing about in Eclipse, but millions and tens of millions of Android phones ended up in users hands. Suddenly, there was a market and then the popular apps came.
    - janjongboom 13y ago
      Contrary to Windows Phone, FxOS is not aiming to be competing against the high end Android or iOS devices. Nor will it be appealing to current consumers who have a smartphone in their pockets. It's targeting consumers that currently hold feature phones (mostly Nokia) that can either not afford a smartphone, or just a very low-end Android that performs terrible. FxOS is not here to be the ultimate OS for developers, but to bring a fully featured smartphone experience to Latin America, South East Asia, Balkans, etc.
- Ygg2 13y ago
  Ahem. Remember this? - http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/android-evolution/ http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/android-evolution/
  - shinratdr 13y ago
    Of course, we also remember the landscape & competition at the time. The world has changed. This is like linking to a page showing the evolution of Windows to justify someone releasing an OS with the capability of Windows 98 in 2013. Yeah, it evolved. But we're actually two steps ahead of the end of that page now. iOS & Android are leaps and bounds ahead of what they were at 1.0. Really the only point you've demonstrated is "Wouldn't FFOS be sweet compared to Android 1.x?" and the answer to that is yes, it would be. Android 1.x was terrible. But that isn't the landscape it's being judged against, and nor should it. Not only that, FFOS wouldn't even be possible then. What made FFOS possible was the mobile revolution and renewed interest in pushing the limits of what ARM and associated mobile technologies could do. Turning 1GHz ARM chips into commodity hardware, which was the direct result of the growth of iOS & Android. Will FFOS evolve and grow? Of course. The question is will it do so fast enough, well enough to catch up, exceed it's competitors in a manner that's so compelling, it stands a chance to actually gain a foothold? Judging by Windows Phone, WebOS, Symbian and Tizen, the answer is almost certainly no.
    - Ygg2 13y ago
      Missed my point entirely. Android was ridiculed claiming it will never reach feature parity with iOS (let alone surpass it), the same argument you used is pretty much same as iOS users when Android was initially released (compare Android 1.0 to iOS around that time). Let's not jump on FFOS neck especially in lieu of recent news. If anything it's way more open than Android is.
      - shinratdr 13y ago
        > Android was ridiculed claiming it will never reach feature parity with iOS Not really, Android was ridiculed for its severe lack of polish and poor performance. iOS lacked plenty of features, arguably Android 1.5 surpassed it in terms of a bullet list of features, the experience was just awful. I saw your point just fine and my comment related to it directly. The part you're ignoring is the landscape surrounding those two events. There simply weren't established players in the smartphone market at the time that bothered innovating. Currently, there are. That makes what FFOS is trying to achieve in their 1.0 and what Android was trying to achieve in their 1.0 completely different and nearly incomparable, which was my point.
- daleharvey 13y ago
  Firefox OS is not a small subset of Android and iOS, in the most part there are equivalent API's for the functionality, in a few places there is more available on iOS / Android, in some places there is more available on Firefox OS (quite a lot in the case of iOS), anywhere were there is missing functionality it is no doubt in the works. (disclaimer, I work on Firefox OS)
  - anon1385 13y ago
    So FirefoxOS extends the existing web standards with non-standard APIs Yes I'm sure you will 'submit' them as potential standards, but until the other vendors agree to them they are not standards. That is the huge and debilitating price that you pay by tying yourself to 'standards' - anything you want to do can be vetoed by your competitors. Anything not agreed upon is not a standard and can't be relied upon in a 'standards based' platform.
    - daleharvey 13y ago
      Yup, Remember this is how every web standard came into being, it was not a standard at some point, By definition it needs 2 interoperable implementations. Some of these are already long on their way to being interoperable standards (getUserMedia), some of them may never be standardised, but that is the aim.
    - kbenson 13y ago
      This is an OS on a phone, not an app on a phone or desktop. Since their audience is specifically people buying the phones and the app makers are targeting only those people, there are no other implementations to worry about. FirefoxOS is the standard for these devices at this point, and whatever they do is then standard.
      - daleharvey 13y ago
        This isnt necessarily true, even with telephony pretty much all the API's have implications, existing standards and/or prior art outside of the mobile. All of the API's are available via Gecko, the same Gecko that is used for desktop and android firefox, a lot of them already work on desktop (I have installed a few apps build for firefox os on my desktop).
- sp332 13y ago
  It's not limited, it's actually pushing to standardize APIs to more phone features than anyone else. Right now, some phone features (like the dialer) aren't available to web apps at all.
- threeseed 13y ago
  Simple. 1. Most people don't need or want complexity like what you see from the typical low cost Android devices. Remember most of these people are still upgrading from Nokia style feature phones and aren't after a computer in your pocket (just yet). 2. Android in particular is really nasty at the low end. The quality of experience you would get from a tightly optimised and simplified Firefox OS would be immeasurably better. Again. You don't need to have X, Y and Z instead just have X implemented really, really well. 3. The barrier to entry and cost for developing HTML/JS apps is far lower than Java and Objective-C. You really do need a decent PC/Mac to program for either. And we all agree that custom, locally developed apps is vital.
  - koolkao 13y ago
    great points. I've been a big fan and advocate of android for some time. But I've have been disappointed and still am disappointed by how much hardware is necessary to run even basic tasks like getting onto the Internet and reading a static page, how even scrolling through the basic launcher interface stutters, even on the new nexus 7, how switching between apps can take so much time. it seems that Android as a solution to the problem of a mobile phone is overshooting a big chunk of the market. in that sense I think FxOS is in a good position to disrupt the mobile space. now how can I get my hands on a phone??
    - threeseed 13y ago
      Seriously the only people who think Android is great for low end devices are those that have never used it. I've built a number of apps that needed to support those devices and it was a nightmare. And it's not just pure specs everyone involved thinks of the people using them as cheap and therefore less deserving of a polished experience. Breaking free from all of that and getting back to simple, well executed basics is the way to go IMHO.
  - slacka 13y ago
    1. So you limit complexity by limiting them to running everything inside of Firefox. Mozilla knows what best. Deny them access to fast native apps on entry level hardware. Sounds like the GNOME 3 philosophy. 2. I have the original Galaxy S and it runs CM 10 Jellybean like butter. Sure bloated skins like touchwiz can slow down phones, but there's nothing wrong with AOSP on similarity spec'd hardware. 3. So you're saying people who can't afford a low-end PCs will be developing web apps with their $79 FF OS phone/tablet? LOL. I can hardly wait for this new paradigm in mobile development.
- Millennium 13y ago
  Where does this "small subset" bit come from? What exactly is it that you see FirefoxOS as being unable to do that other mobile operating systems can?
  - PommeDeTerre 13y ago
    Not supporting real native apps is a massive lack of very critical functionality. This alone makes it far more difficult to write apps that perform well, especially those that are doing something that's resource-intensive. Developers are also limited to basically using JavaScript. Yeah, I know about Asm.js and Emscripten. They're hacks, at best, and nowhere near being proper replacements for actual native app support.
    - mwcampbell 13y ago
      I suspect that your objection to asm.js is primarily that it strikes you as an ugly, byzantine hack, rather than any problem with the practicality of it. It may seem bizarre to encode a cross-platform intermediate representation of low-level code as a subset of JavaScript, but it works. It may still be 2x as slow as native code, but the implementation in SpiderMonkey is still a work in progress. If GCC or LLVM can take a cross-platform IR and generate efficient native code, then why can't SpiderMonkey do the same with asm.js?
      - binarycrusader 13y ago
        Personally, my primary objection is it removes the ability for dedicated application developers like John Papandriopoulos to write marketplace-leading apps like SnappyCam: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6137979 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6137979 Many developers working in the area of games or video and graphics decoding/encoding need access to native-level instruction sets to get maximum performance. Nevermind that I have no desire to attempt to debug my emscripten-translated C/C++ application instead of just debugging the original source. There's an entire ecosystem around supporting native apps in terms of tooling, debugging, libraries, etc. and FireFox OS seems to ignore all of that. Personally, I believe FireFox OS will fail in the mainstream market without native application support. I'd love it if they prove me wrong, but ignoring the need for native applications seems like an obvious mistake. A well-coded native application can make or break its success on having access to the full functionality of the underlying platform.
mhurron 13y ago
Isn't this what the iPhone tried before the release of the App Store?
- TazeTSchnitzel 13y ago
  Yes, but the iPhone provided very few APIs and so web apps had little power and couldn't integrate with the OS.
- asadotzler 13y ago
  The iPhone tried it 6 years ago. That's a long time on the Internet. Since then, JS has gotten about a billion times faster across pretty much all browsers. Also, "HTML5" was still woefully incomplete back then but browser vendors have since filled out support for key enabling technologies -- especially the wide variety of device access APIs that Apple never even tried to provide. When I hear this refrain, I'm often tempted to ask how old the poster is because it seems to show a lack of historical knowledge of long-term Web trends. Six years is a LONG time.
  - mhurron 13y ago
    > I'm often tempted to ask how old the poster is Go ahead. You might find there is a lot more to computing then web programming and not everyone works as a web developer.
  - kllrnohj 13y ago
    > Since then, JS has gotten about a billion times faster across pretty much all browsers. JS has gotten slightly faster, but not much. JS isn't really a bottleneck anyway. Six years has also increased the pixel count by 10x (150k pixels in the iPhone 1 vs. 2 million in the SGS4). The hardware has barely gotten faster relative to pixel count, and in some respects (such as memory bandwidth) has gotten slower. The web is no more viable on mobile today than it was 6 years ago. Web doesn't do efficient - never has, probably never will.
  - giardini 13y ago
    "Since then, JS has gotten about a billion times faster across pretty much all browsers." 1 billion = 10^9. If what you say is true, then the average length of JS code must have increased about 10^10, because despite increased bandwidth, most sites seem to run slower than they did 6 years ago. That is some pretty prodigious coding(8-)) Or maybe it's write delay caused by the NSA.

jvehent 13y ago

ZTE phones are coming this friday for $79: http://stores.ebay.com/ztemobileus http://stores.ebay.com/ztemobileus This is the phone that was launched in Spain. The Ebay version will be vanilla FxOS, unlocked and upgradable!

ippisl 13y ago
When you can buy something that looks like a decent(512MB, 4.5",dual core) android phone[1] at less than $100, and many similar models are coming from china , why bother with this phone ? [1]http://www.pandawill.com/simdo-d98-smartphone-mtk6577-dual-core-android-40-45-inch-qhd-screen-4g-tf-card-white-p76921.html?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=ql&utm_campaign=41955 http://www.pandawill.com/simdo-d98-smartphone-mtk6577-dual-c...
- JungleGymSam 13y ago
  Because it's not the price that is at the heart of the debate. FxOS is an attempt at an alternative to the current mobile OS behemoths in iOS and Android and their anti-consumer features and policies.
  - ippisl 13y ago
    Does that debate interests plain consumers ? Edit: and wouldn't it make sense to fork a version of android, like amazon did, to achieve openness and privacy , than to start over ?
    - Jhsto 13y ago
      Not in the current stage of FxOS, since Gaia (the UI) seems to fail to deliver anything 'new' to a plain consumer. For FxOS to really stand out in developing countries it would require a lot more than what it is providing now. In my opinion, since we are partly already doing communications for free trough Facebook and Twitter, something like P2P connections between the FxOS devices does sound doable for me, both for text and voice. In addition, if you could implement something like Twilio for actual calls it would strip down costs both for mainland and international calls. For reference, where I live calls trough Twilio are six to sixteen times cheaper than what my carrier can provide. This way, you would also avoid the need to sign a contract with a carrier. I believe that this form of carrierless phone would appeal to the crowd the FxOS is trying to reach.

Robby2012 13y ago

I've also developed a Firefox OS App. I've done a compass and a lantern and I love Firefox OS because it's so awesome and easy to develop an app with HTML5. By the way, I have a Geeksphone Peak and it works great, next month they're launching Geeksphone Peak+, it seems promising. Geeksphone is making much much better phones with FFOS than ZTE.

treenyc 13y ago

Where can you get the $50 version of the phone that he mentioned?

michael_h 13y ago
I think it may be a typo? The Keon is still 91 euros (http://shop.geeksphone.com/en/phones/1-keon.html http://shop.geeksphone.com/en/phones/1-keon.html).
- sadris 13y ago
  Also it says its "Not available now"...
  - vvpan 13y ago
    Yeah it hasn't been available since the first time it came out, and no mentions of it coming back. Makes me sad.

eertami 13y ago

Is FxOS usable as an everyday phone at this point?

janjongboom 13y ago
I'm using it as an everyday device. It's not perfect, but it's usable, especially when considering the low price point.
- koolkao 13y ago
  what are some issues you observed?
mhd 13y ago
Lots of minor features that are missing, but I expect most of that to be taken care soon, if it isn't already in some branches. Right now, there are lots of minor niggles that make me miss my iOS/Android devices of the past (heck, even my old Palm Pre). But the basics do work, you can take calls, multi-task, browse, tweet etc. Right now what bothers me most is the lack of badges on icons, I'd really like to quickly see how many calls or messages I've missed, without going to the notification pull-down. A 24 hour clock wouldn't hurt either, and the organisation of the Music players is a bit off (no albums under artists, pretty but useless main view etc.). In my release you can't control it from the lock screen, either, but I think that's going to be in the next version, judging from the wireframes.
- eertami 13y ago
  Mmm ok. I currently use an N900 so I'm a little used to features missing, I think FxOS is a slightly safer bet than Maemo!

Tichy 13y ago

That geekphone seems to cost 150€ at the moment. 50$ would be really exciting.

vanni 13y ago
No, the 149€ (tax excl.) model is the Peak+, now in pre-order. The post makes use of the Keon, not available now, but listed at 91€ (tax excl.) [http://shop.geeksphone.com/en/phones/1-keon.html http://shop.geeksphone.com/en/phones/1-keon.html]

daleharvey 13y ago

Whie these articles are great (and thanks for it), One of the biggest reasons I am excited about Firefox OS is the aim for these articles to not exist, if you do a good job building a mobile friendly web app then on Firefox OS it should 'just work' The amount that this has proved true already is amazing, I have loved doing Firefox OS app days and seeing people spending a long time building phonegap / mobile web based applications and seeing it just work on Firefox OS, there is still a lot of work to be done but it really is the ubiquitous platform dream of mine come true.

jemeshsu 13y ago
Not sure if HTML is the ubiquitous programming platform for client side. It's a dream since 1990s (write once for all clients) but fail to compete decidedly by native clients of iOS/Android in this era. It's going to get worse for specialize smart devices such as smart watch, smart glass, smart car panel, real smart TV etc.
- daleharvey 13y ago
  I am slowly transitioning to a web based IDE, my email, spreadsheets, chat client, all my communications platforms, my maps are all written in web technologies, not my entire phone is powered by web technologies (which includes most of the functionality on my desktop) I have 3 non web based apps that I use on a daily basis (iterm, emacs, spotify), emacs I am moving away from, spotify I will move to the web based player once we have hardware media keys support. My ubiqutous web based dream is very close to true, I think momentum and history suggests that it is going to carry on moving in that direction.

TimJRobinson 13y ago

I ported my game http://www.towerstorm.com http://www.towerstorm.com to FirefoxOS over the weekend too (at campjs). It was surprisingly easy, the only difficulties was making it run on such a small screen and dealing with no longer having window.location or navigation buttons.

untog 13y ago

As a counter point to the (justified) positivity: Firefox OS is still rough around the edges. The app I threw together (basically just packaging a mobile site) doesn't look right on the higher-resolution phones, as Mozilla haven't sorted out the scaling yet. The OS itself feels really very slow. But it's an interesting project. Just not ready for the primetime yet.

DonGateley 13y ago
If it is rough around the edges now then it always will be. Witness the Firefox browser. There is a huge backlog of problems with it yet they have the resources to start something new.
- bad_user 13y ago
  Did you really create your account to post this? Wow. I really don't get the negativity around Firefox OS or the Firefox browser. In regards to Firefox, I consider it the best browser right now; Chrome has many problems of its own and considering the resources that Google has, you'd think they would find a way to make Chrome be less of the resource hog that it is or to provide something like the awesome-bar or extensions for the Android version - and don't even get me started on iOS or Safary. Truth of the matter is, Firefox OS directly benefits Firefox the browser, in ways that Android will never benefit Chrome - all APIs that are experimented in FxOS will make it in the browser, XUL is gone, the architecture is multi-process and better sandboxed, etc...

franze 13y ago

i coded this for use on the Keon (FFOS geek phone) and demo-ed it at the local JS meetup http://replycam.com/m/ http://replycam.com/m/ (also on github https://github.com/franzenzenhofer/masel https://github.com/franzenzenhofer/masel) will extend it someday do also encode/decode SMS messages ... but as i will never probably come around to it, just steal the idea, fork the project (it's zlib license, as soon as i come around to write a readme)

asselinpaul 13y ago

I have written an app for the Firefox OS too, the experience was good but at the end of the day, the hardware feels too cheap and the OS isn't responsive enough. If there is anyone in London looking for a phone, send me a mail.

Mikeb85 13y ago

What Mozilla is doing with Asm.js and Firefox OS is nothing short of impressive. Web apps that can be downloaded from anywhere, and cached offline with full access to native APIs? This is the democratization of app programming at its finest, especially since JS has become a 'platform', and now even has a bytecode target (asm.js). Not to mention, offering unlocked phones at such low prices, with potential feature parity (at least when the app ecosystem gets better) to iOS and Android is huge. I would personally love to never sign another long-term contract...

josteink 13y ago

I'll be getting my phone(s) when I get back from vacation in about one week (imported from Spain). Can't wait to get a look this thing! Finally something new and refreshing in the mobile-sector.

dpeck 13y ago

Like many here I picked up one of the Peak developer preview phones with every intention of dogfooding it, creating some basic apps to get familiar with it, and enjoying something simpler. But, and I feel like I'm back in 2007 saying this about the first iphone, the lack of copy and paste is a deal breaker. Going back to a phone without it and not being able to copy a url into an email, paste a friends phone number to some one else in a txt, or have a reasonably useful password manager is much too far of a step back for me to take these days. I'm hoping this is something the core team puts in before too long, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=747798 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=747798, but until then the phone is really useless to me for day to day.

bad_user 13y ago
The Firefox browser on Android does have copy/paste and this is relevant because Mozilla wants to make Firefox a portable mobile platform for apps, so it is safe to assume that FxOS should have feature parity with the Firefox Android soon.
- dpeck 13y ago
  is copy and paste support a function of the application on android? eg, something it has to specifically allow? seems that copy/paste/clipboard support for firefoxos is going to have to be implemented at the is level and not each individual app, there's already hacks for the latter but the former is what is actually needed

sodelate 13y ago

nice try,keep sharing,guys

rayaway 13y ago

XIAOMI MI phone: 4.7 IPS, 312 ppi glorilla second gen screen, 1.5GHz MT6589T CPU, 1GB Ram, 4GB storage, support at most 32G TF card, 8mega pixel camera, 1.3 mega pixel front camera, 2000mAh battery, Android 4.2.2 MIUI V5 Os And guess what? Sold only 799RMB at China which is about 135 dollars. For simplicity, if I cut every feature listed half, and just assuming the price drops to half too, say 70 dollars. Compare to FFOS phone, which one will user pick? This calculation surely is wrong. But my point is, the hardware is really cheap today, which makes the sweetest point of FFOS phone - the price - not that sweet.