14 ms·

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 somewh

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 Instead, I think of terms like, "extremely limited", "outdated", "obsolete from the start", and "pointless".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?
      - sirkneeland 13y ago
        Well, the facetious answer would be that we can break the 1st world's hold on the fart app and tip calculator market.
  - danneu 13y ago
    The world is flooded with low quality products. That just means that it's useless to browse your options in an alphabetical paginated view.
    - purplelobster 13y ago
      Couldn't agree more. Low quality is not the problem. App stores and their "discoverability" is the real problem.
  - mike-cardwell 13y ago
    Sounds like the web... So what?
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.

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?
    - sirkneeland 13y ago
      Well, the facetious answer would be that we can break the 1st world's hold on the fart app and tip calculator market.
- danneu 13y ago
  The world is flooded with low quality products. That just means that it's useless to browse your options in an alphabetical paginated view.
  - purplelobster 13y ago
    Couldn't agree more. Low quality is not the problem. App stores and their "discoverability" is the real problem.
- mike-cardwell 13y ago
  Sounds like the web... So what?

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.