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Firefox OS Will Become the Mobile OS To Beat
mattydread23 writes with an opinion piece naming a few reasons Firefox OS is likely to succeed "It's geared toward low-powered hardware in a way that Google doesn't care as much about with Android, it's cheap enough for the pre-paid phones that are much more common than post-paid in developing countries, and most important, there are still 3.5 billion people in the world who have feature phones and for whom this will be an amazing upgrade."
I'd push greater commitment to keeping the essential components of the system under FOSS licenses onto the head of that list.
The entire premise of this article seems to revolve around the unsubstantiated claim that Android is poorly optimized for low-end devices. I disagree with that claim, so the entire premise of the article seems suspect to me.
Firefox OS Will Become the Mobile OS To Beat
Flamebait and hopelessly wrong.
True, but U.S. CDMA carriers still refuse to activate low-end Android phones of today on a feature phone plan. And among U.S. GSM carriers, the one with more coverage still has a habit of automatically adding a data plan to a SIM with voice-only service inserted into a smartphone. These behaviors are why I still carry a tablet and dumbphone. Will carriers perform the same sort of tying on Firefox OS devices, or will they let customers use cellular voice with only Wi-Fi data?
Not all 3.5M people want a feature phone. Benefits of feature phones include: cheaper phone, cheaper plan, smaller hardware, longer battery life, less distractions (e.g., email, social media, games), fewer privacy concerns (e.g., tracking, malware), and smaller target for theft. Also, it's much easier to text from my phone's slide-out keyboard than from a touchscreen.
It's over. Android has won. The iPhone will stay around with a significant market share. But current high specs for phones will be the low end in three years. 2GB Ram and a 1.5 Ghz Quad Core CPU with be in entry level Android devices in 2017. Enough to run Android any way you like.
Android already runs on so many phones. It already is ubiquitous. Microsoft might have a chance in a niche. Same as Firefox, if it comes down to it. The mobile phone market is a billion device market. Why not a couple thousand Windows or Firefox or Jolla or Tizen devices? Or Ubuntu for that matter.
Android already runs on low spec cheap entry level devices. Granted, it doesn't run them very well, but neither does Firefox atm.
sudo apt-get install woosh
Firefox OS is DOA. Mozilla just doesn't know it.