Slashdot Mirror
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.
Android requires OpenGL ES, both in the 1.0 and 2.0 flavors. For devices in developing countries, that's a very high bar.
That's also not a knock against Android. For higher end devices that's a very sensible requirement. But just looking at the minimum requirements, it's not compatible with low end in the developing world.