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Firefox OS Will Become the Mobile OS To Beat

Posted by Unknown on from the foxes-are-friendlier-than-androids dept.

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.

17 of 205 comments (clear)

  1. Firefox OS is great... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    But it needs a web browser. Does it run Chrome?

    1. Re:Firefox OS is great... by hairyfeet · · Score: 5, Informative

      What is wrong with AMD? The dirty little secret of the CPU industry is that chips went from "good enough" to insanely overpowered several years so unless you are doing a job that needs every last drop of power you can squeeze (wave simulation, heavy number crunching) you'd be hard pressed in a blind trial to tell an AMD from an Intel....except when you got the bill and saw how much money you can save.

      Check out the AMD Jaguar quads for example (if you can find one, they are selling like hotcakes) for what you can get for cheap nowadays. We are talking 4 Jaguar cores (the same cores powering the XBone and PS4) with Radeon HD8400 GPU capable of running 1080P video with a board that will hold 32Gb of RAM, all for $150. If you want insanely cheap you can grab an AMD E350 which I've used a LOT of in the shop and which makes a cheap and easy upgrade path for all those aging power piggie P4s, simply slap in a PCI to IDE adapter and they can keep their old drives while getting an upgrade to dual cores that again will do 1080P while using less power under load than a P4 does idling. So I'd say we HAVE a good competitor, frankly the only slot where AMD doesn't have a competing product is in the ultra hardcore market and that is a teeny tiny niche compared to mainstream.

      As for TFA? I'd say its gonna all come down to support. If Mozilla can take control of the update process away from the carriers, who have a vested interest in trying to get you to buy a new phone, so that all MozPhones get say 3 years of updates? Then I think they really have a shot here in the states too as I don't know how many folks I've talked to that are seriously pissed at their Android phones because the carriers are so piss poor when it comes to pushing updates. Hell even the $300+ phones are lucky if they even get a year of support from the carriers and it makes folks feel ripped off, If Moz can get out a decent dual core phone at a sweet price ($150 or less should be doable with a dual core and a Gb of RAM) they could really grab some share away from Android, and this is from someone with an Android that I love but I had to ROM it to get a later version. Offer me a dual core for $150 or less that gets 3 years of support? I'm there.

      --
      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
  2. Why? by Guspaz · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Why? by Delarth799 · · Score: 5, Funny

      Your mind is just not properly optimized to receive the slashvertisement in this article correctly. Please step over to the tuning station to receive full mental optimization.

    2. Re:Why? by maccodemonkey · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    3. Re:Why? by ChunderDownunder · · Score: 3, Informative

      Kitkat has a minimum RAM requirement of 340MB.

      Prototype developer hardware, such as the ZTE Open, has 256MB. Mozilla are investigating running FFOS with 128MB.

    4. Re:Why? by im_thatoneguy · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I've seen this before though and this is the same wheel that everyone goes through.

      "Look we got our system to run with 50% less memory!"

      "Ok, so we sacrificed all of the features people expect these days, and in the last 3 years prices have dropped sufficiently that our product is no longer needed, but just wait for our next version!"

      The better approach is to tackle low end devices like Microsoft and Google are already doing (And WP8 runs very well on low end systems) but not let it be your driving focus. Because inevitably what's a "high end" phone today will be a $5 prepaid phone in 3 years.

  3. Firefox OS Will Become the Mobile OS To Beat by fsck-beta · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Firefox OS Will Become the Mobile OS To Beat

    Flamebait and hopelessly wrong.

    1. Re:Firefox OS Will Become the Mobile OS To Beat by BasilBrush · · Score: 4, Funny

      Of course Firefox OS Will Become the Mobile OS To Beat. Also, 2014 will be the year of Linux on the desktop.

    2. Re:Firefox OS Will Become the Mobile OS To Beat by dnavid · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Firefox OS Will Become the Mobile OS To Beat

      Flamebait and hopelessly wrong.

      I wouldn't go that far. Its entirely possible that Firefox OS could become a major player in the market segment the article indicates. The problem is that saying "...will become the Mobile OS to Beat" implies the major players like Android, iOS, and Windows even want to win that game in the first place. Absolutely there are lots of people who cannot afford the top of the line smartphones out there, and it would be nice if someone serviced their needs, but the problem is time. In time, technology will improve and costs will continue to drop relative to computing power. Its very dangerous to target a market Moore's Law is scheduled to destroy.

      For Firefox OS to be the mobile OS "to beat" requires a lot of things to happen that aren't trivial exercises. First, Firefox OS has to become the dominant player in the low end market. Second, it has to achieve a level of brand loyalty comparable to iOS and significantly higher than Android itself (Android users are typically more loyal to their smartphone manufacturer than the operating system itself in my experience). It then has to be able to parlay that brand loyalty into a way to maintain their hold on those users as the smartphone industry advances to the point where the $20 phone of tomorrow is the $600 phone of today. And it must do this in a way that doesn't give the major players an easy way to encompass Firefox's feature set: if FirefoxOS's major innovations are based on open standards and HTML5 applications, anything it can do today Android and iOS could easily do tomorrow if they wanted to.

      So much has to go right besides "sell a lot of low end feature phones" that to me it would be like predicting that the company that supplies most of the paper to print air travel tickets in kiosks was a threat to take over the entire travel industry in a decade.

    3. Re:Firefox OS Will Become the Mobile OS To Beat by ynp7 · · Score: 5, Funny

      Didn't you get the memo? With the announcement of SteamOS, the "Year of the Linux Desktop" has been moved to 2015 (Valve Time, so maybe 2016 or 2017). Of course the "desktop" has also been moved to the livingroom, so plan accordingly.

  4. Cramming a data plan onto a voice SIM by tepples · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?

  5. Ode to feature phones by ahziem · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  6. The mobile war is over, Andorid has won by Britz · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  7. Re: they see me trollin... they hatin' by cant_get_a_good_nick · · Score: 4, Funny

    Reminds me of my favorite UNIX joke:

    Emacs would be great operating system if someone just wrote a decent text editor for it.

  8. Meh... by Nicopa · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Just for reading the summary I can say this looks fishy. The latest Anroid release 4.4 was mainly dedicated to make Android run on smaller devices, adding tools to debug memory footprint, adding compresion of pages, sharing of things, etc. Google claims that now Android can run on a 512 MB device (which is fairly low end right now). And with ever decreasing memory prices is hard to imagine there's a place for a "lower than lower end" OS.

    The "being open" reason is also not good enough. As a technology (i.e. removing Google services) Android is 100% free software. And the reason some telcos might want Firefox OS is to have a more closed environment which they can control.

    Maybe Firefox could have been working to create its own Android fork, replacing Google service with Firefox services. That would be, IMO, much cooler.

  9. Re: they see me trollin... they hatin' by ichthyoboy · · Score: 3, Insightful

    sudo apt-get install woosh