By the end of 2015 Mozilla leadership had come to the conclusion that our then Firefox OS initiative of shipping phones with commercial partners would not bring Mozilla the returns we sought. We made the first of a series of announcements about changes in the development of Firefox OS at Mozilla. Since then we have gradually wound down that work and, as of the end of July 2016 have stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS. This message recaps what transpired during that period of time and also describes what will happen with the Firefox OS code base going forward.
Symbian, Sailfish OS, BlackBerry OS, Windows Phone, Firefox OS.
Not to mention WebOS, Tizen..
WebOS lives on in LG TVs, at least.
Tizen is very much still around, it fills the niche for ‘Samsung products that don’t require Google’. Things like some of their basic phones, their smart watches, and i think it was even on a fridge.
Personally, I wanted to see WebOS succeed.
Is there any way to recover the effects of mass market consolidation? The long tail only exists within margins of error, it might as well not exist at all. It’s brutal and leaves us with boring mono-cultures controlled by the interests of very few. I find it disappointing, is this the ultimate fate of technology?
The game of monopoly is exciting when you play it from the beginning, but approaching the end-game there’s no opportunity and everyone’s fate is sealed by simple economic inequality. You need a reset to make things interesting & fun again.
You’re confusing your terms. The “long” in “the long tail” specifically refers to situations where the “head” comprises no more than 50% of the total.
(ie. “The long tail” is talking about the market equivalent of a minority government)
ssokolow,
50% is just an arbitrary point, it’s actually used in more ways than that:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_tail
If it still isn’t clear, look at the power law graph at the link above. Let’s imagine the green head represents the top 3 mobile platforms (android, IOS, windows), and the yellow tail represents everyone else. To represent the actual mobile market you have to increase the slope of the curve until the yellow area is 0.3% of the entire curve, which is almost none.
Whatever way you prefer to communicate it, my point is that the top few players control the entire market. On this chart by IDC, “other” doesn’t even register on the graph…
http://www.idc.com/prodserv/smartphone-os-market-share.jsp
Edited 2016-09-29 15:01 UTC
Tizen is still developed. Same maybe can be told about Windows Phone but MS is also closing down at least hardware department.
Tizen seems pretty well, although despite open development, it’s currently running only on Samsung’s devices – all of their 2015 and newer TVs, their smartwatches, smartphones for emerging markets, some of their cameras, and even fridges. It’s also been recently reported that Huawei (also a part of the Tizen Association) is working on a Tizen smartwatch as well.
Good. I am tired of every little OS vendor coming up with his own little API and then demanding from developers to spend time to port their apps, as if they have all the time in the world.
B… b… but Firefox OS apps were in HTML5. Well, nobody develops first-class phone apps in HTML5, and nobody cares if HTML5 is supposed to be good for mobile apps or whatnot. If FirefoxOS had a Dalvik in place, it would have succeeded.
Sure, it would still be a long shot, because they ‘d have to convince devs to switch from the Play Store and Play Services to something else, but at least they ‘d have a fighting chance.
For the people who still don’t get it: DOS became what it became because it was API-compatible with CP/M (mostly), OS/2 sold somewhat respectably (despite being more expensive than Windows, requiring double the memory and failing to install even on some IBM systems) because it run DOS and windows apps while other alien OSes like BeOS didn’t even made a blimp on the radar, Android became what it became partly because it had OpenGL and allowed easier game porting from iOS, and GNU/Linux became what it became because it was API-compatible with the Unixes.
Moral of the story: If you want to have a (small but real) fighting chance, be API-compatible.
“…B… b… but Firefox OS apps were in HTML5.”
HTML5 was too much hurried, hackable, anyway. Hit the broken bells. Cry, then forget.
Not a bad thought. Makes sense a lot of the time. Except when it doesn’t.
Well, there is no guarantee for success. API compatibility just helps. But if the product has no real merits compared to the competition, it will still fail.
Edited 2016-09-28 22:20 UTC
I think you are confusing BB10 with BB OS. They are completely unrelated, except from the parent company. Browser on BB10 was very good when it was being updated.
What’s next? Rust?
dionicio,
Don’t even say that! Oh it would be such a shame if we lost rust-lang. IMHO it is one of the better modern programming languages for dealing with the security problems that plague us. You know that’s one of the sad truths of the industry, even projects with strong merit can struggle to find a business model.
Edited 2016-09-28 14:47 UTC
I wouldn’t worry about it. Rust and Firefox OS have very different adoption curves.
Outside Mozilla, Rust is one of the rising stars of the programmer world and is already seeing use in production from various companies, such as Dropbox and OneSignal. If Mozilla dropped it, I don’t doubt the Rust team would get “we’ll hire you to keep doing what you’re doing” job offers.
https://www.rust-lang.org/en-US/friends.html
Inside Mozilla, integration of Rust into Firefox continues at a steady pace (I follow it on Bugzilla and they’re currently focused on the build system and MP4 parser).
Even if Mozilla were losing interest, Servo is a Mozilla-Samsung joint project while FirefoxOS competed with Tizen and Samsung is clearly willing to prop up Tizen all by themselves so that bodes well for Servo and the language it’s written in.
Rust’s adoption curve is closer to Mozilla projects like Opus (mandatory for WebRTC) and Daala (one of the inputs to the IETF’s NETVC project) than to Firefox OS and I can actually explain why:
Rust replicated Firefox’s greatest strength in its early days: It started strong in a niche that nobody was really serving. (Back in the days of Mozilla Suite, “browser extensions” were limited to custom toolbars that couldn’t really do much.)
(And, like Opus and Daala, it was a “long-term” project, taking a decade to come to fruition but starting well ahead of its competitors by aiming to compete with future, not-yet-released generations of the existing solutions rather than merely the ones which would be released around the time it was finished.)
Rust always had the punchy “native code without segfaults” elevator pitch (which only got stronger once they dumped the green threading runtime and gained their current level of C interoperability) while FirefoxOS was always an uphill battle of “Prove to me that this has a benefit to me beyond the warm and fuzzy feeling of taking a principled stand.”
While I equally skeptical about ChromeOS, it managed to find success by filling an un-filled “smartphone-like simplicity for laptops” niche for grandparents and IT departments… that unfilled niche doesn’t exist for smartphones and, despite that minor success, Google is still working to fold it into a desktop-capable Android.
Edited 2016-09-28 22:05 UTC
kurkosdr,
It’s imperative to mention the exclusive deal paying DOS royalties on every IBM-PC sold. If this deal hadn’t happened, the tech world would be very different today, to say the least.
Edited 2016-09-28 14:40 UTC
More bad news. Developing grinch features.
Now there is a bigger story!
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/sep/28/blackberry-to-sto…
Don’t write off the Windows Phone not just yet. This little charming craftsmanship that the 8.1 was, is running perfectly fine on my Lumia 520 and I hope it continues to do so for many years to come. I still get the updates for apps (although not so frequently anymore) and as long as MS fails to bring down the W10 requirements to the L520 level, I am a happy camper and see no reason to switch. Although I admit that when the phone is crippled with some software / OS update, I will jump to iOS world (which I have been developing for two years already at work on daily basis).
Exactly the same feeling for me! I have a 720 and still enjoy using it. As of now, should I need to change my phone and couldn’t jump on a Windows 10 one, I wouldn’t know what to get – I dislike both iOS and Android for different, yet equally-sound reasons.
Maybe Ubuntu Phone… Who knows? 😉
I would definitely not consider FirefoxOS a failure, even now. Many of the underlying technologies, and the code written to support them, have made their way into Firefox for desktop (for instance, a more robust build system, a better media API for audio and video, better support for MP4 containers, etc).
As with many projects, FirefoxOS itself wasn’t very successful, but it pushed contributions to another more prominent project, and in that way was quite valuable.
Pareto’s Law says that there will eventually be two totally dominant players in any mature market eg Boeing and Airbus, Coke and Pepsi, McDonald’s and Burger King. The rest will fight over the scraps.
Automotion?
Clothing?
Air travel?
Computers?
Milk?
Fruit?
Not a very solid law… Oh, it says “eventually”! Then we need only wait, I guess.
Government anti-competition policies and industry subsidies are designed to prevent duopolies from forming. If the policies didn’t exist Ford and GM would probably control 95% of the global car market by now.
In South Korea half of entire economy is controlled just by Samsung and Hyundai. They are involved in almost every industry from pharmaceuticals to hotels to arms manufacturing.
Huge multinational corporations often have dozens or even hundreds of different brands to give the illusion of choice.
>Government anti-competition policies
I think you mean anti-monopoly?
So what happens now to users of Panasonic TVs with the OS? No more security updates for a Web-connected device that most expect to keep for a number of years?
I don’t know about the tvs, but hopefully the customers get smart enough not to buy these things. Probably not, but I can dream. Buy Nexus players, Apple TVs, Roku, whatever. At least then you can change/update that without your tv getting screwed.
I’ve bought and used a Firefox OS phone because I trusted Mozilla to do the right thing from the beginning. They didn’t. As always, phones sold by partners have ZERO updates and were all left in the cold. It didn’t help that Mozilla provided zero support for those phones as well. I’ve been using a ROM built by a very helpful French community, but that’s it, there’s no way to get it from Mozilla itself.
I even talked with the Mozilla guys at FOSDEM this year and they refuse to acknowledge that there was an issue. How is that possible?
Well, I’m glad that this phone can also run Android because there’s no point keeping the Firefox OS flame alive now.
Government anti-competition policies
I think you mean anti-monopoly? http://www.bibiletal.com/
Edited 2016-10-03 21:01 UTC