How disappointing. I wold have expected more from any project that the Mozilla team was supporting. But maybe they were not really doing that here. Did the manufacturer select the Firefox OS because of price and popularity? The FF browser would surely be attractive to potential customer as as would the price .
Too bad the results do not match the expectations.
Iām pretty sure they chose FirefoxOS because it has the lowest licensing costs (Itās free I think). You couldnāt run Android on a phone this cheap because the licensing costs alone would push you overbudget.
I think you have nailed it perfectly. Although you don;t sem to be able to run FF on it either. Maybe a stripped down version of Linux might work?
It would require too much development effort on their part to remake all of the phone parts in a generic Linux distro.
This phone is hideously memory constrained by modern standards, but 128MB is way more than you need to run X and some apps. The 1Ghz processor has plenty of oomph too by historic standards, although it is inevitable that modern web browsers will be slow on it. Building the whole phone out of a browser is just asking for trouble.
Unless the manufacturer has some reason to believe that heās going to literally sell tens or hundreds of millions of these phones there is no way heās going to be able to justify the development costs on a device with such a thin margin.
I agree with your analysis. I wonder why anyone would bother to make something that they know is going to perform so poorly. They could have built a phone that makes and receives calls, text messages and text-only emails and had something people might want.
Instead, they did this?
Nokia makes millions of those phones already each year. How are you going to compete? This phone at least has a niche, even if it is not very good at filling it.
Weāre talking about Firefox OS, where apps are written in JavaScript.
What licensing costs?
Thatās why Firefox should be making some sort of reference standard like Android One. Since they donāt aim to deliver the full android experience, their hardware requirements should be much more modest, and consumers will be assured an adequate experience.
These licensing fees.
Realistically, these arenāt fees that small-time manufacturers are paying, and theyāre not necessary in order to put android on your handset. Google doesnāt charge anything, and if MS wants to try and sue a handset maker that markets exclusively in emerging economies, good luck: even if they do win a verdict in that foreign jurisdiction, theyāre going to have a very difficult time collecting. And itās not only small-time, non-US players that havenāt agreed to MSās demands: Motorola also doesnāt license the claimed MS patents.
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