Comment by djsaskdja@endlesstalk.org on Today 10 years ago I got a Firefox OS phone

Today 10 years ago I went to Poland to buy a Phone with pre installed #Firefox OS on. The Phone was a Alcatel One, so very shitty. Two years later I installed Firefox OS on my Nexus 5 instead.

It was a very good concept, but sadly rolled out on too shitty hardware so it never caught on.

Considering how dominant the mobile OS has become, this wasn’t a terrible gamble. Like they lost and it looks bad in hindsight, but you can’t blame them for trying. If it had succeeded, we’d be living in a very different world of technology right now.

My recollection was that the game was already down to just iOS or Android by the time this came out. Windows Phone still existed, but it was already being ignored by popular apps like Snapchat.

Plus the people who even knew about this (tech people) didn’t like the “everything is a web app” idea when Chrome OS did it, much less a smartphone.

They tried to focus on lower end devices and that’s not inherently stupid. If you only need half the ram and CPU of a low end Android phone, you can undercut Android’s marketshare - in theory at least.

focus on lower end devices and that’s not inherently stupid.

It is. Phones are an aspirational market, it’s the top end that sets market trends. It’s been the case since 2007 at the very least, and arguably well before that. Focusing on the low end was a huge mistake from Mozilla leadership, and it’s sad that nobody seems to have paid a price for it (beyond the FFOS team, which was eventually disbanded). FFOS almost killed Mozilla.

No. You’re way too euro/us-centric. There’s a huge market for low end phones in Africa, South America and large parts of Asia.

If the FFOS team would have managed to get, say, a Nigerian carrier on board and produce a viable smartphone at 40$ or so, that would have absolutely dominated the market there, especially in the early days of smartphones.

The needs of the poorer 4 billion of this planet are not met by 500+$ phones that break every six months and have a battery life of about 5 minutes.

KaiOS, a FirefoxOS fork, is used in the JioPhone in India. It is a feature phone with some internet capability, and is reasonably popular among lower middle-class users.

You can probably have much larger profit margins on that $500+ phone, and if it breaks quickly (and if consumers are OK with that trend which they seem to be), then you get even more money.

That said, it hasn’t been my personal experience that smart phones break easily. At least not the few I’ve had that have all lasted me 5+ years each. I’ve been using my Pixel 6 with no case, and I swear this thing tries to commit suicide constantly. If a surface isn’t completely flat that thing will slowly slide until it falls and hits the floor. I’ve had it been literally 10 minutes after setting my phone down, the thing will seemingly fly off the desk out of nowhere. It’s wild.

Anyway, this thing is built like a tank. Still works great.

You can probably have much larger profit margins on that $500+ phone

Cool, then go ahead and sell the 500$ phone to a nigerian farmer.

Getting a foot into the high end market is almost impossible, the barrier to (successful) entry is gigantic. Tackling the underserved low-end market is a much more viable strategy. And now comes the kicker: Not being able to enter a market is (and this will shock you) even less profitable than entering a low-margin market.

I really don’t intend that as an insult, but you’re looking at this from a very western, rich, profit-oriented standpoint. Mozilla never was about profit and the world is larger than our western rich kid bubble. 500$ is enough to feed a person for an entire year (or more) in some countries.

But they didn’t manage to - nobody will, not writing an OS from scratch. To support that level of development you need high per-device margins that only high-end devices can command. The low-end is restricted to low-margin new devices and secondhand high-end models - because, despite your preconceptions, high-quality models can work for a decade when not abused. The poor Nigerian will buy a secondhand flagship today and, if they get wealthier, a new one tomorrow; they know the market as much as anyone and will not buy something that simply makes them look poor.

The view that the developing markets will eat shit simply because it’s cheap, is an out-of-touch colonial mindset that dooms a lot of companies.

This perfectly explains the demise of BlackBerry phones too.

User experience beats everything else. It sounds like some essential components were never finished

They timed it right so that they fucked up both ways, in the browser and in the low end web-connected phone market. They are clowns.

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