Farewell, FirefoxOS

2015-12-21 Last modified on 2021-05-23

FirefoxOS is (was ?) a mobile device experiment.

Recently, they announced:

We will make space for this [IoT] exploration by stopping our work to build and ship smartphones through carrier partners.<br> — source

FirefoxOS devices

Disclaimer: I haven't tried to install it on a real device (middle/high-end one).

I tried the following phones:

  • Geeksphone Keon
  • Geeksphone Peak
  • Alcatel OneTouch Fire

They all suck. Seriously. Even basic Android phones that are as cheap and offer better performances.

The OS

Mozilla made an amazing thing enabling the devices possibilities to be used from a web app.

Compared to the two (Android and iOS, I have not tried Windows Mobile), the platform is waaaayyy behind.

  • The stability was really bad (I only played with v1.x)
  • Everything is a web app (no possibility to run native apps)
  • Available applications

So what ?

FirefoxOS is a «WEB APP ALL THE THINGS» OS only, and I think they killed themselves not allowing «native apps» on mobiles.

It may be a good move to apply FirefoxOS to other things.