The lesson here, and where we failed, is that if you don't have control over the full stack you're shipping (hardware and software) and can't manage the QA and sign off process before shipping, you expose yourself to bad surprises.
Anyway, crappy hardware cares more about software efficiency. Firefox OS struggled massively with performance, to the point of absurdity; targeting low-end hardware with that is an idea that only ever made sense on paper. Supposedly it was just a temporary problem, optimizations were coming… eventually...
It does when those Bay Area hackers are the ones who decide whether or not they will port their app to your phone.
The mistake is rather that for closed protocols you are dependent on the Bay Area hacker to port the apps instead of "everyone can implement the open protocol".
GP's point is that targeting these markets was a mistake. Their strategy was fundamentally flawed from the start.
> Other than that, the sorts of people spending 35$ on a phone do not care about the three different materials, the thickness, the shitty camera, etc. I've seen the most horrifying, hackneyed together internet connectivity solutions in China that to mock a 35$ phone for being "too thick" is to be just... out of touch.
Again, GP's point was that the idea of selling a $35 phone to China was what killed Firefox OS in the first place.
If Mozilla was targeting the market for cheap, crappy phones, they were also targeting the search market on cheap, crappy phones. Unfortunately Yahoo, Bing and Google, the companies who comprise nearly all of Mozilla's revenues, need access to extraordinarily rich markets to justify their bids. It's not clear to me that they'd be substantially better off if the Mozilla phone was considered a success.
There's also government social welfare contracts to consider, or good faith agreements with a government that allows you to corner a more profitable market (you provided five hundred thousand affordable phones to our people, so we'll let you lay fiber through our country / get through our Great Firewall / whatever).
Yea, but you don't "bet the company" on it if the opportunity is smaller.
> Mayo says it took the focus off of Firefox. “It was close to a bet-the-farm effort,” he said.
Not so. Android decided to do cheap and lean, too. I did some price comparisons in emerging markets back in 2015, and everywhere that Firefox OS tried to play, there was an Android alternative available at a comparable price. More details are here:
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/537661/firefox-maker-batt...
EDIT: I just read that review you linked and it suffers the same problem - a total lack of perspective. The only critical error I can see is the lack of internal battery to keep time synced, which will be a major setback for browsing because of authentication and whatnot. Other than that, the sorts of people spending 35$ on a phone do not care about the three different materials, the thickness, the shitty camera, etc. I've seen the most horrifying, hackneyed together internet connectivity solutions in China that to mock a 35$ phone for being "too thick" is to be just... out of touch.