Obviously the idea of Firefox OS is great. It's successor KaiOS (fork of Firefox OS) is the third most popular mobile OS with hundreds of millions of users.

I think what OP was saying is that Mozilla is so poorly managed that they took a great idea and made it crash and burn.

Even Microsoft - with countless more resources and motivation - failed to make traction in mobile. Blackberry was swept off the stage in the blink of an eye.

Firefox OS was abandoned pretty quick as I remember, 2 years tops?

I would not single that out as a failing.

> Even Microsoft - with countless more resources and motivation - failed to make traction in mobile.

Microsoft made a new OS where they needed developers to target their platform. Too few did, and the platform failed.

Mozilla tried to bypass this chicken-and-the-egg problem by being able to leverage PWAs which “everyone” is making anyway these days. It wasn’t a too crazy bet that it might have worked.

In a similar vein the Pinephone is trying something similar these days: not asking developers to target it, but instead leverage existing app eco-systems (Linux and web).

I don't expect a runaway mainstream success here, but I do wish them luck.

It might have had some neat technical designs, but it is not a good idea to try and launch an OS into a maturing market, which the smartphone market clearly was by 2013.

It never works.

It worked in India - it was a success. And it was a shock when Mozilla just gave it up. Giving up on an install base of hundreds of millions just when it was taking off...the US is not the only market you know ?

Sometimes you need to plough your way through the field to get the bountiful harvest - Mozilla did that and then left the harvest to burn.

Firefox made the right call, they were never going to succeed against Android. Looking at statcounter, Kai has not been able to resist it either, dropping from somewhere over 4% to under 1%, while Android sits at over 95%.

Could they make any money off it though?

They could have - they gave up just as it was gaining traction. Now, Reliance Jio earns all the money from it...

The FirefoxOS fork KaiOS is now installed on 100M+ devices worldwide - mostly as cheap devices below full smartphones.

1.3 billion Android devices sold last year worldwide.

So, "significant market share in some markets" for KaiOS, given it has 10% the global numbers and is basically not present in EU and US?

A thing can be good and successful without being the global leader, unless you want monopolies for everything.

FirefoxOS was a good idea: a portable phone system that could run on cheaper hardware than Android could, built with web technologies instead of Java.

Then hardware manufacturers started producing cheap hardware that could run Android with acceptable performance, thus eliminating the price advantage for FirefoxOS, before that OS could take off in third world nations.