I remember the gist being that we were trying to compete against the two biggest companies on the planet, and (outside of some concerns about security) nobody seemed to really be complaining about the two options. If our goal was to bet the company (financially) on it, it made no sense to try to undercut Android... at the time Android was open source and ran on dirt cheap phones.
I remember a big part of it being "nobody wants a phone that doesn't have Angry Birds on it". I wasn't specifically worried about that one game (although it was insanely popular at the time), but rather all the apps – Uber, Facebook, etc. We had no ability to make parternships of that level happen. Especially since some of those companies (like Facebook) were trying to build their OWN phones at the time.
I just didn't think there was a market for a phone with no apps, that was positioning itself as the "cheaper" version of an already cheap (and ubiquitous) competitor. And I wouldn't have cared, if it wasn't for the fact that we had to move the entire company towards building this – which we did for a few years.
Damn, I wasn't aware of this. I had a big interest in FirefoxOS when it was developed, so much that I named one of ours dogs after one component of it (Gaia). I was always sad that FirefoxOS (tried) to pivot to IoT instead of continuing to iterate on the idea, seems KaiOS is worth looking into.
n = 1 and I don't know how much phone vendors customize KaiOS. Maybe it was only cumbersome due to customizations or limitations from that vendor. Maybe it works better on touch devices. Maybe the hardware just wasn't up to the task. But it didn't leave a good mark.
Nokia also had an internal 'next gen small OS' that they also killed during that time.
Do you still have that? What was your reasoning?