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.
Imo that’s what caused Firefox to lose market share to Chrome. They focused too much on Firefox OS and deprioritized browser development. In one example, it took them a long time to implement FIDO when it was already functional in Chrome.
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.
oh wow, i had forgotten! I too was hopeful…
I wish so much that there was a solid Linux phone that was just as viable as any android-based device.
There are some options, but nothing that just works.
i really hope these alt-mobile OS’s take off, i know theres things like pinephone and kde mobile but they’re still a little bit rough around the edges last i checked… at the same time tho maybe i should do some more digging around. i imagine someone’s made a daily-driveable alternate OS for phones at this point
Wish something like that would come back.
Same, having competitors to Android and iOS would be great.
OS aside, the Nexus 5 was boss.
I never understood why they targetted low end hardware with a tech stack that’s notoriously slow (web).
To keep it affordable?
I once had the Nokia N9 with MeeGo on it.
https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N9
It was a great phone, but sadly there was little support for (3rd party) apps. I had it for like 3 months, could still get a buck for it (wish I’d kept it) and bought something else with the money.
The N9 was killed by Stephen Elop, the new CEO coming straight from Microsoft with a mission: get Nokia bought off by MS.
Right from the start, he ran an explicit counter-advertisement campaign against the N9 and Meego. Whatever commercial success it would be, this would be the first and last device running MeeGo from Nokia, and there would be no support for MeeGo.
Nokia was to embrace Windows mobile OS, that turned out to be a total disaster. But indeed, after he tanked Nokia, it became cheap enough to bought by MS, as Nokia got both cheap and undsirable by any other big player due to its binding to MS bad mobile OS, and Elop got his VP status back there.
This is a shame in the history of mobile phones and OS!
Later, some former Nokia would start their own phone company reusing part of MeeGo. Jolla was born.
Reminds me of the pre phone/tablet line with webOS and the way hp or better their short lived CEO Leo Apotheker killed it. That was such a shame great devices and great os.
I remember Ars Technica had an article or series on his bad decisions called “Apotheker needs an Apothecary” and lit into him for all the dumb things he was saying and doing. I just don’t see how you can have the manufacturing and branding behemoth HP was then, get giftwrapped Palm and webOS while RIM was still in the process of imploding, and fumble the bag so hard
