Is there any likelihood that FFOS will ever be more than a niche player? From where I'm sitting it looks like Android & iOS are the big players, Windows Phone is the plucky upstart, and then there's dark horses and complementary products like Tizen and so on. With all of the big brands out there, where does FFOS propose to carve out a niche?
The same question probably was asked when IE had >90% of the browser market, Microsoft controlled the distribution channel of the default desktop icons for >90% of computers, nobody (except people reading this) had heard of "Mozilla" or "Firefox", and Mozilla had many fewer resources.
At least now the public has heard of Mozilla and Firefox, they have hundreds of millions of users, and they have some resources.
They still have a tough road ahead. If you are reading this, and you care about the open Internet and end user control, consider helping out.
They've always said they are aiming to target cheaper less powerful phones. Right now the bulk of the world is using cheap phones probably running Symbian or something similar. Whether they actually will be able to target that group is up for debate, but that's been their (stated) plan.
<disclaimer>I work for mozilla on fxos</disclaimer>
And that works really well considering the price point and the hardware. Another benefit of working to make things good on this very low end device is that we made a number of performance improvements that benefit also other devices.
Something important to note compared to android is that android phones in this range are stuck with gingerbread and no official play store.
"They've always said they are aiming to target cheaper less powerful phones"
Android can increasingly be found on a lot of cheap, low-cost smartphones too - and there's a large established app marketplace. Firefox OS has a couple of potential advantages though. If the Firefox team can deliver on fast native performance for HTML apps, then development for the OS will be magnitudes easier (potentially) than developing for rival OSes.
User privacy is another feature where Firefox OS could easily outshine its rivals. I'd love to see a Firefox OS laptop that goes head to head with ChromeOS for example (Google's OS tracks everything you do - even printing to your desktop printer).
I Think WP and FirefoxOS are the two big players in the low-end smartphone market, and the victory of one of those depends on that segment of phones.
WindowsPhone8.1 already allow developers to use html5/js to create native apps (using winJS or any other framework) and the smartphone that sold most is the lumia520 -> the most low cost of all the wp gamma.
I hope FirefoxOS will succeed, but considering that MS is trowing literally Billions to keep wp alive, I doubt it will be easy.
I very much doubt that Windows Phone will be a player there. The Lumia 520 sells for ~150 USD without contract. That's the lowest WP8 can go. Nokia introduced their Android phones because they'll run on cheaper hardware.
The Lumia 520 actually sells for ~ $50 (or lower if you look around) with no contract[1]. Its the cheapest a phone can get for the given specs: 4" LCD touchscreen, 5MP camera & 13 days standby. Too bad it hasn't been hacked yet.
Android devices running modern OS version on Jelly Bean or Kit Kat? Many new low-end devices are still shipping with Gingerbread. Gingerbread will be Google's Windows XP.
I don't know about other markets, but here, the majority of the absolutely cheapest Android phones (45€ inc. 23%VAT) run at least 4.1.2 and have 512MB of RAM.
I don't know how lower you can realistically go. Is a 128MB RAM really that much cheaper from a BOM cost perspective? Does it make sense for manufacturers to create a phone equipped with 128MB of RAM?
Also, while getting base FxOS running on 128MB of RAM looks neat this doesn't say much about how the phone actually works on the Web.
Not anytime soon. Until it has a large share of the market, it won't be worth the time for developers to really come aboard, and the only way to get there is to have a large enough sized team driven to be better than iOS and Android, which they don't have yet, and probably won't, sadly. The mobile web trend has started to die back down, too, according to recent stats; writing apps in JavaScript for FFOS would make sense if it were just a matter of reusing the same served content.
But, I'd like to see FFOS do well. David against Goliath(s) sort of thing.
