It seems like every time you turn around at the moment there is another Open Source mobile OS arriving on the scene looking to target the middleware and lower tier markets. Sailfish, Tizen, Alyun and of course, Mozilla’s Firefox OS. All of them are based around the HTML 5 platform rather than say, Linux like Android or Unix like iOS (although the Unix connection is tenuous these days). Heck, despite Facebook not making a truly stand alone OS, they’ve taken a step into competing in the mobile OS world.
(UPDATE 2017: In September 2016, Firefox announced that it was discontinuing work on Firefox OS.)
It seems like the “next big thing” though, is HTML 5.
Firefox definitely think so, with Head of Engineering Jonathan Nightingale recently saying in an interview that: “if you aren’t betting on HTML 5, you’re making a mistake”.
Developers certainly seem to agree with him, as Geekphone, the Spanish based OEM that Mozilla have been working with, have already sold out of their developer and preview versions of their medium and low tier phones, the Peak and the Keon respectively. It only took a few hours for the devices to sell out, and Mozilla have seemed very happy with this performance so far.
“Mozilla is thrilled to see such high demand for the Firefox OS developer preview devices, made available today by Geeksphone,” Stormy Peters, director of websites and developer engagement at Mozilla, said in a statement sent to TechRadar.
This may be interesting to some who looked at the two device’s performance and quietly questioned the thinking behind Mozilla’s move. With only 512Mb of RAM, 4Gb of storage space and a 1Ghz processor, the Keon is definitely low tier and won’t be impressing anyone with spec lists any time soon. Peak, the bigger sibling, isn’t too much more powerful, adding a 1.2Ghz dual-core chip but keeping the same amount of RAM and storage.
In this day and age of Samsung releasing a phone that’s more powerful than some mid-level laptops, phones that don’t have the same credentials can seem a little underwhelming. That market, however, is not what Mozilla is aiming at with Firefox OS.
They are instead trying to create an affordable, capable but not overly complicated phone that your average user is likely to find more than sufficient. This and they are opening up a whole new and exciting avenue for app developers. Whereas it used to be that, to get the best performance in an app, you have to make it native to the OS it would be running on. There have been some great ports, but they rarely measure up to the original product. This is changing with HTML 5 though, as it means that apps can run on essentially any phone as they are running a very slick web-app rather than a natively installed app.
This opens up the field for developers who may have wanted to create, say, a more complex app but didn’t think the investment was worth it due to having to go through the trouble of porting it. It also opens up the field a little more for first time developers who are looking to create, small, simple apps that users are likely to find useful on a phone that’s less capable, but perhaps more user friendly for those of a non-technophile mindset.
Whatever the case though, developers are clearly excited for the opportunity to develop for this new platform and Geeksphone and Mozilla are looking to get orders up and running again at a rate of 5000 a day if possible.
