Comment by _nedR | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _nedR | Hacker News Reader

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To be fair , the market niche for a phone that doesn't try to imprison you or ransom you to the highest bidder, hasn't yet been served.

In the internet-landscape, Mozilla is the one that tries to intervene on the user's behalf against commercial interests. Maybe they thought they could do the same for the much more competitive mobile market.

The bigger problem i think is that Mozilla didn't make a phone that appealed to influencers - the high tech crowd similar to the early adopters for Firefox. Instead they tried to go for the emerging markets that was already well served by other alternatives, and who aren't ideal early adopters. From what i saw the user experience and quality of their Platform wasn't top notch either (and html apps still suck in 2015).

Ubuntu was on the right track with Ubuntu Edge (the Indiegogo campaign showed that there was definitely a demand for it), but they set their goals too high and since then they seem to be dragging their feet in getting into the market.

The stock Android on my Nexus 6 does a pretty good job actually. In a sense FirefoxOS is more limited than Android. You can't run an alternative browser on it for example.

On Android you can install a custom launcher to get rid of that annoying Google Search bar, you can replace Google Search with DuckDuckGo's app, you can install Firefox for Android on it and completely replace Chrome, you can install apps from third party sources like F-Droid or Amazon's Appstore. In Marshmallow the previously broken permissions system has been finally redesigned. Chrome for Android is pretty cool lately, as it also does push notifications, the app manifest and it does a much better job for making web apps first class citizens than Safari on iOS or Firefox on Android or whatever Opera is doing. You can actually run Facebook in your Android browser now and pretend that it's a native app.

And Android is also open source, I mean yes, while it's dependent on Google's Play services, like for push notifications or its location services, those can be replaced and Android is very much fork-able. Hey, Amazon did it.

Ubuntu was doomed from the start and Android is light years away from its competition imho. I mean, experiments are cool, but if your mobile OS is less usable than Android from 5 years ago, that's a failed experiment.

Android seems to be getting better with each new release from a security & privacy perspective, but still has a long ways to go. As a long time rose-tinted-glasses-wearing FOSS fan and android user, i have to say that iOS is still far ahead of Android in terms of security and privacy. Furthermore Apple seems to keep innovating in that regard.

You could go with custom launcher/mod/rom/ route but that brings its own possible set of problems - performance, battery life, broken functionality (some banking apps wont run on rooted phones), more spyware(from launchers), etc. It is not an acceptable solution for the masses.

Amazon - well they are just another company trying to ransom/loot you. Cyanogen mod is promising if they can overcome challenges (how many apps work without google play services?).

Furthermore Google play services is deeply embedded into android, whose key purpose is to ransom you to the highest bidder. Android is fundamentally compromised by the conflicting business interests of its primary developer (Google).

edit: I wouldn't say that Ubuntu was doomed from the start, but they certainly missed the boat.

The market niche is/was nicely being served by Jolla. (At least outside US. But as mentioned they are bankrupt atm. And the phone is old - still nice imho)

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