Hacker News Reader

Comment by cleverjake | Hacker News Reader

I reallllllly think this author misses the point of firefox os. it is not meant to "take on android" it is meant to take on feature/dumb phones. People who store their contacts on their sim card, and pay for things using SMS.

View on HN

What I understand from a friend who works for Mozilla, their interest is in "the next two billion people to come online." That is to say, people who are outside the smartphone saturated bubble of the first world and who are unlikely to jump to iPhones on LTE in the foreseeable future.

This really is about a designing a system that works in the incredibly constrained and frequently unstable conditions of the developing world. If you've ever been there, you know it's a really different universe - politically, socially, culturally, economically, and technologically. And yes, all these factors influence the definition of solution correctly optimized for its environment.

Without an understanding of that environment, it's hard to judge whether or not Mozilla is hitting its marks.

I lived in Cambodia for a couple years, and my wife and daughter were born there. It is, as you say, a different universe. I agree that most people in developing countries are not jumping to iPhones anytime soon (although they all want one, Apple simply doesn't care about people who can't drop hundreds of dollars on a phone), but LTE is definitely coming. I don't at all see why they won't all be buying smartphones in the near future. At the low end, there are already Android phones selling for less than $100. What would prevent them from eventually getting down the price to where feature phones are now?

I think that's the short-term strategy, but the long-term strategy probably is to take on Android. As it stands now it seems like Firefox OS is a good proof of concept but is lacking in polish and is a bit unreliable. I had a chance to play with a Firefox OS phone a few months ago, and I would probably opt for a feature phone over that, right now. In a year or less though, I think it could be a viable replacement.

For competing with Android, they have a lot of catching up to do, but I think it's within reach and not requiring devs to learn another api/platform to create apps for it should help them get past the biggest hurdle any new players in the smartphone OS have to contend with, which is a lack of apps.

Remember that the apps being written for Firefox OS are the first of their kind. They had to write IMAP libraries from bits and pieces of Node libraries because no one had ever tried to write an IMAP library for the browser before (of course you couldn't in the past) whereas Java has many mature libraries to choose from.

A lot of the complaints surrounding Firefox OS are stuff like this, the Mozilla guys are doing a lot of from-scratch implementations of complicated protocols

Exactly. When the author mentions, "I like playing around with smartphones", he is immediately ruled out from the target audience of FirefoxOS today. Perhaps in the future it may compete evenly with android/iOS, but that's not an immediate goal.

What's wrong with storing contacts on a SIM card? Seems like a good idea, just move it to a new phone and boom, all your contacts are there.

My main problem with it is the lack of enough fields to store all contact information. If you have, for example, a person's home phone number and mobile phone number, you end up using two entries instead of one, because last time I checked (and at least on the SIM cards I own) the storage format is a simple two-column list: Name-Phone. Furthermore, there are strict limits on the amount of characters one can insert (and the character set is very limited, too). Additionally, one can only store 250 entries or so (varies from card to card). To sum it up in one word, for me it's very unpractical. I remember having to use Bluetooth to transfer contacts from a old feature-phone to a new feature-phone because, obviously, the SIM card would not hold all the contact information I had in the old phone.

We certainly have the technology to make better cards with more storage (BTW, the space for SMS text storage on the cards I own is ridiculously small, too). But as people moved on to store information on "rich" contact systems and, more recently, in the cloud, I think there isn't much motivation to innovate in that area.

Interesting. I didn't know they had those limitations. Better off with regular SD card backups then.

Not as good as syncing to some online service e.g. Google. I recently bought a new Android phone, before that I used a Windows Phone 8 phone and before that another Android. On both the WP8 and second Android, I simply logged into my Google account and all my contacts synced in mere minutes. (On the Android, it also reinstalled all my apps, reconnected to all my WiFi hotspots etc.).

I believe a SIM card can hold 100 numbers. Many people will have more numbers than that, so that's not really a viable alternative.

Manually exporting to an SD card and then importing (which I believe can be done on Firefox OS, although exporting requires a third party app) is another option, but it's not as convenient as syncing to an online service.

All the cool kids sync their data in "THE CLOUD"

You are fairly limited w/regards to space.

The author addresses that:

> If this was the first ‘smart’phone I ever used, I’d wonder what the hell the fuss was all about, and return to my trusty Nokia 3310 in confusion.

That is not addressing it, it is projecting his own bias into a situation he doesn't know. You are assuming because it types slowly, it isn't worthwhile to have all of wikipedia, google, and every other website out there available. For someone who has never had a smartphone, having the internet on your phone could be a TREMENDOUS deal.

> That is not addressing it, it is projecting his own bias into a situation he doesn't know.

It is addressing it, although perhaps with a particular bias. Don't try to twist words like that. And unlike people who have never had smartphones, he obviously has the experience of both having a dumb phone and a smart phone, so he knows how it is to not have things like a browser on a phone, though you might argue that that was probably in a time where you didn't gain a lot from having convenient access to the Web... but then you're starting to really draw in many assumptions about the author just because you refuse to concede any point when it comes to what you wrote. ;)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com