Submitted 1 year ago by jeena@jemmy.jeena.net to technology@lemmy.world
https://jemmy.jeena.net/pictrs/image/92599a07-0e09-4d26-920d-4b4df8e43d88.jpeg
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 jeena.net/photos/111
It was a very good concept, but sadly rolled out on too shitty hardware so it never caught on.
Wish something like that would come back.
Same, having competitors to Android and iOS would be great.
The are some alternatives out there. Calling them competitive might be a stretch though.
We have GNU/Linux on smartphones now. There is PinePhone and Librem 5. Some Android phones can run GNU/Linux too.
We have PinePhone and Librem 5 now.
there are a few like postmarketos and ubuntu touch for specific phones, among others
This makes me nostalgic for my Palm Pre and webOS.
Me too. I loved webOS. Favorite phone I’ve ever had.
Ah, nostalgic! I loved the Firefox OS! I even preached about it to family and friends. Good times.
Unfortunately it never felt like a finished product.
I never understood why they targetted low end hardware with a tech stack that’s notoriously slow (web).
This was exactly my (dumb, layman) view of things - great idea hobbled from the outset by the marriage of slow web apps with slower hardware.
To keep it affordable?
Then use something more efficient than the web stack. In the end, Android ran better on the same devices and had better software support.
I was thinking of getting one of these when they were very cheap. I really wanted FF OS and other alternatives to succeed or at least exist, because Android was just never very good and I foresaw how Google is just gonna abuse its monopoly and make life difficult for everyone.
But Mozilla was like “now it’s not the right time to introduce a mobile OS” - wtf, when if not exactly at the time when markets were still forming? It was now or never, and Mozilla threw in the towel so quickly it almost feels like someone got a nice paycheck from Google or something.
And while I never got that phone at the end, it did look like it had some decent basis and ideas in it that could’ve developed into something cool. Alas.
Am I the only one that misses a thick bezel?
Thick bezels are great for actual comfortable usage, but they don’t look sexy so they’re no more
It’s nostalgic for sure, but from a UX perspective I am so happy with the edge to edge displays.
My only gripe is that they work best with at least a little Bezel. Too little side bezel especially, and the edges of your palms will give you false input. Incredibly annoying.
The iPhones have been really good with this thankfully.
Isn’t the software supposed to correct for such false input in most cases?
I wrap my $1200 piece of hardware in a good case. Basically gives me a bezel. Check out the OtterBox Commuter.
That’s what bugs me about modern phone design, though. They could put Otterbox-type protection right on the phone and that’d be fine for most people. Personally have an S23 and I think it’s unnecessarily ugly, thin, and easy to drop, when it’s not in a case.
I’m so cheap, this one plus nord POS for 250 suits me pretty good, comes with a case and screen protector sticker from the factory. I’m more thrilled to have a regular headphones port and memory card slot.
I definitely miss simple rectangle displays. Curved corners and notches annoy me to the point of giving me anxiety. For bezels, one can at least put the phone in a case.
Do you actually get anxiety from a curved corner or was that just hyperbole?
They’re coming back. The Galaxy S 23/22 Ultra both are squared.
You can still get phones like the pixel 7a, which has thick bezels, so I’d say they aren’t completely gone from the market yet.
Unfortunately they still won’t put in a headphone jack which is a deal breaker for me. It’s a real shame because i would otherwise really like a pixel phone.
Sometimes, makes using a tablet easier & I liked “chins” on iphone for the fingerprint reader.
I still want to go back to my Moto G6. The fingerprint reader on the chin is perfect. It replaced all the buttons so I didn’t need the virtual chin or finicky edge gestures.
For the curious people, Firefox OS kept living in a way, being used as the foundation for KaiOS, which was a smart operative system for “dumb” phones. This one took off in certain parts of the world.
I remember when Ubuntu for phones was hyped so big, then it fell flat…
today there are comparable projects with like postmarketos and ubuntu touch for specific phones, among other linux mobile projects
Also Sailfish OS (though it’s not fully open source), which I use.
I really wish they had opened all of the system.
I mean: what is it they can still lose? I’m pretty sure a few licenses are not making them break even. Do they fear some third parties would copy the OS and release phones with it? Would that not be a sign that other companies trust in the OS and help them land bigger contracts?
/e/ managed to get a business off with a full opensource stack, without building the phones themselves. What prevents Jolla to try the same approach?
They could have been the main developers of the true Linux opensource phone OS. Instead, they’re going to get passed by Plasma Mobile, and then they’ll have nothing left to offer.
I sincerely hoped Jolla would at least continue to make one technology demonstrator hardware model available for purchase by enthusiasts. The current situation where I have to buy a phone and then buy OS separately is not feasible for me.
Ubuntu Touch has been pretty decent, and because of how it’s built, device support is a lot more widespread. Although it’s in this perpetually broken state now, because of the transition to the Focal base.
No luck at all with Postmarket though, on any of my devices. One is marked as bootable but unusable, but I can’t even install it fully
Ahh, my appraisal might be the opposite, PMOS seemed to have better software and support for things like the Pinephone and I thought it ran on more devices, but I am happy to see both projects and it’s nice to see both designs
I once had the Nokia N9 with MeeGo on it.
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.
I completely forgot Firefox had a phone.
Not long before Amazon came out with their spyware phone.
Seriously - they bragged about how the Fire Phone was always spying on you and still tried to charge $600 for it. Like three months later, they had to discount it to $99 and include a year of Prime.
I would love another, more privacy focused os. I’ve tried graphene, etc, but something altogether different would be cool.
I thought this was a urban myth or a collective hysteria.
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
Didn’t Raspberry Pi have a DIY phone a few years back? I’ve always had that in the back of my mind to try but I’m not a tech person.
Remember when android phones fitted in hands?
I don’t miss it.
as someone with small hands: I very much do
I usually buy last year’s pixel model when they go on sale around end of year. prefer to use my desktop as eyes aren’t great at skimming tiny text. on a 6a which should last until next year. could get by with much less
The 6A is the worst phone I’ve ever had. It never gets a good signal and barely lasts a day of battery. I bought it new.
Now it is Kai OS
commercially, but there’s also capyloon.org
offering a GSI too, so if you have a modern Android lying around you can install it
And it sucks unless you want a feature phone.
What sorcery is this?
So development was abandoned, whatever happened with the Ubuntu OS for cell phones?
Community maintained, still gets updates and features from time to time.
It still exists but only officially supports google nexus and some niche phones. I don’t think it’s going anywhere but I do hope to be wrong someday. At the moment there are options like GrapheneOS to run Android without letting Google into all your shit by default.
I forgot this even existed. I had the HTC One and/or Galaxy S4 around this time.
Loved my HTC One
I recently flexed on some nerds when I whipped out my Zaurus
Rad! I just threw ubuntu touch on my nexus 6p… Far from perfect, but a great premise of a new era!
I miss my nexus 6 shamu. I think that phone was the best that Google ever made even to this day.
My Nexus 6 was the worst phone I’ve ever had. It aged like milk. It was so bad I jumped off Google phones and never went back. Getting the OnePlus 3T was like breathing fresh air again.
I’ve had android phones since the G1. The Nexus One was pretty freaking sweet, but my favorite phone of all time was either the Nexus S or the Nexus 5x.
I still have mine in a drawer. Sure newer phones are taller but that thing was fucken WIDE. It felt more like a small tablet. I don’t know if it’s right to say that Google made it though; really it was made by Motorola
Yh boi
I also got one (not sure which model) to play around with.
It was… okay. It very much felt like an alpha release. Lots of features were broken or simply missing.
I should have it in a drawer somewhere
I daily drove the ZTE Open and then the ZTE Open C for over a year each. Still have them kicking around in a box somewhere. Returning to Android was weird, but unfortunately there just weren’t good alternatives, since Ubuntu bailed on Ubuntu Touch about the same time Mozilla pivoted away from FirefoxOS.
I’ve considered going with a Pine Phone, but not sure I want to go back to not having 5G support at this point. Kinda hoping that eventually we might start seeing more open alternatives once RISC-V matures a bit, but that’s probably still quite a few years away at this point.
I always thought those were really cool! I used to have the launcher they made for Android on my old Droid Turbo, and it was pretty cool! Then it stopped working when I got a new phone with a newer version of Android.
meiti@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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.
djsaskdja@endlesstalk.org 1 year ago
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.
angstylittlecatboy@reddthat.com 1 year ago
My recollection was that the game was already down to iOS or Android by the time this came out. Windows Phone still existed, but it was already being ignored by popular apps like Snapchat.
Historical_General@lemmy.world 1 year ago
They timed it right so that they fucked up both ways, in the browser and in the low end webn-connected phone market. They are clowns.
Hyperi0n@lemmy.film 1 year ago
Chrome won the browser war because they were lightweight, had better plugins support and it was easy to integrate with you google accounts, which were basically standard.
Firefox at the time was plagued by memory leaks and it was worse with plug-ins installed.
Ironically I switched back to Firefox years ago because Chrome was having those same issues that Firefox was had.
Suoko@feddit.it 1 year ago
Fxos was just android + a custom launcher, it was not a huge investment since it was just a launcher in the end. They focused on low prices, a camera to create video reports and a usable mobile browser.
Bal@lemm.ee 1 year ago
This is incorrect, it was also Linux-based but completely unrelated to Android.