While things haven’t been great for the operating system for a fairly long time, it is now officially the time to say goodbye to smartphone Mozilla Firefox OS. While the original first hint that Mozilla wasn’t particularly bent on capturing a portion of the smartphone market came back in December last year, there hasn’t been any official statement since.
According to the company itself, the Mozilla Firefox operating system did not come up to the expectations that neither Mozilla nor the users had for the software and ended up not being able to “offer the best user experience possible” and instead decided to focus its efforts somewhere else.
However, this time, Mozilla has made a clear statement in which they confirmed the fact that the operating system for smartphones will be discontinued; in that sense, the OS will continue to function on devices but it will no longer be receiving support or updates. The Mozilla Firefox OS development will end for good once version 2.6 is released in May 2016.
According to the official statement, the company made this decision due to the feeling that the company was playing ‘catch up’ more than managing to establish itself as a viable alternative on a market where circumstances were not favorable for a newcomer such as themselves. As a result, Mozilla will return to focusing its efforts on other markets, most likely not phone-related.
Considering the operating system itself is not literally going away, the Mozilla Firefox OS will be considered a Tier 3 project by the company from now on. In essence that means that any issue you may have with it you will either have to solve yourself or rely on forums and community rather than the company itself. That shouldn’t necessarily be regarded as a major change as the OS has been an open-source system, so it’s not unlikely that there are individuals out there that could share a fair amount of knowledge about it.
Mozilla claims they have given up on this particular project in favor of ‘connected devices’ and that they will be focusing on developing software – most likely also open source – for the ‘Internet of things’. In other words, programming for linked and synced devices and household items.
As a side note, the company also said that it will stop accepting submissions from Android, desktop and tablet apps to its Marketplace starting Marth 29th this year, and that it will also remove apps that don’t support Firefox OS after that date.
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