After less than three years in the market, Mozilla is bidding farewell to Firefox OS smartphones. The company has announced it would no longer offer Firefox OS smartphones through carriers but the OS will remain in existence and be used for Internet of Things and other connected products.
The announcement was made at Mozilla developers event in Orlando, US and in a statement to TechCrunch, Mozilla’s SVP of Connected Devices, Ari Jaaksi said;
“We are proud of the benefits Firefox OS added to the Web platform and will continue to experiment with the user experience across connected devices. We will build everything we do as a genuine open source project, focused on user experience first and build tools to enable the ecosystem to grow.
Firefox OS proved the flexibility of the Web, scaling from low-end smartphones all the way up to HD TVs. However, we weren’t able to offer the best user experience possible and so we will stop offering Firefox OS smartphones through carrier channels. We’ll share more on our work and new experiments across connected devices soon.”
Mozilla targeted developing regions with affordable smartphones and released a number of phones to a market where there are several hundreds of cheap Android phones. Unsurprisingly, the platform didn’t reach the level of adoption the company was hoping for, hence, the discontinuation.
Firefox OS is built using the same technology behind the company’s Firefox Browser; the OS was first introduced to developers in July 2011, before a public release followed in February 2013. It was created with the aim of providing an offering different compared to either Android or iOS and applications are not native apps but web based.
