Mozilla Gives Up on Firefox OS for Smartphones

Mozilla no longer wants to compete with Google’s Android on the smartphone market. This is apparent after Mozilla has decided to stop developing and selling Firefox OS for smartphones. Mozilla will, however, continue to experiment with how Firefox OS can be used on other types of devices such as Internet of Things.

Below is the full statement from Mozilla’s Ari Jaaksi.

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.

Firefox OS focused on HTML5 web applications rather than native apps as is the case for Android and iOS. The focus was also on low-end devices, but sales have been poor, which is probably closer to the reason of the withdrawal than “being unable to offer the best user experience possible.”