This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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.
It was a very good concept, but sadly rolled out on too shitty hardware so it never caught on.
This makes me nostalgic for my Palm Pre and webOS.
Me too. I loved webOS. Favorite phone I've ever had.
oh wow, i had forgotten! I too was hopeful....
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.
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.
If you are still interesting in Linux phone, consider looking at PinePhone Pro. I would recommend it only for experience users and the phone experience is far from Android, but software is catching up. Check @linuxphones
P.S. writing this comment from PPP :)
I would love another, more privacy focused os. I've tried graphene, etc, but something altogether different would be cool.
It would be great, but a big problem that I see with a new, completely different OS is... the apps.
If a new OS not based on Android launches tomorrow, it will have no 3rd party apps, and it will be very hard to catch momentum without WhatsApp, Youtube, Netflix, Spotify, TikTok, Facebook, ~~Twitter~~ X (🙄), Uber... all of those apps that most people use their phone for 90% of the time.
It's what killed Windows Phone. There was a period of about 6 seconds to get in on the commercial phone OS game, and it was long gone by the time Windows made a legitimate effort (Windows Mobile phones didn't really count - they were stuck with legacy PDA software).
Honestly, the AT&T exclusivity and the late rollout of the app store (iPhones initially only had the factory apps) were the opening that let Android in.
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
I remember using multiROM to install Lineage OS, Sailfish OS and Firefox OS all at the same time on my Nexus 4. I wished there was some kind of software today that you could dual boot an android phone.
What is this? A phone for ants?
I remember a time when all of the companies were striving to make cell phones as small as possible. But as soon as touch screens came out that trend reversed.
When we realized we could watch porn on them.
The nexus 5 was peak size for a phone imo, it's a nightmare trying to find a decent 5" phone nowadays.
Reminds me of the original 3.5” iPhone. Absolutely tiny by todays standards.
I once had the Nokia N9 with MeeGo on it.
https://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.
It was summer 2011, I remember Windows Phone shops here in my area around that time, which sold something similar hardware-wise. I bought (I think) a Galaxy, but switched to the iPhone 4s when it was released here.
I miss my N82. So simple, had my music and SSH on in it. All I needed back then.
Reminds me of the pre phone/tablet line with webOS and the way hp or better their short lived CEO Leo Apotheker killed it. That was such a shame great devices and great os.
OS aside, the Nexus 5 was boss.
That home button is really cute. Reminds me of the iPod Nano 7
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.
I wish so much that there was a solid Linux phone that was just as viable as any android-based device.
There are some options, but nothing that just works.
Oh man, I wanted one of those so bad back in the day, how was it?
It was quite slow because of the hardware, it sometimes wouldn't recognize touches, and the software had so many bugs like that when you got a call, you couldn't take it because there would be some overlay over the button to take the call which would steal the touch most of the time, etc.
Remember when android phones fitted in hands?
How much functionality is left on that phone?
