Firefox OS smartphones are dead

The Japan-exclusive Firefox Fx0, the closest thing the platform had to a flagship. (credit: Mozilla)

Mozilla is ending its plan to build an OS for smartphones. Today at Mozilla's "Mozlando" developer event, the company announced that it would stop developing and selling Firefox OS smartphones. TechCrunch has a statement from Ari Jaaksi, Mozilla's SVP of Connected Devices:

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.

As an open source project, Firefox OS will never really "die," but it sounds like we shouldn't expect to see any more commercial smartphones.

We actually got to do a full review of a Firefox OS device with the $35 Intex Cloud FX. The hardware definitely wasn't high end, but the software didn't help matters, either. The HTML-only approach to app development meant there was basically nothing designed for the platform other than the apps that came with it, leaving us with no benchmarks, no alternative browsers, and not much to do. Firefox OS was mostly relegated to cheap phones like the Cloud FX, with the most expensive, the Fx0, clocking in at $420 and only available in Japan.

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