Mozilla Officially Shutters Firefox OS

Last December marked the beginning of the end for Mozilla’s smartphone platform, Firefox OS. Now it’s official — Mozilla will cease development of the operating system after the next update and will be closing the doors on its satellite operations over the next few months.

The company’s George Roter posted the announcement over on its community forums and explains Mozilla’s plans for Firefox OS’ future:

  1. We will end development on Firefox OS for smartphones after the version 2.6 release.
  2. As of March 29, 2016, Marketplace will no longer accept submissions for Android, Desktop and Tablet, we will remove all apps that don’t support Firefox OS. Firefox OS apps will continue to be accepted into 2017 (we have yet to finalize a date for when we won’t continue accepting these apps).
  3. The Connected Devices team has been testing out a new product innovation process with staff, 3 products have passed the first “gate” and many more are in the pipeline. Having multiple different product innovations in development will be the approach moving forward, and we’re hoping to open up the formal process to non-staff participation in the first half of the year.
  4. The foxfooding program will continue and will focus on these new product innovations (rather than improving the smartphone experience). We expect the Sony Z3C foxfooding devices to be useful in this, but we expect it to take until the end of March to figure out the specific design of this program.

It goes on to mention that from June onwards, Mozilla will no longer have any involvement with the platform’s development.

So, things didn’t work out for Firefox OS, but you have to give Mozilla some credit. With Android and iOS dominating the market, a strong competitor would have been nice.

Firefox OS/Connected Devices Announcement [Mozilla]


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