Lo sviluppo di Firefox OS per Smartphone verrà interrotto dopo la versione 2.6
La notizia era già nell’aria dallo scorso dicembre quando Ari Jaaksi, SVP dei dispositivi connessi di Mozilla, aveva dichiarato che Mozilla aveva intenzione di smettere di sviluppare e vendere smartphone con Firefox OS attraverso i carrier telefonici. Questa notizia lasciava presagire una fine imminente dello sviluppo di Firefox OS per smartphone, anche perché dopo qualche settimana Telefónica, uno dei primi carrier ad aver adottato Firefox OS, annunciò la sua decisione di abbandonare Firefox OS e di passare a Cyanogen OS (basato su Android) per i propri smartphone.
Bene, a distanza di quasi due mesi è arrivata ora la (triste) conferma di quello che noi tutti temevamo.
Mozilla ha infatti ufficialmente annunciato che, a partire dal rilascio della versione 2.6 di Firefox OS. la versione per Smartphone non verrà più sviluppata da parte dei developers di Mozilla.
Dear Mozillians,
The purpose of this email is to share a follow up to what was announced by Ari Jaaksi, Mozilla’s SVP of Connected Devices, in early December6 — an intent to pivot from “Firefox OS” to “Connected Devices” and to a focus on exploring new product innovations in the IoT space. We’re sharing this on behalf of Ari and the Connected Devices leadership group.
In particular, there are a few decisions that we want to share along with what will happen next. We’ll elaborate more below, but let us start by being very clear and direct about 4 decisions that have been made:
- We will end development on Firefox OS for smartphones after the version 2.6 release.
- 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).
- 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.
- 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.
Obviously, these decisions are substantial. The main reason they are being made is to ensure we are focusing our energies and resources on bringing the power of the web to IoT. And let’s remember why we’re doing this: we’re entering this exciting, fragmented space to ensure users have choice through interoperable, open solutions, and for us to act as their advocates for data privacy and security.
There are some exciting opportunities for you to shape this next phase through your participation — we’ve started to outline some of these below and will send more details in the days ahead.
Even after reading more below, you may have questions to ask and thoughts to share. For that reason we’re opening up a conversation here on Discourse and will have open office hours over the coming days7. Please reach out.
Via Mice.com e VentureBeat
