Mozilla Stops Offering Firefox OS For Smartphones; To Focus On IoT

Mozilla confirmed last week that it will stop offering Firefox OS smartphones through carrier channels. Senior Vice President of Mozilla Foundation’s Connected Devices, Mr. Ari Jaaksi tweeted that they will continue improving web experience on smartphones.

“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”, TechCrunch quoted the full statement from Jaaksi.

However, Mozilla will not stop developing Firefox OS, it will rather focus on Internet-of-things (IoT) or connected devices.

In an official blog, Jaaksi wrote, “Everything is connected around us. This revolution has already started and it will be bigger than previous technology revolutions, including the mobile smartphone revolution. Internet of Things, as many call it today, will fundamentally affect all of us. We will prototype this future starting right now using technologies developed as part of the Firefox OS project to give us a kick start.”

He added that Mozilla will explore and prototype new use cases in the world of connected devices as an “open source project” with a clear focus on the user benefit and experience. The focus will be on products and technologies that allow people to access and manage their world of connected devices, helping to ensure people are “empowered, safe and independent.”