Mozilla kills Firefox OS Development – Why Huawei, Xiaomi and Lenovo will rule in the Year of the Monkey

Sometimes, it just wasn’t meant to be.

That seems to be the case with Mozilla Firefox OS which is now being shut down by the Mozilla Corporation as reported in the article “Mozilla Will Stop Developing And Selling Firefox OS Smartphones”, published Dec 8 2015 by Ingrid Lunden, TechCrunch. 

Mozilla seems to be streamlining their operations, focusing more on its core money making products, such as the Firefox browser.  Meanwhile it's cutting all of their non-performing products, such as Thunderbird email and chat client as well as continued developement for Mozilla Firefox OS.

They've also begun to push into the development of their own ad-blocker as that market is pretty hot right now, especially for the privacy conscious wary or the prying eyes of advertisers as noted in the article “Why Edward Snowden thinks you should use an ad blocker”, published November 13 2015 by Andrea Peterson, The Washington Post.

So why exactly is the Mozilla Corporation culling all of these projects, specifically the Firefox OS, especially after committing so much time to the project?

Mozilla kills Firefox OS Development –Why Huawei, Xiaomi and Lenovo will rule in the Year of the Monkey

Firefox OS made its debut at MWC (Mobile world Congress) 2013 as noted in my blog article entitled “MWC 2013 reveals Firefox OS & Tizen OS launching Second & Third Quarter 2013 respectively - Samsung's Despicable Me 2 & Mozilla practices The ABC's of Death”.

However, by June 2015, after two (2) years of slow development thought Africa and South America, reality began to catch up with them. There were just too many smartphone developers out there willing to make Android and Windows phones below US$100 as noted in the article “Mozilla stops working on Firefox OS smartphones”, published December 8 2015 by Jon Fingas, Engadget. 

Good to note that many of the makers were Chinese as predicted in my blog article entitled “Mozilla's @Firefox OS and the Ignite Initiative - Wearables, Hipster Trend as Three Chinese Dragons Dominate the Smartphone World”.   

Running mainly Web App, while a futuristic concept, meant that this Smartphone depended too heavily on the internet. Many persons in the Developing world might be barely able to afford a smartphone but the cost of Internet service may have been out of their reach, making web App appear to be more of a novel concept that a workable solution.

Mozilla will continue to use components from the Firefox OS development to make Internet-of-things projects, but the Firefox OS dream is now officially dead. The main takeaway here is that making low-cost Smartphone isn't always a winning strategy, especially against the advertising and marketing muscle of Huawei, Xiaomi and Lenovo.

After all, the year of the Monkey 2016 will be the year that they conquer the US of A.