Mozilla to end development of Firefox OS for smartphones

Mozilla released Firefox OS for smartphones couple of years ago and like many other operating systems, this too failed to find traction. Today, Mozilla SVP Ari Jaaksi has announced that they will stop development of Firefox OS for smartphones. Instead, the focus will to move to “Connected Devices” and explore innovation in IoT space.  Mozilla will release version 2.6 of Firefox OS and then there won’t be any updates to the OS.

Here is what’s going to happen in the future w.r.t Firefox OS:

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. 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.