Today 10 years ago I went to Poland to buy a Phone with pre installed #Firefox OS on. The Phone was a Alcatel One, so very shitty. Two years later I installed Firefox OS on my Nexus 5 instead.
It was a very good concept, but sadly rolled out on too shitty hardware so it never caught on.
I remember using multiROM to install Lineage OS, Sailfish OS and Firefox OS all at the same time on my Nexus 4. I wished there was some kind of software today that you could dual boot an android phone.
I daily drove the ZTE Open and then the ZTE Open C for over a year each. Still have them kicking around in a box somewhere. Returning to Android was weird, but unfortunately there just weren't good alternatives, since Ubuntu bailed on Ubuntu Touch about the same time Mozilla pivoted away from FirefoxOS.
I've considered going with a Pine Phone, but not sure I want to go back to not having 5G support at this point. Kinda hoping that eventually we might start seeing more open alternatives once RISC-V matures a bit, but that's probably still quite a few years away at this point.
I spent a couple weeks in Poland exactly in August 2013 and I distinctly remember a huge Firefox OS billboard on the Warsaw Central train station building.
So development was abandoned, whatever happened with the Ubuntu OS for cell phones?
It still exists but only officially supports google nexus and some niche phones. I don’t think it’s going anywhere but I do hope to be wrong someday. At the moment there are options like GrapheneOS to run Android without letting Google into all your shit by default.
That home button is really cute. Reminds me of the iPod Nano 7
I forgot this even existed. I had the HTC One and/or Galaxy S4 around this time.
OS aside, the Nexus 5 was boss.
Now it is Kai OS
commercially, but there's also https://capyloon.org/
offering a GSI too, so if you have a modern Android lying around you can install it
Rad! I just threw ubuntu touch on my nexus 6p... Far from perfect, but a great premise of a new era!
I usually buy last year's pixel model when they go on sale around end of year. prefer to use my desktop as eyes aren't great at skimming tiny text. on a 6a which should last until next year. could get by with much less
I also got one (not sure which model) to play around with.
It was... okay. It very much felt like an alpha release. Lots of features were broken or simply missing.
I should have it in a drawer somewhere
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