The reason why the phones even landed in South America (and Spain) was because Telefonica heavily invested into Firefox-OS and lobbied several HW-vendors to provide devices for it.
The idea for Firefox-OS to carve-out its niche was to go lower in spec than Android could, providing a solid entry-level Smartphone experience at a price an Android device could not match just due to Hardware spec alone.
Google understood the threat, and indeed they couldn't lower the bar that low anymore and have Android provide a decent experience on a device with 1GHz single-core CPU and 512MB RAM.
As a fast measure, Google created "Android Go" as a stripped-down Android variant for lower-spec hardware, exactly to respond to Firefox-OS.
--> The fact that WhatsApp was missing on Firefox-OS was the final deathblow, yes.
But even before launch of the device, the wave of "Android Go" devices matching/undercutting Firefox-OS in price was already building up, and carriers not confident in Firefox-OS were starting to order those devices.
Then, at the moment the Firefox-OS device faced its major setback after launch, that wave already came crashing down into the procurement departments of all the carriers, and so the gap to threaten Android was closed.
Just to reiterate the scale: Google made a "Go" variant of Android and ALL it's GMS-applications just to close this gap. After the threat was gone, "Android Go" was discontinued again
The reason why the phones even landed in South America (and Spain) was because Telefonica heavily invested into Firefox-OS and lobbied several HW-vendors to provide devices for it.
The idea for Firefox-OS to carve-out its niche was to go lower in spec than Android could, providing a solid entry-level Smartphone experience at a price an Android device could not match just due to Hardware spec alone.
Google understood the threat, and indeed they couldn't lower the bar that low anymore and have Android provide a decent experience on a device with 1GHz single-core CPU and 512MB RAM.
As a fast measure, Google created "Android Go" as a stripped-down Android variant for lower-spec hardware, exactly to respond to Firefox-OS.
--> The fact that WhatsApp was missing on Firefox-OS was the final deathblow, yes. But even before launch of the device, the wave of "Android Go" devices matching/undercutting Firefox-OS in price was already building up, and carriers not confident in Firefox-OS were starting to order those devices.
Then, at the moment the Firefox-OS device faced its major setback after launch, that wave already came crashing down into the procurement departments of all the carriers, and so the gap to threaten Android was closed.
Just to reiterate the scale: Google made a "Go" variant of Android and ALL it's GMS-applications just to close this gap. After the threat was gone, "Android Go" was discontinued again