I think you might be assuming Mozilla is trying to create a captive app ecosystem. The idea is that Mozilla will work with standard web technologies and apply them to the phone. The demographic in this case would be the same demographic that uses the web not Firefox OS specifically.
What's your metric for success? Perhaps the Firefox OS teams metric is enable people to get a cheap smart-phone, period.
Down thread you say:
>targeting the lowest end of the market isn't a great idea unless you are trying to make money off the sale of the device alone and not ongoing services like apps //
And that works if you consider only ideas that make a profit to be valid. Perhaps they think that others will add to their project altruistically.
Mozilla give away their main product for free (albeit enabled in that as they're supported through advertising via Google).
If they make a model based on altruism work, I am all for it, but I am working on the assumption that it won't work, or at least, I don't know of many systems in which something is for sale, but the rest of the system relies on altruism.
Wikipedia is altruism on a large scale, but they aren't selling the consumer anything.
nor is mozilla selling anything... mozilla is a global community dedicated to the betterment of the web. We don't have shareholders, we're only accountable to you, the normal web user that we'd like to help and protect ;-)
There's a pretty big FOSS ecosystem that seems to be sustaining itself reasonably well - yes it relies on things like freemium and paid support and such, but still.
Well, specifically, it needs developers and it needs manufacturers. As it's an open-source project stewarded by Mozilla, it will likely have developers at least until Mozilla run out of funding, and it might even survive that if they can get enough outside developers involved. Manufacturers are a bit more tricky, but on the other hand, there's always been manufacturers of cheap phones and there likely always will be.
Well, to get my point across further, it needs customers willing to pay for content in the ecosystem. Developers may be there but they won't sustain a presence if they can't make enough money to make it worth their while, so unless Mozilla is going to pay them for premium apps, they will need an audience that is willing to buy them.
This generally means that targeting the lowest end of the market isn't a great idea unless you are trying to make money off the sale of the device alone and not ongoing services like apps.
The people who buy the devices will create their own apps if nobody else does. The "ecosystem" won't buy houses and cars for high-buck Western commercial developers, but that doesn't mean there will be no ecosystem.
Can people actually write apps using only a Firefox OS device? I'm not being flippant. I think this is an interesting question for sustainability of the Firefox OS ecosystem.
I'll point out that a Firefox OS app is, literally, a web app with a manifest file. If there's a web app out there that happens to work on Firefox OS, it's very close to being a Firefox OS app with ten minutes of effort to write the manifest file. You don't even have to put it on the store. Getting out of the walled gardens of the app world is a large part of the point of Firefox OS's goals.
Even if it didn't have any apps, it provides complete and open access to the Internet for $25 to people who might not otherwise have access to it. Wikipedia, email services, OpenStreetMap, Twitter, news sites, political forums, MOOCs. It's a chance to give the last billion people their voice on the open Internet.
All of which is to say that less than half the world actually has anything like consistent internet access today. And yes, getting those next 4 billion people on the internet is one of the explicit goals here.
I can't say for sure. My only experience with a browser OS was an early Chromebook. There it was possible to develop an app in an online IDE, then download and install it. (I had to do this to build a rudimentary text editor that could save locally, although I believe there are usable editor apps available now.)
If there's no way to do something similar on Firefox OS, then I see that as a much worse hindrance to the ecosystem than the income demographic they are targeting.
Firefox OS has 22 carriers and 5 manufacturers last time I counted: LG, Alcatel, ZTE, Huawei, Geeksphone, Spreadtrum and Sony said it was working on a device but no one saw it...
The carriers include: Telefonica, DT, Telenor and more...
This is not a fly-by-night project, it has already launched in 14 countries.
