[perucoder]

This is something I never understood about Firefox OS. Why did they not package it up in a way that it could be easily installed on someone's existing smartphone. I was eager to give it a try also but there was nowhere to buy the hardware and I never found a way to install it on a spare smartphone.

[wwweston]

This.

Not only that, but the number of spare smartphones is steadily increasing. Barring impact damage, the hardware generally lasts longer than the period of time a consumer is satisfied before wanting something newer.

But older devices are also increasingly left out in the cold with software updates. Anything that can't run the latest OS release will miss out on a portion of apps. Anything that's more than one OS release old will miss out on most of the apps. Three OS releases? You'll be able to run what came with the OS and a bare handful of carefully backward compatible (or all but abandoned) apps, maybe.

So... there's an increasing amount of old devices that could really use something else to run on them.

[petecox]

Well it is based on a pared-down Android build system complete with adb and fastboot access.

Maybe crowdfunding? Replicate the Cyanogenmod infrastructure and provide automated releases on every CM12.x device for Fx OS and others (Replicant, LuneOS, sailfish)?

I think Ubuntu Touch is slightly different but they run a bastardised Android inside an lxc container, so could possibly benefit from auto-building each 'inner' image too.