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by Apaec 2536 days ago
Web centric didn't work for FirefoxOS.

Contrary to popular trends, programmers can know more than a couple of languages and not everything has to be javascript.

I'm sure many hackers would be more excited to make an app with go, rust, haskell, etc than to do js, that just feels like work.

1 comments

Yes, FirefoxOS was certainly web centric and mostly did not succeed. That doesn’t mean it failed /because/ it was web centric. Every mobile OS has struggled other than iOS and Android because getting adoption for a new OS is hard.

Some additional thoughts:

1) maybe shipping a new OS with hardware, catering to a privacy focused niche is key to succeed this time

2) maybe web technology wasn’t ready to have wide adoption for making cross-platform apps at the time FirefoxOS was launched, but is now

3) maybe PureOS will fail regardless of how apps are built. In my opinion, the best chance of succeeding will be from actually being useful. In order to be useful, it needs software. Unless, of course, you seriously believe that getting hackers excited by not using web technology will be a better solution.