[CameronNemo]

I don't understand why they sunk so much money into Firefox OS when they could have much more easily released an Android spin that had Firefox by default, along with other privacy enhancements.

[walrus01]

I think they missed a huge opportunity in about 2014/2015 to do what CyanogenMod was doing, as a clean/no-nonsense power user variant of Android. Ultimately the Cyanogen company leadership made poor choices and killed their relationship with the largest phone manufacturer that was shipping their OS on the phones (OnePlus), who decided to go and re-implement the same features in their own oxygenOS android build. Thereby killing Cyanogen as a company.

[bzbarsky]

My understanding, and I could be totally wrong on this, is that at the time such an Android spin would not have been able to use things like Google's app store, and possibly things like Maps and whatnot, due to not having Google's browser as default.

[CameronNemo]

Likely true. But there are options.

* it could come with an alternative app store

* maps can be used as a web app (how is that different from Firefox OS?)

But yes it would look more like Amazon's offering than Google's. Look where microg is now, though. That is without Mozilla's backing.