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by thegeomaster 4388 days ago
I have used the OS and I can confirm your headaches, and maybe even worse (because I've used 1.1 and it was far more bad than the current release version).

They released it too early. It wasn't ready. It still isn't ready, from what I've seen. I'm aware that Android was in a pretty bad state in its own v1.4, but when they release a mobile OS today, it has to put up to expectations set forth by others. No one is going to say "it has so many bugs and far worse functionality than Android/iOS, but it's okay because it's only v1.4" simply isn't going to fly because users expect what they're accustomed to.

And the choice of technology is a little problematic. How can you ever implement Skype, for instance, in Javascript? (But with acceptable performance, naturally.) I guess they have to improve asm.js support astronomically in order to enable such use-cases.

I've developed for FxOS (you can find an app I made on my Github) and it's been really fun and liberating (I have an Android phone so I tried developing for it but I don't like Java, especially the way Android uses the language, and it's been more or less a horror to work with, sadly) but there is a lack of standardization, and supporting docs and building blocks are still not up to my expectations, which is exactly where Android (and I presume iOS) shines. Then again, Javascript is not a bad language. With first class functions, for example, I consider it rather powerful and easy to work with. (But easy to fall into the inefficiency trap, I suppose.) Myself, being a guy who has been writing C/C++ and PHP for scripting it was a great break from routine.

1 comments

> How can you ever implement Skype, for instance

This is why http://dev.w3.org/2011/webrtc/editor/webrtc.html exists.

I was talking more about video encoding/decoding in real time as Skype uses a proprietary protocol and encoding scheme IIRC.
That is what webrtc is for too, without the "proprietary" part.
My point exactly. Skype is a big P2P network using proprietary schemes for just about everything. They don't seem eager to interoperate with open standards in the slightest.