Is Firefox Mobile OS Good for Developers and Testers?
Mozilla has been working on its mobile OS for a while, and this month LG, ZTE, and others will be releasing smartphones powered by a pint-sized Firefox OS.
For now, there’s no timetable on a US release—the first devices will be rolled out this month in Brazil, with Venezuela, Portugal, Spain, and Poland following in the coming months. Nonetheless, it is big news any time a new player is thrown into the smartphone mix, especially one with the track record of Mozilla.
The Firefox phone follows other players jumping in on the smartphone action, the most notable this year being the most popular flavor of Linux, Ubuntu, offering a mobile version of their OS.
With Firefox following its operating system brethren Google, Microsoft, and Apple into the mobile OS space, it inevitably begs the question: Do we really need another option in an already crowded smart device space?
Competition is healthy, and the platform that Mozilla is touting seems to have a tremendous upside for developers. According to Mozilla’s VP of product Jay Sullivan:
We’re really focused on making Firefox OS a platform for anybody who already knows how to develop for the web—which is millions of developers. They’ll use HTML or JavaScript to write apps.
Given this easy learning curve for developers, they’ve been taking the bait thus far: The first developer phones sold out very quickly. It should be reassuring to testers that developers are champing at the bit to develop for the new platform.
On the flipside, the phone is currently only available in limited countries, and consumer demand is ultimately what fuels sustained app development—and, in turn, the need for testers. Consumer demand is still very much a wait-and-see situation at this point. However, by targeting these developing countries where the slate is clean for a true mobile phone champion and not directly taking on the Android/iOS battles present in the United States and other countries, it may not be that much of an uphill battle for Mozilla to garner a dedicated following.
Regardless of whether the phone is a smash success, there will always be a demand and need for testing, no matter which players are left after the dust has settled. As long as mobile phones exist—many on fragmented OSes, in different environments, or under different conditions and wireless carriers—these devices will have to be tested where the users are.
