In a highly saturated market dominated strongly by Apple and Google, it’s hard to imagine the success of a newcomer. The entry barriers are just too tall at this point. But Mozilla’s Firefox believes that it has what it takes to break the mold and become the next big operating system. With that in mind, the company has just announced two phones that will be available for developers in February and hit the stands later in 2013. Firefox has presented some solid points to back its claim for the top spot in the smartphone market.
Firstly, FF asserts that it is the only truly democratic open source software in the market today. While Android may say that it is open source, its reigns are really in Google’s hands and everything is screened top down. Mozilla, on the other hand, intends to give complete control to the open source community, just like it did for its browser. Company representatives were quoted saying that it won’t have the vendor-controlled ecosystem that app developers have to deal with on other operating systems. It will come with a Firefox Marketplace for apps, but developers are free to sell them through any other channel as well.
Its next strategy is to target the emerging markets before it enters mature ones like the U.S. and Europe. Its first entry will be in Brazil, in partnership with leading mobile carrier Telefonica, which is a relatively open space in terms of smartphones. Jolla has adopted a similar approach by releasing its new Sailfish OS only in China. These markets have a surging consumer base of socio-economic climbers that would now like to switch to smartphones. They are better tapped now before they become habituated to an Android or iOS.
Mozilla will complement its plans for emerging markets by making a relatively cheap smartphone. The phone will run HTML5 apps, which are more affordable that the sophisticated ones seen one iOS or Android. The specifications of the devices aren’t that impressive either. The lower model, Keon, will come equipped with a 1.2-GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 CPU and 4GB ROM. The higher-end Peak will have an 8-megapixel camera and better CPU. So, yes, Mozilla doesn’t have the power to bring down the giants yet, but smartly enough, that’s not what it’s trying to do at the moment.
