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Interview: Mozilla’s Chris Lee on the Firefox phone in Africa

“We’ve really been thinking about how to build for not using data,” explains Chris Lee, “Android really hasn’t been thinking about that, and iOS hasn’t been thinking about that. They’re very data hungry devices. We’re actively thinking about that, because we’re actively thinking about those types of users and we’re thinking about their needs.”

‘Those types of users’ are the two billion people who will experience the internet for the very first time over the next couple of years, and they’ll do it not through a PC or laptop screen – in the way that most of us did – but via one of the many low cost smartphones that are becoming available.

This much we’ve known for a long time. The thing that makes us splutter our coffee into the hazy Cape Town heat when Lee speaks isn’t his honest concern about burning through a handset owner’s entire data budget with an unexpected app update. It’s that he is the Director of Product for Firefox OS, an operating system much like Google’s Chrome in that it’s basically a web browser with a phone-ish skin over the top.

And web browsers need to be online to do much, don’t they?

Chris Lee, Director of Product at Firefox OS
Chris Lee, Director of Product at Firefox OS

Somewhat counter-intuitively, explains Lee, the answer is no. Although all apps for Firefox OS, including core programs like the phone dialler, camera and calendaring service, are coded in JavaScript and HTML, that doesn’t mean they have to be always online. Indeed, an increasing number of HTML5 websites are already caching data locally on the desktop which enables them to be run in offline mode – Textdown, in the Google Chrome store, is a beautiful example of this. As, indeed, are the offline versions of Google Docs.

In fact, says Lee, with a few tweaks, many popular web apps could run offline, so that installing them to a Firefox phone is the same as simply creating a bookmark link on your homescreen.

Offline apps are nothing new, but it’s only recently that developers have begun to explore their potential in any great depth. Part of the reason – as far as phones go, at least – is that apps written in HTML5 haven’t been as reliable or fast on Android or iOS as native apps. But that’s changing, says Lee.

“Right now, we’re on the cusp of getting there,” he explains, “There’s still a lot of work developers need to do to get to that level of maturity. What I am confident about is that Javascript performance will becaome competitive with native technologies and will continue to push in that direction. We’ve looked at how performance has increased over several years and done benchmarking against Java and it’s competitive, because of the competitive naure of the browser marketplace.”

Following that train of thought, ultimately there will be no native apps and every phone game and program will be written to cross-platform standards. Ubuntu’s forthcoming mobile OS, for example, takes the same approach as Firefox in that there’s no such thing as a ‘native’ application, just very clever web ones. Windows Phone and BlackBerry 10 also lean heavily on HTML5 standards and, increasingly, so does Android.

A piano app, written entirely in HTML5 friendly code.
A piano app, written entirely in HTML5 friendly code. Which means it would work on any phone. Be scared Gapple, be scared.

Right now, however, most users will install apps from the Firefox market and there are about 2 500 available at the time of writing. That’s far short of the hundreds of thousands of Android or iPhone apps available, but Lee is unconcerned. Most people rely on four or five key apps, and most of the big ones – Twitter, Facebook, Box and so on – are presesnt and correct. Besides, he’s not interested in converting existing Android or iOS users or those who demand large app choices. Rather, he’s after the mass of people who’ve probably never used a computer, let alone a smartphone.

Setting up limits for data consumption. A killer feature for low budget prepay users?
Setting up limits for data consumption. A killer feature for low budget prepay users?

Hence the concern for data use. During the initial set-up of Firefox OS, you’re prompted to set daily limits for the amount of data you’re prepared to pay for and a chart of useage is never further than a couple of taps or swipes away. Even better, you can customise data use and alerts on a per-app basis, so that you can leave essentials – like email, say – downloading in the background but stop music downloads or ads from another app using up your cap.

Part of the thinking behind this is that the Mozilla Foundation (which overseas Firefox) is on a mission to democratise internet access and help reduce the cost of smartphones for the poor. Whether or not Firefox OS will do this is debatable – it may be free to use, but then again, so is Android. Lee argues that operators are keen on using Firefox OS because – like the browser – it is completely open source and therefore allows them more control for customising and monetising than Android by including operator-specific tweaks.

Perversely, it’s easier to lock users into a – say – Vodacom marketplace on a Firefox phone than it is on an Android one, in which Google ultimately controls what goes on to (most) phones.

On a more positive note, however, because up and coming feature roadmaps are regularly published, there’s no waiting and guessing to see what the next version will be called. That should mean that Firefox-based phones are easier to keep up to date than Android ones – especially Lee’s plan to standardise API calls to the phone’s internal workings come through.

“We started looking what we could do for the web platform to enable web technologies to access APIs and technologies firectly on a phone,” Lee explains, “To be able to user the phone or the FM radio, or bluetooth or WiFi from a web app. So over time we’ve introduced 30 or so new web APIs to the platform that are going through the standardisation platform so that they become, over time, the standard on other platforms as well.”

What that means is that if an API for controlling the phone dialler – for example – can be standardised, anyone who knows that API can write an app that can be used as a dialler on any phone. Ultimately, that would mean no more lengthy testing updates to the operating system, as if a dialler app works on one phone it should work on all.

When it comes to reducing hardware cost, though, the key attraction of Firefox OS is that it has very low system requirements. Lee says that the organisation set out to create competition in the phone market in the same way that it set out to create competition in the desktop browser arena all those years ago. Just when it looked like Internet Explorer was going to win all, Firefox cropped up with all highly moddable backend and proved that people valued customisation, standards and speed. Then along came Google’s Chrome browser which out-competed Firefox for raw performance, and pushed everyone raced again to catch up. It’s the positive cycle of innovation and competition.

Firefox OS_1_1
Orange. Like fire. Yes?

The same thing hasn’t, however, happened on mobile.

“Web technology not progressed in mobile,” says Lee, “If you look at desktop browsers, there’s lots of healthy competition which promotes innoavtion and push technology forward. This is why the performance of javascript has improved multiple times over in the last five years. On mobile, it’s really just two proprietary systems.”

The biggest problem for Lee, however, may be that Google has already responded to this competition by reducing the system requirements for Android 4.4. One of the key goals for 4.4 was to get it running on Nexus 4 hardware that was deliberately crippled to half power, something which was internally codenamed Project Svelte.

But what of the Firefox phones themselves? You can download Firefox OS and try it for yourself on just about any rooted Android phone if you want, and the ZTE Open has already gone on sale in nine countries around the world. Apparently, they sold out within days in Spain, Venezuala and Columbia when they launched earlier in the year. They might also look very familiar – while the ZTE Open isn’t officially available in South Africa yet, it’s actually the same Qualcomm-based hardware as the Vodacom Smart Mini which we loved when we reviewed it – even though it was running an older and slower version of Android than 4.4.

Again, however, what should be an easy victory for Firefox OS turns out to demonstrate how hard it is going to be for them to compete against Google. Overseas, the ZTE Open sells for $80 (R823). A bargain, no? Not really, when you consider the Smart Mini is only R799, with access to the full Google Play store for mature apps.

To make it worse Firefox OS hasn’t reviewed well overseas, where seasoned smartphone users liken it to Android 1.1 in terms of performance and polish. One of the biggest problems is that those HTML5 website apps aren’t caching data locally yet. Open the YouTube app, for example, and you basically start loading the website from scratch. That makes it feel sluggish when compared to the latest budget Android hardware.

Firefox OS_2_1
Looks like a smartphone, acts like a smartphone.

Still, that doesn’t mean its game over for Firefox OS by a long shot – although its immediate future may not be as the phone of the masses, there is one audience for whom it definitely appeals. Security and privacy advocates, as well as hackers who were willing to back the Ubuntu Edge to the tune of $12m, should welcome Mozilla’s approach to opening up the source code fully, and the fact that app permissions – the ability for one app to read and share data collected by another app – can be easily changed after installation and to your liking.

A big issue with Android, for example, is that you might not mind a game accessing your GPS data if playing it has something to do with your location (think Ingress), but you don’t want it to access your contact list. On a Google or Apple phone, you must agree to all the terms or none at all. With Firefox you can revoke access to the bits you want to keep private (it might break the app, of course, but them’s the breaks).

Firefox OS also has backing from some big names, too. Qualcomm and Deutsche Telekom, for example, have both contributed towards its development with programmers and other resources.

And then there’s the fact that phone manufacturers don’t necessarily enjoy being tied to Google’s fortunes. Samsung has been persistent in trying to get its own Tizen operating system off the ground, now it’s rumoured to be looking at Firefox as a way of speeding up adoption of an alternative to Android.

So long as Firefox OS can keep enough people interested long enough for HTML5 apps to become truly as rich, fast and useful as native ones, it will almost certainly succeed. Because when that happens, it really won’t matter what phone or operating system you have.

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