I'm a FxOS user since its beginnings and I would like to share my experience with it. Please consider that the only Android version I ever used is Gingerbread, so I may miss many recent Android features and my arguments may resent from it.
The first experience a FxOS user has is isolation. Your friends and colleagues have never heard of it, leave alone actually using it. While this may partially be pleasant, as you can introduce them to something new and prove an "early adopter" feeling, you mostly have to defend your unusual choice. Up to now I honestly can't find a practical reason to justify it. It's to be told that impressing Android/iOS users is difficult, since they have been "spoilt" by OSs refined by long years of work and profusely funded by giant industries. While ideological reasons (free software and independence from Google/Apple) may be valid, in my experience they make poor arguments. A common misconception is that FxOS app ecosystem is short in numbers. I think that actually there are all the apps you need. To actually be few are users: most apps on Marketplace have no more than a handful of reviews. Maybe as a consequence of this, apps' quality and support is generally quite low, as I guess developers see no point in working hard for so few users. When I say that there are all the apps you need on the Marketplace, I'm not saying that there are all the apps you want. A very common experience for FxOS users is missing apps that all of your friends with Android/iOS have. You may have analogous apps (often of inferior quality), but you don't have THAT app to share with your friends, which means you can't play the same games or use the same utilities. By the way, the FxOS ecosystem situation may not be as bad as it looks: while I still think many apps lack quality, they may be made by young developers finding no space on the more competitive Android/iOS ecosystem. Thus, FxOS may be fostering a new generation of developers who may keep developing web apps and, with time, may prove to be an invaluable resource. Thus, there is no magic solution to this issue, as far as I can see. Every new system/platform face an initial scarcity of users. This can be improved by providing users with great products and content. Reguarding the product, I think FxOS is already quite good and constantly improving. Content depends on developers, of which FxOS already has a fair amount. I think these developers have to be supported as much as possible. Then, Whatsapp. That's the single most annoying problem I've had. Openwapp and Loqui IM are intended to substitute it, but uncountable issues make a poor user experience. I'm not blaming Openwapp and Loqui IM developers: it's unsurprising that replacing Whatsapp is so difficult, given its closed-source nature. My current solution is having my old Android phone connected to Wi-fi with the single purpose of receiving Whatsapp messages and routing them to Whatsapp Web on my desktop. While having a proper Whatsapp client on FxOS would be awesome, I'm most puzzled by the ACL solution. Looking back, what all minor mobile OSs tried to do, failing quite badly, is to be more Android-like by being compatible with its apps. It usually turns out that the best Android-like experience is provided by Android. I don't know whether an ad-hoc solution like ACL for Whatsapp would be any good or not, but something worries me: Openwapp and Loqui IM are among the most complex and participated projects in the FxOS ecosystem. Whatsapp by ACL could potentially undermine those projects by taking users and motivation away, damaging that community of developers FxOS desperately needs. Another most pressing issue for me, as a user, is the lack of FxOS devices. To be more specific, the lack of FxOS devices I can thrust the manifacturer to regularly update and support. While I can solve this issue by manually flashing my own device, this is not something I can reccomend my friends to do. As a matter of fact, at the moment I could not reccomend FxOS to non-tech-savy people because of this. I know there is an ongoing effort to solve the fragmentation issue and I think it's most needed. About user feedback, there are features I miss most and I request them when I can (for example on the Participation Hub's dashboard). Though, I think it's much more preferable for FxOS to provide a coherent, full-flashed experience while still missing some features, rather than advanced features among an inconsistent user experience. This doesn't mean ignoring user feedback and requests, of course, but developers have the duty of mantain a coherent and comprehensive vision of the project, which at times may even be against users' requests. Forgive me for writing that much. I wonder whether my experience with FxOS represents the majority of its users. Anyway, there it is. I hope it may be of some use, at least in understanding FxOS users' perspective. _______________________________________________ dev-fxos mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-fxos
