Mozilla ends development on Firefox OS for smartphones; shifts focus to Connected Devices, IoT

  After March 2016, Marketplace will no longer accept submissions for Android, Desktop and Tablet and Mozilla will remove all apps that don’t support Firefox OS. Firefox OS apps will continue to be accepted into 2017, till the company finalises on a date. Mozilla says that its Connected Devices team has been testing out a new product innovation process with staff and three products have passed the first stage and more are in the pipeline. Having multiple different product innovations in development will be the approach moving forward, and Mozilla hopes to open up the formal process to non-staff participation in the first half of the year. The foxfooding program will continue and will focus on these new product innovations (rather than improving the smartphone experience). “We expect the Sony Z3C foxfooding devices to be useful in this, but we expect it to take until the end of March to figure out the specific design of this program,” says the blog. Mozilla adds that the main reasons these decisions were made is to ensure that they could focus their energy and resources on bringing the power of web to Internet of Things (IoT)). Talking about its current projects, Mozilla revealed SmartTV – building a web ecosystem for TV and connected devices, MozVR – a project to bring virtual reality to the open web and Fly Web – a project to enable phones discover and interact with electronics around them without relying on the cloud.