

Fix the OS of your own smartphone (with Firefox OS) - janjongboom
http://glamour.tweakblogs.net/blog/10085/fix-your-own-smartphone-os.html

======
baldfat
TL&DR: To little to late. Nokia :(

I was so looking forward to MeeGo on Nokia and was ready to switch to that
stack. I had grand ideas of all the things the community could do with an open
enviroment where we could place our Linux ecco-system onto a phone.

Sadly the time-frame has lapse and I am looking at Nokia with HUGE
disappointment. They really should have been the Android but instead they
floundered for years while Apple and Google passed them by.

Firefox OS also something that might have been special 3 years ago seems to
little to late sadly. Ubuntu OS looks great if it came out 3 or 4 years ago.
The community could have made it the perfect hackers phone. Now not so much
sadly.

~~~
k_bx
I disagree. I really want to have a phone which out of the box would have rich
set of powerful, well-designed and integrated applications (Mail, Contact
manager, Calendar, Notes, Todo, Maps, IM, Music player, Book reader, File
manager, Alarm, Gallery/Camera).

I think Android is far behind here in current state, and all the new stuff
they do is so Google-centric that it makes me sick.

So I do see a room for another OS that doesn't need tons of apps for each
thing, but rather has great stack out of the box.

~~~
luxpir
What you describe is more of a computer. I want that too, have done since
those pocket organisers in the 90s, or the Casio Databank that played dial-
tones of friends' numbers down the phone line.

What we really want, I think, is the ultimate portable computer. With a phone
feature. I'd actually rather it was VOIP and everyone used that over 3/4G
networks for most calls, but imagine that happening in the next 5 years - fat
chance. This ultra-portable device would have the perfect form-factor of
usable screen and keyboard, all somehow tucked into a pocketable device. Much
like those old Psion devices, or the N900, only packed with decent hardware.

~~~
danford
This is sort of what canonical is trying to do with Ubuntu and Unity. The
phones they'll be coming out with later this year are said to be a "full os"
in the form factor of a phone. The interface is made to allow you to pair your
device with an external device (say screen and keyboard) and the interface
adjusts its self to that form factor (think "responsive design"). So at say a
public library, they could have these cheap terminals that people with phones
can just walk up to and use with their phone as the computing platform and the
peripherals as just an input interface. Right now every major manufacturer is
putting out two OSs (chrome/android, windows/winphone, osx/iOS), and I think
they're just now realizing it doesn't make sense, I mean google even touts
chrome as mobile OS, why the heck are they making two? I don't think they have
any plans to combine the two projects, but I really hope we aren't using java
vms everywhere in the future. It seems microsoft is now rethinking windows 8
and their phones aren't selling well (for a number of reasons) and I think
most likely they'll be coming out with a convergent OS soon. It'll probably be
a rip off of unity or gnome shell.

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reubenmorais
Note that this only works with a rooted phone. In newer versions of Firefox
OS, you should be able to do all of that via the App Manager [0], without
needing to root the phone.

[0] [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/Firefox_OS/Using_the_App...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/Firefox_OS/Using_the_App_Manager)

~~~
janjongboom
I doubt that, you can't push system level (certified) apps through the app
manager if you're not rooted either.

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jedanbik
This is a cool demonstration, but it also makes me wonder why this couldn't be
an option in something like about:config.

Wouldn't editing source like this make your mobile software difficult to
patch? If so, it seems like it would be a security risk.

~~~
y0ghur7_xxx
> Wouldn't editing source like this make your mobile software difficult to
> patch?

Why? Looks pretty easy to me.

> If so, it seems like it would be a security risk.

How?

~~~
jedanbik
Right now I'm thinking of this in terms of git rebase. Can the package manager
in Firefox OS handle local backports upstream? Would an update to a given
Firefox app wipe my changes automatically by default? Would an update to a
given Firefox app never occur automatically by default because of my local
changes?

In other words, if I edited the source of this app on my hypothetical Firefox
OS, would I be damned for the rest of eternity to either upgrade manually, or
wipe my local changes? The security risk I'm concerned about is "my software
isn't up to date with the latest patches therefore it is at risk."

------
w0ts0n
If you feel like contributing to annoyances;

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?bug_id=984792%2C984...](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?bug_id=984792%2C984797%2C984798%2C984794%2C984790%2C874950%2C984803%2C747798&bug_id_type=anyexact&query_format=advanced&resolution=---&title=Bug%20List%3A%20FxOS%20annoyances&ctype=atom&list_id=9727967)

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userbinator
Interesting flexibility. To do the same things on Android is possible, as
evidenced by all the mods done to existing apps, but requires a decompiler
(and you also have code signing to contend with.)

The only downside I can see is that non-native code won't ever be as efficient
as natively compiled and optimised code, which could be important on a mobile
device.

~~~
asadotzler
On Firefox OS, HTML/JS is native code ;) Seriously though, Firefox OS does
some things considerably faster and more efficiently than Android and it's
"native" Java stack.

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Pepe1vo
Doesn't this make for a massive security risk on rooted phones? With other
apps being able to inject code into any app without the user noticing.

Seems risky to me.

~~~
szatkus
Apps are sandboxed. To inject something you need to plug a phone into computer
with ADB.

~~~
janjongboom
Plus you need to remount the moment you want to actually do write actions to
protected areas of the phone.

------
jbb555
I want a phone that I can modify and change the apps. But not running
everything as a web app/javascript.

