Yeah, true, but the building blocks are available to port it to any cheap Android 4.x phone. I just don't have them available. I also chose this particular list because all of them ship rooted and have downloadable images available in case someone f*ks up, so I don't brick anyone's device :-)
An open source kernel also helps when you do GPIO support etc.
I have been able to use the modified System application on my own firefoxos-based boards. However, for GPIO I have used a background process based on NodeJS (which exposes the ports using a REST-api). Getting GPIO working on some phoneboards would still prove a challenge as mostly they do not have these easily exposed.
... of the GPIO on the SoC, you only have some of the exposed buttons a device might have. Far from ideal... also, at the moment FirefoxOS itself does not have a notion of GPIO as a WebAPI. But great to see this, nice article.
This is what I've been looking for. I didn't want to have to create something like this myself, but wanted to be able to reuse older smartphones lying around. I don't know if I want to use JS though.
An open source kernel also helps when you do GPIO support etc.