Month: December 2013

Firefox OS – What is missing

As noted earlier, I hope that Firefox OS can replace Android on my phone at some point. Mozilla has done some great work in the past month but there is still a lot to be done. Right now the main problems for me are…

  • Hardware support: While Firefox OS is fully open source, neither my old Nexus One nor the Galaxy Nexus can run it in a stable way. At least the Galaxy Nexus has much better hardware than any official Firefox OS phones and even the Nexus One should at least be on par with the ZTE Open.
  • Firefox Sync: This feature is great, I use it sync between my Fedora desktops and phone. Especially sending tabs from one device to another is great. It is totally beyond me how Mozilla could not support this killer feature on Firefox OS.
  • Firefox extensions: Well, I only really need Adblock Plus…
  • CardDAV: Another fact that is hard to explain, given Mozilla’s love for open standards is the absence of CardDAV sync. In order to sync contacts you need to use, guess what, Facebook (or Google/Hotmail). Maybe this will make it into a release sooner or later.

Besides those, it would also need solutions for at least news, passwords and file sync to match the functionality I get on Android.

I plan to follow the development of Firefox OS more closely from now on and update this list as features become available or I find other important things that Firefox OS is lacking.

Android apps

The following is a short list of nice Android apps which help getting away from proprietary services (Google, Dropbox, …)

Out of these, FolderSync is the only app that is not open source, but hopefully Encdroid will support fetching files from ownCloud directly soon.

I am still looking for a solution regarding notes, ideally giving me access to the same set of notes on GNOME, Web and Android.

Messaging remains the biggest problem. Sure there’s XMPP, but nobody seems to use it. Maybe heml.is can replace WhatsApp? For Email, let’s see how Mailpile develops…

Don’t be evil

Google has done and is still doing a lot of great things, but recently they have crossed a line.

For myself it began with the shutdown of Google Reader, which was a very useful service for me. The company thought otherwise and wanted us to use Google+ instead, but that doesn’t really cover my use case. I looked around and finally went with selfoss, which works fine but feels a bit slow.

Then the Nexus 5 was released and I ordered one day one… big mistake. The first unit I received had a very bad power-on button. Shaking or even slightly moving the phone caused it to create rattling sounds. Also, the vibration motor sounded as if it was dying already. Turned out these problems were quite common… a sign for perfect QA. RMAing was no problem but the replacement was said not ship before mid-december. Sigh. I got the replacement a few days later and started using the phone. Easily the best Android phone I every owned, BUT…

Sadly Google does not care about open source anymore. On the Nexus 5, the closed source Hangouts has replaced the messaging app and the various other parts of the system (launcher for example) are no longer open source as well. For me this is a big deal, but even those who do not care will notice that Google is now actively fragmenting Android by not adding some KitKat features to the Nexus 4 or Moto X. I had big hopes after the relatively smooth and quick rollout of Android 4.3 but with KitKat Google destroyed this illusion.

Could it get worse? Sure! Google banned the CynogenMod installer from Google Play. I guess it is only a time before other popular root-only apps will follow. Some time ago Google also banned AdAway from Google Play, but thankfully there is F-Droid.

It does not stop here. There is another very sad story here. In a nutshell: Google offers a way to import custom CA certificates in Android but in KitKat, there is a very annoying and misleading warning message about this after every boot. The bug was closed WorkingAsIntended and Google basicly asks us to trust them but not ourselves. Nice.

A way out?

It can be hard to migrate away from Google services but thankfully ownCloud is finally getting into usable shape. I use a pre-release of the upcoming ownCloud 6.0 for files, contacts, calendars and news. The only Google services I still cannot replace are GMail and Maps…

As for Android: I will probably switch to a custom ROM soon and not buy anything from Google Play anymore. In the medium term I hope that Firefox OS will be able to fit my needs.