Hi Elliot,
I'm really pleased to hear you're trying out one of the early Firefox OS devices and using it to start to develop apps for the web! When can we expect to see your app in the Firefox Marketplace?
The first thing I want to call out is that you're absolutely right, this device is not meant to be a competitive consumer smartphone in markets like the UK, it simply wouldn't compete. The fact that you've previously owned a Galaxy SII immediately means you're not in the target market. This device is aimed at markets like Brazil for people who have never owned a smart phone and may not even have any access to the web yet. My current Android phone is a Nexus 4, which completely blows the ZTE Open out of the water in terms of specifications and performance.
The reason it has been made available outside of the launch markets is so that developers can get early hands on access to Firefox OS to start to develop web apps for it. By the time Firefox OS properly reaches the shores of developed markets like the UK and US I expect to see much more powerful hardware and much more polished software. Remember what Android 1.0 looked like? This is Firefox OS 1.0. We intend on releasing a new version every 12 weeks. 1.1 and 1.2 are in the pipeline with lots of improvements and we've already started working on 1.3.
> The capacitive screen is so unresponsive, it feels like a resistive screen.
I agree, it's terrible. That's partly cheap hardware and partly bad drivers. There are things we're starting to do at the Gecko level like event target fluffing to increase responsiveness, but I think this will really start to improve when the hardware starts to improve.
> The camera has no flash and is only 3 mega-pixels.
This is the main reason I still carry around my Nexus 4 (with no SIM card) when I'm dogfooding Firefox OS. I'm used to having a good camera. If you'd never owned a phone with a camera before or it was your only digital camera, it might be useful. But the quality isn't up the standards we have come to expect.
> The onscreen keyboard is unpredictable, fiddly and generally a very poor experience. I end up having to correct mistakes so often that I've practically given up using it for anything other than text messaging.
This is one of the biggest areas of improvement to make. Part of it is the general unresponsiveness of the screen, part of it is missing things like predictive text (coming in 1.1) and more sophisticated techniques other devices use like dynamically changing the touch target sizes of each key based on statistically which key you're most likely to type next. This will come, but it's challenging to get working performantly.
> if you use the Twitter app to follow a link, the link opens in a browser and the Twitter app disappears (closes itself, I'm guessing).
What's probably happening here is that the device is running out of memory and killing the Twitter app to prevent the current task from crashing. However, the device should be much better at keeping multiple apps running and it has ample RAM for several apps to run at the same time.
After seeing lots of complaints from users of 1.0.1 about not being able to keep many apps open at the same time I spent some time with a colleague debugging this last week. It turns out there's a bug in version 1.0.1 where under certain conditions unused system processes in the browser can get orphaned and given a higher priority than they should, taking up lots of RAM even though they're no longer being used. This causes the low memory killer to start killing backgrounded apps. This is fixed in 1.1.
> The app-store is full of hobby projects or very thin wrappers around mobile websites. The quality is generally quite poor.
The Firefox Marketplace is very new, we expect this to improve over time. The good news is that the Firefox Marketplace isn't the only place you can get content on the web and web developers are optimising more and more web content to work well on mobile devices. We expect the quality of content to improve and other web app stores (like the one recently announced by Amazon) to start appearing.
> Some mobile sites don't recognise the phone, or think it's Android... Other sites like GMail look like they did 5 years ago, as you get the default "we're not really sure which phone you're using" interface.
This is an ongoing battle. Web sites use databases of user agents and user agent sniffing to decide which of multiple versions of their web site to send you. Often they will simply send you nothing if you're not using a Webkit based browser or a user agent that isn't in their database. Mozilla spends a lot of time evangelising better techniques like feature detection and progressive enhancement and reaching out to the owners of popular web content directly.
> I can't bear auto-brightness, as the screen brightness fluctuates madly in the British weather).
Yes, this is pretty bad. I tend to turn it off.
> Setting up the email app for an IMAP server took me forever, until I realised that it was because the SSL certificate the email server was using was registered to a different domain name. Once I ping'ed the IP address and got the "real" domain name, and used that instead of the alias, it worked. I've never had this issue with any other email app, on Android or Linux or Windows or Mac, which will either carry on regardless or give you a decent error message about why they're hesistating.
You should file a bug in Bugzilla against the Gaia::Email component for this. It sounds like it's perhaps an edge case that wasn't thought of, perhaps we can do a better job.
> Setting up the weather app to show me the weather for where I live, automatically when I open it, took forever.
Provide feedback to the app author in the marketplace! Also, there are lots of other weather apps in the Marketplace you could try. I found a really good one but it unfortunately stopped working recently, I think it was a victim of its own success and they exceeded the limits on API of the data provider they were using!
> The contacts app has no integration with Google contacts, only Facebook.
Google contacts import was added in 1.1 and made the OS much more useful for me! If you can't wait for 1.1 then take a look the marketplace, an engineer from Telefonica called Francisco created a contacts importer app which can import your Google contacts for you.
> Updates failed for me for about a week. I kept getting a notification that there was an update, and when I tried to download it, I got a generic "update failed" message.
Yeah, ZTE accidentally put a dummy update into their production update servers. It's fixed now, sorry about that.
> The web API has some big gaps which prevent you from writing certain types of apps (e.g. anything using udp).
It's still early days and there's lots more to do, but definitely file bugs in Bugzilla where you see obvious missing APIs!
Happy hacking!