Back in December, Mozilla revealed that it was giving up on its dream of capturing a chunk of the smartphone market, ending development of Firefox OS for phones, and bringing an end to sales of devices running its open-source operating system.
Despite Mozilla's best efforts, it admitted that it had not been "able to offer the best user experience possible", and with limited resources available, it has made the difficult decision to focus its efforts elsewhere.
Mozilla has now further clarified its plans, stating that it will end development, and terminate support, for the OS on phones, following the release of version 2.6 in May:
We will end development on Firefox OS for smartphones after the version 2.6 release.
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Through the work of hundreds of contributors we made an awesome push and created an impressive platform in Firefox OS. However, as we announced in December, the circumstances of multiple established operating systems and app ecosystems meant that we were playing catch-up, and the conditions were not there for Mozilla to win on commercial smartphones. We have decided that in order to succeed in the new area of Connected Devices we must focus our energy completely on prototyping the future and exploring how we can make the biggest impact in IoT.
Therefore we are announcing our plan to end-of-life support for smartphones after the Firefox OS 2.6 release. This means that Firefox OS for smartphones will no longer have staff involvement beyond May.
It also said that from March 29, 2016, it will "no longer accept submissions for Android, Desktop and Tablet" apps to its Marketplace, and that it will "remove all apps that don't support Firefox OS" after that date. It will continue to accept new Firefox OS apps until a yet-to-be-determined date in 2017.
While the smartphone dream is over for Firefox OS, the operating system will live on in other devices, including a number of Panasonic smart TVs. Mozilla will now be focusing its new Firefox OS development efforts on the Internet of Things through its Connected Devices initiative.
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