Eventually we’ll have to present B2G to the world, and it’s important to give prospective users the best experience possible, from first looking to the official website to have B2G up and running on their devices.
Also, one thing I learned by following FxOS vicissitudes is that updates are difficult. Thus, we should begin well in advance thinking how the whole B2G deployment and updates are going to work. I don’t have the technical expertise to say anything meaningful about the implementation details, but I’ll try to guess users’ expectations about this.
Let’s say I’m a generic person with fair (but not advanced) tech skills (and sufficient money to have access to fairly recent, though not necessarily expensive, mobile devices and computers).
I first hear about this weird B2G OS and I decide to google it. I expect to find, possibly as first result, the official OS website. I don’t (initially) care about forums, dev documentation, code repositories and so on, so this stuff don’t have to get on my way.
Things I look for on the website (more or less in the right order):
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What is this all about? A short and clear, catchy description, then fancy images (especially screenshots demonstrating features).
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Given I’m interested, is my device supported? What if I’m willing to buy a dedicated device? EXTRA QUESTION: is the flashing process reversible if I don’t like B2G?
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Given I have a supported device, how do I install B2G? A clear, simple flashing guide is needed. Also, we need to provide the easiest way possible to flash. The add-on is very promising in this reguard.
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Now that I have it, how do I make the most of it? B2G is going to be extra easy to use, so a proper manual should not be necessary for first-time users (although we’ll need it for documentation anyway). Instead, given the system is decivedly simple, we may need a guide to help users coming from other OSs (well, Android mainly) to use B2G effectively. For example, explain users there are no “apps” in the traditional sense, but they can Pin their favourite sites and use that instead. [Note]
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Will I receive updates? This is a deceivedly simple point, as many OSs claimed to have solved the update/fragmentation/planned obsolescence issue, whereas they actually failed. User expectations are simple: they want to receive updates regularly and for a long time. I think this is an especially important issue for a newborn OS: since this will have many bugs and lack lots of features, receiving updates represents the ongoing work of devs dedicated to their users, and rewards them for supporting a niche project.
An additional consideration on updates
Because updates are so important, we should be careful not to repeat the same mistakes others have made in the past. In particular, I think the list of things not to be done include:
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Relying on carriers, manifacturer or anyone else. It always turns out they prefer produce a new phone rather than update the old one (I can’t really blame them for that). Also, updates belongs to the software compartment, that is us, let’s not delegate our responsibilities to others.
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Thinking we can fix the issue later, once we are already in production. I think Mozilla made the first mistake at the beginning, then tried to fix the issue while phones were already shipping. It took years to improve the updates system, and anyway it could not be applied to already sold devices.
As a result of the updates failure, most FxOS users are stuck with 1.3 and never benefitted from the improvements made in newer versions. Just a few have seen 2.x versions, and indeed there are no reviews of these releases on popular tech sites (while you can still find the mostly negative reviews of 1.3). Thus, the public image of FxOS is mostly based on 1.3 and that’s no good.
Any thoughts?
[Note] Here again I’ll re-state my point about how we should not have any sort of Marketplace for apps, although admittedly it’s off topic. Marketplaces are needed in the iOS/Android-like native-apps model, but we are subverting that model by adopting web-apps. Since web-apps are substantially web-sites, the way to discover them has to be by search engines --just like we discover ordinary web-sites-- and there are already many good search engines out there, so there’s no reason why we should make a new one. We do probably need a Marketplace-like store for add-ons and homescreens.
