ZTE, Mozilla aim to roll out mobile operating system in coming months
(Reuters) - China's ZTE Corp, the world's fourth largest mobile phone handset vendor, is cooperating with Mozilla, maker of web browser Firefox, to introduce a new mobile operating system later this year or early next year, a ZTE spokesman said on Wednesday.
Context & Ripple Effects
Mozilla has been building toward this all summer: it confirmed in July 2012 that Firefox OS would be built on standards-based Web technologies, and shipped desktop B2G nightly builds so developers could test the platform before any hardware existed. What changes with this Reuters report is the hardware commitment — ZTE, the world's fourth-largest handset vendor, says it will put the OS on phones within months, turning a developer experiment into a shipping product plan.
First-order effects
- ZTE gains a smartphone OS it does not license from Google or Apple, suited to the low-cost devices where it competes on volume.
- Mozilla moves Firefox OS from nightly builds to a committed launch window of late 2012 or early 2013, with a top-four handset maker as its anchor OEM.
Second-order effects
- App developers and component suppliers now face a third mobile platform to evaluate alongside iOS and Android, raising the cost of staying platform-neutral.
- Other handset vendors will watch whether a web-standards OS runs acceptably on cheap hardware before deciding whether to hedge their own Android dependence.
Third-order effects
- If Mozilla's backers deliver on the pitch of hardware-agnostic experiences built on open Web technologies, the OS layer starts to commoditize and the browser engine becomes the real application platform — a structural challenge to the two-OS duopoly rather than a single product launch.
The trend: The mobile OS market is testing whether open web standards, carried by volume handset makers like ZTE, can crack the iOS-Android duopoly from the low end.