This is really interesting feedback; thanks Johannes! I can only really speak for the documentation aspect of the project, so the comments below will only focus on those. I’ll let other better qualified team members comment on the dev process issues, etc.
One thing I will say is that the OS is getting better all the time. I’ve been dogfooding a 2.0 build for a little while, and there are a lot of UX improvements found there. All the best, and thanks for the time spent giving us valuable feedback. Chris On 3 Jun 2014, at 10:48, Johannes Bauer <[email protected]> wrote: > Hey list, > > so I've been using Firefox OS on my Alcatel One Touch Fire since Nov > 2013 as my only phone on a day-to-day basis. I'd like to share my > feedback to give you an impression about what I like and dislike about > it. I've been on branch 1.2 for pretty much the whole trip. > > Gernerally when I bought the phone I knew I was getting into a haphazard > kind of development situation. I knew there was going to be fiddling > involved and that's okay. The main reason I bought it was beacuse I was > happy to see an alternative to Android on the market and was curious if > it were possible to actually actively participate in the project. > > About the usage: One of the very very first things I noticed was that > the phone had a irritating, annoyning and most of all completely useless > vibration effect when pressing the home button. It's one of the first > tickets I commented on and it was annoying enough for me to actually > patch the relevant code (described solution in #885716). Six months > later: I tried to pull a 1.4 branch only to realize this is still > exactly the same code. A dev had the ticket assigned to himself only to > disassign it a few days back saying this isn't going anywhere. > > I don't get it. You guys even have a "user experience" team. Those > people should know how freakishly annoying vibration can be. Why can't > you just comment out the two lines until it's implemented "properly"? > Actually I don't think anyone would miss the vibration when pressing the > home button at all. In any case, it's utterly frustrating to see that > this is not something that is important enough to warrant attention. > > Other quirks: The phone has sometimes really weird behavior when > dialing. Sometimes it dials the wrong number (i.e. I have three numers > stored and I absolutely positively press the first one, but it dials up > the third one). Data import and export is horrible (it was a real pain > upgrading the phone because there was no option to delete all contacts). > Also when the number that is dialed is busy it just goes back to the > address book with no indication what went wrong whatsoever. This is > pretty annoying (i.e. you have the phone on your ear for a few seconds > and hear nothing, then you look at it again and it's stopped dialing as > if you never dialed to begin with). Some random flickering/crashing > issues too but not reproducible and seldomly enough to be considered okay. > > Ironically the worst thing about the phone is the browser. Wow, that > browser sucks so much it's hard to put in words. It feels like Netscape > Navigator again. Don't know why something with a "Firefox" label can > have such a horrible browser (which effectively makes it not a "smart" > phone anymore when Internet is practically unusable). Crashing *all* the > time, display errors all over the place. Wow. > > In any case what I found most frustrating about it all is that I have > got the feeling that feedback is not taken seriously. On this mailing > list ironically people are super helpful and enthusiastic and nice, but > once issues get in the bugtracker, they're just lost. Looking at the > version history I couldn't even find out what version I was supposed to > install if I wanted to upgrade. This site: > > https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox_OS/Releases/1.2 > > Lists 1.2, 1.3, 1.4 and 2.0 ALL in pre-release stage which is utterly > confusing. How can you have multiple branches which are all pre-release? > Wouldn't it make sense to get just ONE to release quality so you have > one that you can recommed to users, not just devs? This is my fault, for not updating the documentation. I’ll check out the release status of versions and make sure this gets changed accordingly, to provide updated status and install advice. > Also the release > notes focus very much on technical issues, but don't explain the impact > for the user. So CanvasRenderingContext2D now has a addHitRegion() > method, which is cool - but does my phone still crash? Does it still > flicker and dial the wrong numbers? It would be nice if the actual user > impact were described on top (even though the technical details are > undoubly nice and helpful for devs). We also have mozilla.org Firefox OS release notes, for example: http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/os/notes/1.2/ These are where the more use-centric information is kept, so I decided to just make the MDN stuff developer-focused. But perhaps I should make these more visible with a link up the top, rather than just at the bottom of the huge list of dev changes? > > Ultimately, I've sadly reached my breaking point and think I'll go back > to my Nokia 6100. Both phones are equally unable to surf the Internet, > but at least the thing I need my phone most for (phoning people) works > flawlessly on the Nokia. I actually thought about giving another branch > a shot but realized that I don't even know which branch I should pick at > the moment and that I'd have to read all docs again to even get it to > build. Another issue I should flag here is that, for a lot of build wants, we are at the mercy of the phone manufacturer/OEM to provide easy-install builds; licensing issues in many cases prevent us from just issuing builds, so we have to wait for the phone companies to make them available. Some companies (such as geeksphone) have been great at providing up to date builds to Flash to your phone, some not so great. It’s not just as simple as downloading a new browser to your desktop. Apologies if you already knew all this, but I just wanted to make sure, as many people miss this detail. > I remember something about having to clone three different repos > and making some json files to get i18n to work which was quite a PITA. > > In any case, hope this report is at least a bit helpful. > Cheers, > Johannes > _______________________________________________ > dev-b2g mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-b2g _______________________________________________ dev-b2g mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-b2g
