Hi Adam,
On 9 February 2016 at 17:57, Adam Farden <afar...@mozilla.com> wrote:
> I like this Idea. A lot. One of the reasons I don't use my Android tablets
> much is the relatively poor app experience compared to smartphones I
> actually use it for web browsing and little else. The rumors of a Chrome OS
> tablet have been circulating for years, but nothing has come to fruition
> yet.
>
I think Google is in a difficult position here because they have two
platforms they don't want to be competing with each other, so they have to
draw clear lines. For me this presents an opportunity for Mozilla.
> This actually sounds similar to how Chrome OS started, but which then
> turned into a full desktop style OS and is no longer suitable for the
> tablet UX. Personally I think there is a chance of success here with a full
> screen browser tablet UI.
>
> We already have Sony tablets working on B2G so we can get the community
> involved pretty easily with those.
>
Alexandre mentioned this, could be a great target device.
>
> The only point I would disagree with is leaving out RIL. Lots of consumer
> tablets are LTE capable, it would be a shame if the community could not
> take advantage of that on the devices they already own.
>
I wouldn't rule it out, but my main reason for avoiding this is the
certification requirements in this area. It's my understanding that the
certification requirements are less for a data only device, but still
something I'd rather avoid, at least for an MVP.
> Brillo is based on Android, but do you have any ideas how easy/difficult
> it is to port Android devices to run something based on Brillo? ('ve not
> looked at it much myself) One of the big barriers to porting new devices to
> B2G was the fact that the AOSP base is not designed to support devices that
> are not Nexus devices.
>
> If we build on top of CyanogenMod it will make it massively easier for
> community members to get involved with their own devices. I fear Brillo
> will only make things harder for the community than the current AOSP base.
>
This is a fair point. My main reasons for considering Brillo are:
1. It's a pre-built version of Android with the Java layer removed, much
like Gonk
2. It's an existing open source project which is developed in the open
(unlike Android) and we could contribute to directly rather than
maintaining a heavily modified fork
3. It could potentially form a consistent base for a wide range of IoT
projects at Mozilla, including headless devices that don't need Gecko as
well as those that do
But I agree that for this project specifically CyanogenMod could
potentially be a better base, certainly in the earlier stages of DIY
flashing. We should investigate that more thoroughly.
Ben
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