Mozilla has officially announced that it will phase out its Firefox OS for smartphones and focus on connected devices.
This development follows the December 2015 statement given by Mozilla’s senior vice president Ari Jaaksi in his blog about Firefox OS.
Mozilla said: "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."
Mozilla said that it will not accept Android, Desktop and Tablet submissions from developers and said that it will continue to accept Firefox OS apps into 2017, though, the final date for killing the OS has not been announced.
Apps that presently work on Desktop and Android will no longer function on those platforms because Web Runtime will be removed, but it will continue to allow updates for Firefox OS phone apps.
Mozilla’s Connected Devices team has already started work and presently they are testing new product innovation process to identify IoT product programs for 2016.
Mozilla intends to adopt a startup-like-approach where the team has to demonstrate clear consumer value proposition at all points in the development cycle.
It said that there are already three projects that have passed through the first point, including SmartTV, and it is lining up new projects for review as well.
Mozilla also wants to push the connected devices initiative into its community of developers for support. With this move, it wants to engage its members with new product innovations with various sensors that could be used in IoT space.
As a small step towards, this goal, Mozilla has set up an innovation fund which will fund lightweight projects which aim to experiment and prototype ideas for connected devices.
