Crazy Geckos: Nitot on Mozilla’s post-Firefox mobile crusade

First came the BlackBerry, bringing the smartphones for suits perfected by RIM to consumers. Next came the iPhone, which quickly hoovered up 23 per cent of the market. But the iPhone came at a price: the freedom of users and coders. It is tightly controlled by Apple, as Adobe quickly found to its cost with Flash.

Next up was Android. In just four years, Android exploited consumers' desire to poke and stroke their phones to become the world's most popular smartphone OS – burying the iPhone – with 59 per cent of the market.

Android had a plus: freedom of choice for both coder and consumer thanks to an open-source code base.

Honeycomb changed things: the Android code was yanked back inside the Googleplex as Mountain View asserted control over builds and contributions. Read more...