The reality is it's impossible to compete vs Google or Apple on that field, I'm not sure why Mozilla / Canonical even tried.

The reality is that mobile OS that will offer free IOS/Android wrapper for apps that actually works out of the box will win the market. This way from day 1 there will be enough apps for users to consider switching.

That was IBM's strategy for killing Windows with OS/2 -- shipping OS/2 with extremely robust support for running Windows applications right alongside OS/2 ones. The marketing people pitched it as "a better Windows than Windows."

It didn't work; third party developers saw that a Windows app could serve both the Windows and OS/2 markets and focused all their energy on their Windows app, usually not bothering to write an OS/2 version at all. The result was that Windows' big moat -- its application library -- actually got deeper. IBM's big plan to kill Windows ended up cementing its position as a dominant platform.

They were both growing rapidly in a brand new market. What I am proposing is a solution for low budget OS to have ANY chance against duopoly. If Mozilla would allow painless wrapping Android apps, I bet their platform would be in a different place now. I remember my non-technical friends saying they like Mozilla for price etc, but they won't get it as there is no apps.

I don't think you're right. What killed FxOS was not a lack of wrapper to run Android apps (we actually got one that worked).

What makes or break a Mobile OS is the availability of the key apps for the market you're going after: whatsapp, FB, Twitter, etc. (that varies based on the region).

> What killed FxOS was not a lack of wrapper to run Android apps (we actually got one that worked).

Was that ever released? I saw it on Mozilla employees' dev phones, but nowhere else.

You likely saw the other attempt using the J2ME-in-js implementation: https://github.com/mozilla/pluotsorbet

That was too slow and never shipped in commercial devices either.