Acadine Technologies – The Walking Dead Pt II.

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H5OS likely to struggle against tried and tested native.

• Acadine Technologies, a well-funded Chinese start-up is aiming to breathe new life into the zombie that was once Firefox OS.
• Acadine Technologies is a Hong Kong based start-up that has received $100m in funding from Tsinghua Unigroup which is directly linked to Beijing based Tsinghua University.
• Tsinghua Unigroup already owns chipmaker Spreadtrum and RDA Microelectronics and appears intent upon creating an integrated value chain encompassing semiconductors, devices, software and services.
• Now that Firefox is officially discontinued (see here), Acadine can take on the mantle of leading the development of web software in mobile devices.
• This is how Acadine and the new incarnation of Firefox OS (called H5OS) intends to get around the problem that there are no Digital Life services available for this OS.
• By using HTML5 code, H5OS can access the wealth of developers that exist for the web and apply them to mobile, wearables and IoT with minimal effort.
• The problem with this is that HTML5 on mobile devices does not run as efficiently as native code.
• This means that a device running HTML5 will have less performance and a shorter battery life than a similar priced device running native code.
• Back in 2013, when Mozilla launched Firefox OS it made what I called “The Vital Promise” (see here) which consisted of mid-high smartphone performance at mid to high feature phone prices.
• Mozilla was unable to deliver on this promise which I am certain is the major reason why it failed.
• If Acadine also wants to succeed it must also live up to this promise despite the fact that it is implicitly backed by the Chinese government.
• The Chinese ecosystems are all busily engaged in looking for a software platform upon which to base their services as they are unwilling to be dependent on software controlled by Google.
• This is why some of them are engaged in creating their own versions of Android (JunOS), while others are considering Sailfish, Ubuntu, Cyanogen and so on.
• Consequently, I think that if Acadine can show that H5OS can at least offer performance at least as good as native, then it has a chance of being selected by one of the Chinese ecosystems.
• This is easier said than done and every attempt to crack this problem to date has failed.
• Acadine will need to do something radically different to succeed.
• Unfortunately, I am not convinced that Acadine is doing something different and suspect that H5OS will remain within the stagger of zombies that continue to exist in open source.