Acadine Technologies has stepped in to continue the development of the Firefox OS. (Photo : YouTube)
After Mozilla announced that it is halting the development of its Firefox OS, a new company announced that it will be continuing for the beleaguered operating system.
Hong Kong-based startup Acadine Technologies said that it would still be continuing with the development of its H5OS for mobile. The H5OS is based off the Firefox OS but is expected to go on a different development route now that the latter has been discontinued.
To help its efforts, Acadine said that it has hired several former engineers from Mozilla to work on the H5OS, including former chief technology officer Andreas Gal, who will be serving Acadine as an adviser. Gal was one of the founders of the Firefox OS project, CNET reported.
Acadine added that that they will be teaming with several mobile device makers, carriers, and app, content, and service developers for the project. The company CEO Li Gong said, "We are definitely working with a good number of partners who desire a non-Android OS to power their mobile devices."
The company received an initial $100 million funding from the Hong Kong-based Tsinghua Unigroup International, a subsidiary of Tsinghua University in Beijing. However, Acadine reported that it will be seeking a second funding, this time, open to companies and venture capitalists from all over the world.
Mozilla made the announcement of Firefox OS' shutdown earlier this week, citing an inability to provide a satisfactory user experience. The OS was first introduced in 2013 as the non-profit organization's attempt at developing a competitor against Android and iOS. There have already been several carriers who expressed their intention on using the OS for their units, including Verizon, which wanted to use it for their low-end flip phone models.
The shutdown came in the midst of Mozilla's streamlining efforts to focus more on their core products. Earlier, the organization also announced that they are currently looking for a new developer to hand over their Thunderbird email and chat client, Tech Crunch reported.
