alt Hacker NewsFun fact - FirefoxOS only flopped in Mozilla, it went on to be the insanely successful KaiOS based on the source code. KaiOS has over 100M active users.
This indicates there was actually a lot of technical merit in it and the problem was with the GTM and leadership.
TBF KaiOS had a measure of success but it is now on life support.
The fact is Android could be scaled down way better than KaiOS could be scaled up.
(and you could just wait for the perf/$ to continue to decrease).