Partners (carriers, or whoever supports the phone, e.g. geeksphone) provides the updates, in all cases I have seen so far (Spain and Poland are the only places that have launched AFAIK). Anyone can root their phone and install the latest of course (assuming this is legal where you live and not breaking the terms of contracts you agreed to etc)
I have a geeksphone and they provide a nightly channel, or I can root the phone and install my own image - I use a T-Mobile pre-paid SIM, but could switch to any carrier the hardware supports, who will let me use their network. If you buy hardware under contract or some other conditions from a carrier, I imagine things will be different. I am not a lawyer (if it's not obvious already), I work for Mozilla but don't work with partners or have any special knowledge of this :)
As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, in order to use trademarks like Firefox OS and logos etc. you must meet Mozilla's terms. I don't know if these agreements are public or just between Mozilla and their partner, all I can find from a quick search is https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/partners/
This would go a long way to preventing a problem like Android's "fragmentation" assuming that it extended to the device firmware level.
Mozilla's strategy along with their partners in this project seems to be to target middle-end devices and carriers, and create a consistent and supportable target platform that won't suffer from the effects of premature obsolescence as quickly as the latest Android devices pushed by the major carriers.
I don't see this working out in the long term. Unlike Firefox, which auto updates on it's own, these Firefox OS updates will be provided to partners, meaning it's up to handset manufacturers to push them out. I'm skeptical that we'll see these updates every 6 months, let alone six weeks.
A typical Android update will change the drivers and other low level stuff. My understanding is that a Firefox OS update will typically change only the upper layers: Gecko and Gaia. That should hopefully reduce the amount of testing necessary to push a release.
In any case, it seems unlikely that Mozilla would simply announce this without any consultation with their hardware partners. They're in a much better position to know what's possible than you or I!
We've seen a similar promise from Google at I/O 2011 about Android OS updates:
> [W]e're jointly announcing that new devices from participating partners will receive the latest Android platform upgrades for 18 months after the device is first released, as long as the hardware allows ... and that's just the beginning. [1]
The announced partners were Verizon, HTC, Samsung, Sprint, Sony Ericsson, LG, T-Mobile, Vodafone, Motorola and AT&T. Since then, many have broken that promise[2]. Three of them (Sprint, T-Mobile, and LG) are now Firefox OS partners. I'm just skeptical that this time will be any different.
As part of the licensing agreement to be called a "Firefox OS phone" I believe carriers must provide updates for a certain amount of time. For how long, I do not know. If the duration is public knowledge, I do not know. If partners will actually follow through, well... the articles you linked to paint a bleak picture. Of course, since our entire OS is open source, they can just use it on their own, and never release a single update, as long as they don't brand it a "Firefox OS phone."
I'm prototyping an add on right now that would detect a connected device, download updated pre-compiled images of the layers (gonk, gecko, gaia) and allow you to update them (if I verified that the update worked on your device beforehand, to make sure you wouldn't end up bricking your phone). Just trying to raise awareness within the org right now to get a green light to work on this more.
I think those manufactuers' broken promises are why Google is pushing the Google "Play Services" library (released at Google I/O 2013) that adds new APIs that are compatible from Froyo and above. An old device many have an outdated OS, but Google can still push new Play Services APIs from the Play Store (and Google has to deal with the backwards compatibility).
This is a great theory, but one of the reasons Android does this is because it is necessary for what users want: better performance, or fixes for GL driver bugs that apps need to work, or whatever.
I can't see why Gecko/Gaia won't have the same problem, looking at the architecture docs.
If the options are an update that fixes driver issues but is never pushed, and an update that only fixes less serious issues but is pushed -- which would you rather have?
My (fairly naive) understanding is that there is nothing comparable to the Gecko layer on Android (Dalvik seems in practice to be very intertwined with lower level code) so I'm not sure what conclusion you're drawing from the docs. Feel free to school me on it, though. :)
This means it will be impacted by graphics driver bugs and issues, the same as Android is.
(Which is not surprising, since Gonk, the layer below it, started out as Android)
Look at it this way: anything that lives in Gonk will generally have exactly the same issues as Android does in terms of updates. There may be some pieces of it that are more generic than others (bluez, for example), but by and large, you will need to test on each phone model.
FWIW, the Gecko layer is essentially the same as Android's framework.
What functionality is provided by a high level layer differs a bit, but Android and Firefox OS are not as architecturally different as you seem to think.
I'm somehow reminded of the feeling I get every time I log on to my PC and see this in the task bar alert message: "A new version of Java is available..."
In the past couple of years, we've had major upgrades pushed out to three types of mobile device here. Moving to iOS6 infamously broke things like maps. The Android update from Samsung lost numerous settings and required more than an hour just to reconfigure things back to roughly how they were, in exchange for exactly no useful change in functionality for us. And the Windows Phone one... Well, I can't tell you what it did, because it was pushed within a day of connecting the new phone to the network, completely bricked the device, and resulted in the whole thing going back and being replaced by something completely different.
Move fast and break things rarely seems to work out well for users in practice, but it's a particularly dumb idea for the core functionality of a critical piece of equipment. Modern mobile devices are very much in that category for the individuals using them.
As an added potential issue here, there is a question of how much integration with/control of the underlying transmit/receive functions the Firefox OS code would have and whether that underlying code would be affected at all by this kind of update. I would hope the answer is that the key hardware control functions are completely isolated, but if the design is poorly engineered then you also have a real risk of a bad mass update literally bringing down a national network for everyone. When these devices are how people call 911 or the local equivalent, that is obviously not a good idea.
From what Mozilla mentioned before, it'll just be userspace updates that'll follow this rapid release cycle.
The underlying OS will only receive updates every major point i.e. the next one will be 2.0
Also, which major software company doesn't upgrade often?
If you're talking about core infrastructure (operating systems, servers, etc.) used by serious businesses then the answer is pretty much all of them are much slower-paced. Look at how often Microsoft releases a service pack or new version of Windows, or Debian changes stable, or Postgres bumps the minor version. These things happen every year or two, not every month or two. Even Android, to the extent that it has any meaningful version numbering or naming at all, only tends to push out a major release or two per year, and in practice people's mobile devices don't get updated that often by their networks and many phones never get a major update within their normal lifetime.
Of course many developers issue point releases with security patches and important bug fixes more frequently, but changing functionality every few weeks in infrastructure software just seems crazy to me. It doesn't work well in Firefox-the-browser, so why would we expect it to work any better in Firefox-the-operating-system?
