The Flame developer reference phone is a milestone in Firefox OS device releases. The Flame hardware offers a representative set of specs — including FWVGA display and dual-core processor — to help developers build great content and experiences. A single hardware platform is also good for testers, making it easier to test and address specific software issues without having to worry about device model-specific bugs, etc.
If you have your phone in hand and want to start playing with it, developing and distributing apps, or contributing to the Firefox platform, the following links will get you where you need to go:
If you’d like to find out more about updating the operating system, recovering it, pushing apps to it, or phone specs, you’ll find the information you need below.
Our device manufacturer partner has made the device available to order on everbuying.com, for US$170 including global shipping (device cost is $145, shipping is $25 and custom fees may still apply, depending on the destination country). The device is bootloader- and carrier-unlocked, and it utilizes a quad-band GSM+UMTS radio so that it can work with a wide variety of operators/carriers.
Note: Another option for getting hold of a Flame is to participate in our Flames for Apps scheme, aimed at experienced HTML5 app developers wishing to port their highly-rated apps onto Firefox OS.
There are a couple of steps you should make sure you follow for your particular operating system, before you start trying to update your device, for example by updating your Flame's version of Firefox OS, or pushing apps to your phone (both are covered below.)
You need to install ADB and Fastboot on your computer — these are applications that allow you to interact with your phone from your computer when the two are connected via the phone's USB charger cable. They are needed for Flashing your phone to a new version of Firefox OS, recovering from an unresponsive state, pushing apps to your phone, etc.
Note: If you are on Ubuntu you can install ADB and Fastboot simply by using sudo apt-get install android-tools-adb android-tools-fastboot on the command line.
ADB and Fastboot are available in the Android Developer Toolkit:
ADB is a tool that you run from the command line. If you open your terminal/command prompt, go to adt/sdk/platform-tools and run the adb command, you should see a load of information thrown back at you about what you can do with ADB. Running adb devices should return the line List of devices attached, and nothing else, because you haven't got any devices attached yet.
But at this point, you need to set the PATH variable to point to the ADB tool, so you can run it from anywhere, not just when you are in the exact directory that ADB is in. To do this:
adb devices. If it comes up with List of devices attached, you are successful!On Mac/Linux:
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles YES, then restart Finderadb devices. If it comes up with List of devices attached, you are successful!No additional steps should be required if you are using a Linux or Mac system, although depending on your Linux distro, you might need to add a udev rule for your phone.
The udev rule for the Flame should look something like the following:
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="05c6", ATTRS{idProduct}=="9025", GROUP="users", MODE="0666"
Make sure to --reload-rules, then unplug and replug and your device before continuing.
To access the Flame device with the App Manager/ADB, a USB driver is required. Follow the steps outlined in the below sections to install it.
Download the Windows driver from this location. Once downloaded, extract the contents of the ZIP file to a suitable place on your hard drive.
Note: The Android Debug Bridge (ADB) must be installed first.
At this point, connect your Flame device to your computer using a USB cable.
To install the driver, open the Alcatel_USB_Driver_Q_4.0.0_2013_11_11_noinstall directory within the extracted ZIP file and double click on the DriverInstaller.exe executable. You may receive a warning at this point that the executable is from an unknown publisher. If so, select the Yes button and the executable will be launched.
Click on the Install button to install the driver.
After the driver installs, you can check that it is working by opening a command line window and typing adb devices. This should list the connected device with an output something like:
List of devices attached 3561d02a device
If your device is not showing up here, check in the Windows Device Manager. Your Flame may be showing up as "ACER ADB Interface". You can confirm this by unplugging the device and seeing if it disappears from the device manager. Uninstall the driver software by right-clicking on "ACER ADB Interface" and clicking uninstall. Be sure to check the box in the dialog to delete the driver software. Now re-run the installer above. It is advisable to set the screen timeout on your Flame to something high (Settings > Display > Screen timeout) as Windows sometimes appears to reinstall the default drivers when the screen turns off.
We will have two main "channels" of Firefox OS software version releases for the Flame phone:
While our partners are working out a final storage solution for the software builds, you can get recovery files and tools at the following storage locations:
To install the base image on your device:
adb devices command in a terminal..zip file referenced above. Unzip it onto your Desktop.flash.bat script using flash.bat.flash.sh script using sudo ./flash.sh (if you don't run it using sudo, the flash script may fail to see your device, and it won't work).Note: You are also welcome to build your own builds to install on the Flame: see Building and installing Firefox OS.
Note: For this current build, Nightly development builds of Firefox OS do not support A-GPS, which may lead to slow performance of GPS functionality. We plan to resolve this in an updated future Nightly channel.
b2g-XX.XX.en-US.android-arm.tar.gz and gaia.zip files. Save them inside a directory on your Desktop called something like fxos.shallow_flash.sh.cd into the directory you saved the files in and Flash the builds to your phone using the following command:
./shallow_flash.sh -g gaia.zip -G b2g-XX.XX.en-US.android-arm.tar.gz
./shallow_flash.sh -ggaia.zip -Gb2g-XX.XX.en-US.android-arm.tar.gz
shallow_flash.sh -g gaia.zip -G b2g-XX.XX.en-US.android-arm.tar.gz
Note: If you get a "permission denied" error when running the above command, your shell script probably doesn't have the right permissions. Running chmod +x shallow_flash.sh on it should solve this problem.
Note: A "shallow flash" updates Gecko and Gaia plus data directories, as opposed to a full flash, which updates Gecko/Gaia, but also the underlying Gonk layer and associated binaries particular to that device type. This is why it is a good idea to update to the official base image first, as suggested above, then shallow flash over the top of that, once you've got the Gonk/binary layer right.
Important: When running a shallow or full flash, your phone data will be overwritten: you should therefore back up your data before updating!
Once the install procedure finishes the phone should reboot into the updated build and display the first time user workflow.
After updating Gecko and Gaia to nightly with the v123 base image, there will be a mismatch between the fonts that Gecko and Gaia expects and what the base image provides. To fix this, download our font update package, extract it, navigate into the directory created by extracting, and run the supplied flash.sh script.
Note: Another option is to use the update_system_fonts.sh script, which will download and flash the system fonts automatically.
If flashing a new build to your phone fails to work, your phone may become unresponsive, leading to the phone rebooting in recovery mode. The recovery mode provides few options (Reboot, Update from adb, Wipe data, Wipe cache, and Update from sdcard). Unfortunately, selecting Update from adb triggers a sideload mode in which you cannot use the other adb commands. The adb sideload command would work but the various flash scripts rely on other adb commands.
From sideload mode, you can force fastboot mode as follows:
The phone should only display the very first static logo and stay there, without displaying the boot animation. It seems stuck but is not really: it is in fastboot mode and is waiting for a USB connection. At this point, a USB-connected, computer with adb installed should see the phone listed when the fastboot devices command is run. Note that regular adb would not see the device — only fastboot sees it. In this mode, you can use the flash script to install v123 as explained above. As the script does use both adb and fastboot commands, you may see some initial error and warnings from adb, but the device should be flashed properly at the end of the procedure.
If flashing a new build to your phone fails to work, your phone becomes unresponsive, and the phone cannot enter fastboot mode, you can use emergency mode for recovery. A USB cable and the Emergency Download Tool are required to enter emergency download mode. Install this tool and follow the instructions.
You can enter recovery mode to clear your phone data or manually update the firmware. There are two ways to enter this mode:
adb reboot recovery on the command line.When in recovery mode, press the Volume up/down keys to move the selection highlight, and the Power key to select. Make sure you have your phone data (Contacts, SMS, etc.) backed up before clearing data, and your upgrade packages downloaded before updating.
The App Manager tool makes it easy to push apps to your phone, for testing, etc. Full instructions are available in the article Using the App Manager.
Note: If you are running Firefox Nightly, you can instead make use of our next generation WebIDE tool, which performs the same functions as the App Manager, plus more.
You can adjust the available RAM capacity to see how apps perform on Firefox OS phones with lower memory footprints.
This is accomplished by entering fastboot mode (install fastboot first, which is available on the same SDK page as ADB) and typing:
adb reboot bootloader fastboot oem mem [0|256-1024]
“0” is the memory automatically detected and “256-1024” is the number of megabytes. For example, if you want to adjust device RAM capacity to 512M, enter fastboot oem mem 512.
You'll need to then reboot your device for the settings to take effect. This can be done using:
fastboot reboot
The current memory size can be returned by entering fastboot mode and typing:
fastboot getvar mem
Network:
Hardware: You can find more of the hardware features listed on our Phone and device specs page.
Additional features include: