6 ms·

The Firefox OS marketplace is brilliant

159 points by dendory 14y ago

DeepDuh 14y ago
I'd hold on with the 'brilliant' qualifier until we see the interface, but the concept certainly looks fitting to the OS model. Is this the entire JSON though? I'm missing at least a keywords child there.
- ngokevin 14y ago
  You can see the early version at marketplace.firefox.com
  - DeepDuh 14y ago
    Looks quite neat. I'd like someone to bring some fresh approaches into this however, instead of just basically the Appstore interface with a different skin. Especially for web-apps I'm still not that sure how important the appstore starting point for finding apps actually is. How about a unified search built into the OS with priority set like 'installed apps > other available apps > local data > Google Search' ? Of course, for those who want to search by category it's still good to have a curated list somewhere. But isn't the search for webapps basically the same as a Google search with some meta information sugar on top?
    - ngokevin 14y ago
      Well, the store has a search bar that returns web-apps of any category. But these web-apps are meant to be installed. Some web-apps will be the same as navigating to a mobile version of a site, but many web-apps are developed to work offline.
nickpresta 14y ago
I've published an app to the Mozilla Marketplace and for the most part, it just work. As for the manifest file, you can get by with as little as: { "name":"Example", "developer": { "name":"Developer", "url":"https://example.com" }, "description":"My Description", "icons":{ "128":"/img/icon.png" }, "launch_path": "/", "installs_allowed_from": ["*"] } With this, you can install your app from the Marketplace or from your own site (by serving it with the correct mime-type). It is relatively easy to get the app installed from your own site, if you choose to ignore the Marketplace entirely (our code does it in ~80 lines of CoffeeScript) as seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMxeK1_xY98 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMxeK1_xY98 One thing to keep in mind is that the window chrome which will house your application does not have back/forward buttons, does not have bookmarks, or an address bar. Remember this when designing your interface (you may been to provide in-app back/forward buttons, bookmarks, etc). The only problems I ran into when developing this was that the API was unstable at the time (a few months ago) and that relative URLs for installation didn't work (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=745928 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=745928) but the devs in the mozilla #webapps IRC channel were helpful. The nice thing about the Marketplace is that you can specify which form factor you want your app available to - Desktop/Laptop, Phone, Tablet. On the phone side, things are easy: https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-7uT3PPCyPD8/UP9RTN-392I/AAAAAAAAC0A/mh8tfq9BpLY/s668/Screenshot_2013-01-22-21-55-19.png https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-7uT3PPCyPD8/UP9RTN-392I/A... https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-GB4Vt6YVTKA/UP9RSDzDy8I/AAAAAAAACz4/_iURmFiVTLw/s668/Screenshot_2013-01-22-21-55-30.png https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-GB4Vt6YVTKA/UP9RSDzDy8I/A... https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-dXnc0iuIBdM/UP9RRW_UILI/AAAAAAAACzw/EZcLT6_xR1Q/s668/Screenshot_2013-01-22-21-55-40.png https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-dXnc0iuIBdM/UP9RRW_UILI/A... https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-NReWzbudobw/UP9RnJEiHpI/AAAAAAAAC0I/4iH_q98qOVk/s668/Screenshot_2013-01-22-21-57-16.png https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-NReWzbudobw/UP9RnJEiHpI/A...
- ido 14y ago
  How do you sell apps or IAPs?
  - nickpresta 14y ago
    The apps that I have experience with have all been no-cost. I don't know what an IAP is, so I can't comment. :-) edit: Thanks to Samuel for the explanation. No, I don't have experience with IAP.
    - Samuel_Michon 14y ago
      In the context of the Mozilla Marketplace, 'IAP' stands for 'In-App Payment'. https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebAPI/WebPayment#In-app_payment https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebAPI/WebPayment#In-app_payment
  - kevin_p 14y ago
    You can't yet. "The Firefox OS Marketplace does not currently support paid apps or in-app payments. We hope to enable this feature for testing late in the first quarter of 2013." (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Apps/Submitting_an_app https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Apps/Submitting_an_...)
batgaijin 14y ago
This can't happen soon enough. I hope it supports a terminal and basic dev tools. Mozilla, please create a decent cheapo phone and I'd pay 2x to ship another one to a poor country.
- fzzzy 14y ago
  It doesn't yet have a terminal or dev tools on the phone, but this is something I would absolutely love to see in the long run. It's open source, so if you feel like helping out to add these, please do :-)
- mikeratcliffe 14y ago
  You can connect to the phone using remote debugging with Firefox's built in Developer Tools (you are best to use the latest nightly). I think that only the debugger and Web Console are remote-able right now but that will change in the near future. We are working hard to make it easy for you to create and debug your apps because that is a win win for everyone.
notatoad 14y ago
My only complaint is that the Firefox app manifest and the chrome app manifest aren't the same thing. The Firefox and chrome developers seem like they work together pretty well, it's too bad they couldn't collaborate on this.
- plansurf 14y ago
  It's sad they aren't willing to allow for a central system with browser apps much like it is with cross-browser JavaScript for the web.
  - ibotty 14y ago
    in the near future, you should be able to use the mozilla marketplace on android devices. apps there should (mostly) work on android (and even ios).
- Yoric 14y ago
  I'm sure that's going to happen eventually.
paul9290 14y ago
I'm very interested in Firefox OS as we skipped the native app route and just created a web app. Though I am concerned about it's performance. Firefox has always been prone to crashing. Thus I wonder is this a brand new piece of software not built on the Mozilla (Firefox) engine?
- Arelius 14y ago
  FirefoxOS does indeed run on Gecko, the Firefox rendering engine. I'm my experience, most crashes seem to be related to plugins and/or extensions, with that aside, I seem to get pretty comparable crash frequency from Firefox and chrome while developing code that relies on pretty state-of-the-art APIs (WebGL)
  - paul9290 14y ago
    Cool .. also i wonder since our app is an audio app of sorts does Firefox OS's audio tag play .mp3s or still stuck with ogg vorbis? We haven't been able to get our app working in regular Firefox because of this - unfortunately!
    - fabrice_d 14y ago
      Yes, Firefox OS plays mp3 (and h264 videos), using the hardware decoder from the device.
    - doublec 14y ago
      MP3 and H.264 should play fine on Firefox OS if the device vendor includes hardware support for it. The initial devices do support this as far as I know. Firefox for Android for some devices also supports MP3 and H.264 now. Desktop support is in progress with Windows and Linux being the furthest along.
rmundo 14y ago
"When you're on a mobile device, you don't have time to go search the web for an app that does a certain function that you happen to require. You want a central place that will list all of the apps that are compatible with your phone" It seems we really need a curated site for mobile apps like the Yahoo of old for websites. Essentially, a more functional app store than the app store. Thoughtful reviews on par with those you see on Amazon. Algorithms equivalent to PageRank don't seem to apply to this space, so perhaps human experts like those seen on about.com might work.
- zanny 14y ago
  Mozilla already has that covered: https://marketplace.firefox.com/ https://marketplace.firefox.com/ Chrome also has their web store. The major bridge is there needs to be a standard interface for web apps, in addition to some standard way to use them offline. Since most local storage limits itself to 5MB max, you don't really have the offline storage you need to run a game, for example.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
zanny 14y ago
I'm still confused how a platform running only html5 + js applications can target low power devices. Performance on Android, which runs a highly optimized JVM, is only barely reaching acceptable levels in the last year with Project Butter. Ubuntu Phone, targeting the same use case except with native apps (albeit scripted in qml) comes out next year. How is a device built on a browser engine supposed to provide good UX on low power devices? My Android tablet has Firefox stutter and wheeze through pages and loading, often freezing up on any reasonably sized amount of javascript, and it has a Tegra 3 (TF700) which many would call the high-end mobile device market.
- CrazedGeek 14y ago
  The TF700 has a known problem with its internal storage being incredibly slow, which could be what's causing your problems. http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2066849 http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2066849 Firefox on Android has always been fairly fast for me, for what it's worth.
  - untog 14y ago
    I bought a cheap TF300 and was blown away to find the same slowness. If you're doing any downloading it's basically unusable. Especially disappointing as the rest of the hardware (including keyboard dock) are great.
  - zanny 14y ago
    I've had the same experience on a Nexus 7, and when I turn on the developer system monitoring it always either pushes memory into swap or maxes out some cpu cores and doesn't properly utilize all 4. The biggest culprit I would say is that you have 4 cores but your computationally expensive javascript is never multithreaded. Though I do acknowledge the internal memory is slow as crap.
- hosay123 14y ago
  Android's performance problems are more to do with architecture than anything else: - Prior to 4.x the "highly optimized JVM" was "highly interpreted". - Access to the display is gated via userspace (SurfaceFlinger) which must be invoked to composite every frame, and at least in 2.x (if not still true) unconditionally repainted the screen each frame. - Accelerated 2D did not exist in Android 2.x, I'm not sure if it exists yet. - None of the standard GUI widgets knew how to handle partial repaint. I think this was fixed in 4.x. From the perspective of getting lag right, you only need to ensure there is some native code that can scroll around a bitmap efficiently. As for how that bitmap gets rendered, a few hundred thousand lines of C++ stands a much better chance of efficiency than an unoptimized, initially interpreted Java GUI framework that has no native way of expressing "allocate this temporary on the stack" ever did. The choices made for Android might have been valid when painting a 160x200ish 16bit display (about 64kb per frame), which AFAIK was roughly the original target hardware prior to the Google purchase, but for 800x480 24bit this quickly turns into a need to generate 34mb/sec to render at 30fps, all done in software, chunks of it interpreted, on (what was initially) a 500mhz ARM11 CPU. Really helps frame the panic Google must have been in to get something on the market and fast.
matthiasb 14y ago
I would not mind to own a cheap phone like these ones but in US you have to pay $70/month for the voice and data plan so it is way more expensive than the phone itself.
- nsmartt 14y ago
  The phones could reasonably neglect data in favor of wifi. I don't know if they do, but it's plausible.
  - matthiasb 14y ago
    If you leave in an area with a good wifi coverage it make sense. Agreed.
- PeterisP 14y ago
  That's a pain. Here in Europe I've got a cheap voice/data plan for 6$/mth; if/when I start hitting the 2gig cap then I can switch to 10$/month for unlimited. I do have to pay full price for the phone(s), though. You really need to get some functioning market competition in USA telecommunications, it seems nonexistant.
  - tsahyt 14y ago
    10$/month for unlimited? Where do you live if I may ask?
    - arnoooooo 14y ago
      I'm paying 9€/month in France for unlimited data and text messages, and 5h voice time.
- pekk 14y ago
  That is paying for the iPhone, if you go with monthly-prepaid you can get a good plan for $30/mo or $40/mo
jxdxbx 14y ago
As a mere mortal I find some aspects of "web apps" confusing. I never know whether I'm running an app locally in my browser, vs. what's happening on a remote server, etc. And I have a hard time knowing which apps are stored locally on my phone, vs merely bookmarked, and whether if they're stored locally they'll update. My preference is for app stores that work more or less the way they do now. If under the covers you're rocking some standard web technology, hey great. As long as my app works offline and doesn't randomly change.
- bad_user 14y ago
  Normal apps are confusing in the same way. Quick, answer this, does Facebook work when you are offline? How about Google Drive? Or the new GMail for iOS?
tferris 14y ago
refreshing!
est 14y ago
This really looks like an package manager with a name "market place"
meaty 14y ago
This is the first mobile platform that I've been excited about and I've been doing work on mobile devices since Windows CE 2...
- PommeDeTerre 14y ago
  Why is that? To a lot of us, Firefox OS sounds like a miserable platform with many serious problems. 1) There are basically no users at this point, of both the platform and the Firefox Marketplace. 2) Firefox OS is far back in line, behind Android, iOS, BlackBerry OS, several Windows variants, Symbian, MeeGo, and various other platforms that currently have actual users. 3) There's nothing really compelling about Firefox OS for customers. There's nothing that makes it more appealing that its competitors. 4) The emphasis on developing apps using HTML5 and JavaScript is not appealing to many good developers. Going from the power of languages like Java, C, C++, and Objective-C on other mobile platforms to HTML5 and JavaScript on Firefox OS is a pretty big step backward. 5) The Firefox Marketplace won't be publicly launched until later this year. Even if that was as early as tomorrow, that's still ages in the mobile world. 6) It looks like Mozilla is just playing catch-up with Apple, Google and others. So it seems to be a pretty big dead end to a lot of us, that's destined to failure.
  - meaty 14y ago
    I've written software for all the main platforms apart from BB. My rationale is: iOS is closed / walled garden. Windows Phone is closed / walled garden BB is closed / walled garden. Android is a fragmented, buggy shit tip of an environment and is mostly closed and uncertain. Symbian is pretty much dead. MeeGo is dead. Nokia S40 is still alive but I'll be fucked if I'm writing J2ME any more. --- Some positive indications of FireFox OS: It's open. It's easy to access it. The environment requires little proprietary knowledge i.e. deep specialist APIs and languages (no obj-c, WPF, XAML, that awful XML thing Android uses). License cost for hardware manufacturers will be very low if not free I imagine so uptake on carrier's own branded handsets might be high. As for catch up, I remember everyone complaining about how the original iPhone and Android phones didn't stand a chance against BB and Symbian...
  - 14y ago
bengillies 14y ago
> Basically, the main reason why an app store or marketplace is important, is because the web suffers from a discoverability problem. Isn't it the other way around? There's no effective way of publicising you app or helping people to find it in an app store short of hoping that the Apple/Google overlords will decide to stick it on the front page. It's remarkably hard to find apps that you're looking for unless you know the name of it (and it isn't a common name, etc), and there's no way of working around it. In contrast, on the web, if one site doesn't work very well, you go to another one. If one discovery tool isn't working very well (e.g. Digg), you use a different one (e.g. Hacker News). The web is very discoverable. It just doesn't force a particular discovery mechanism on people like app stores tend to do. That said, this is a large part of why FirefoxOS is so promising.
- pedalpete 14y ago
  The web has content discovery, the app stores provide function discovery. They are subtly different I would say. Though I can't say entirely way. I think we've been trained to go to google to search for content, but not to search for something to help us get a specific job done.

159 points by dendory 14y ago

I'd hold on with the 'brilliant' qualifier until we see the interface, but the concept certainly looks fitting to the OS model. Is this the entire JSON though? I'm missing at least a keywords child there.

ngokevin 14y ago
You can see the early version at marketplace.firefox.com
- DeepDuh 14y ago
  Looks quite neat. I'd like someone to bring some fresh approaches into this however, instead of just basically the Appstore interface with a different skin. Especially for web-apps I'm still not that sure how important the appstore starting point for finding apps actually is. How about a unified search built into the OS with priority set like 'installed apps > other available apps > local data > Google Search' ? Of course, for those who want to search by category it's still good to have a curated list somewhere. But isn't the search for webapps basically the same as a Google search with some meta information sugar on top?
  - ngokevin 14y ago
    Well, the store has a search bar that returns web-apps of any category. But these web-apps are meant to be installed. Some web-apps will be the same as navigating to a mobile version of a site, but many web-apps are developed to work offline.

nickpresta 14y ago

I've published an app to the Mozilla Marketplace and for the most part, it just work. As for the manifest file, you can get by with as little as: { "name":"Example", "developer": { "name":"Developer", "url":"https://example.com" }, "description":"My Description", "icons":{ "128":"/img/icon.png" }, "launch_path": "/", "installs_allowed_from": ["*"] } With this, you can install your app from the Marketplace or from your own site (by serving it with the correct mime-type). It is relatively easy to get the app installed from your own site, if you choose to ignore the Marketplace entirely (our code does it in ~80 lines of CoffeeScript) as seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMxeK1_xY98 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMxeK1_xY98 One thing to keep in mind is that the window chrome which will house your application does not have back/forward buttons, does not have bookmarks, or an address bar. Remember this when designing your interface (you may been to provide in-app back/forward buttons, bookmarks, etc). The only problems I ran into when developing this was that the API was unstable at the time (a few months ago) and that relative URLs for installation didn't work (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=745928 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=745928) but the devs in the mozilla #webapps IRC channel were helpful. The nice thing about the Marketplace is that you can specify which form factor you want your app available to - Desktop/Laptop, Phone, Tablet. On the phone side, things are easy: https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-7uT3PPCyPD8/UP9RTN-392I/AAAAAAAAC0A/mh8tfq9BpLY/s668/Screenshot_2013-01-22-21-55-19.png https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-7uT3PPCyPD8/UP9RTN-392I/A... https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-GB4Vt6YVTKA/UP9RSDzDy8I/AAAAAAAACz4/_iURmFiVTLw/s668/Screenshot_2013-01-22-21-55-30.png https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-GB4Vt6YVTKA/UP9RSDzDy8I/A... https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-dXnc0iuIBdM/UP9RRW_UILI/AAAAAAAACzw/EZcLT6_xR1Q/s668/Screenshot_2013-01-22-21-55-40.png https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-dXnc0iuIBdM/UP9RRW_UILI/A... https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-NReWzbudobw/UP9RnJEiHpI/AAAAAAAAC0I/4iH_q98qOVk/s668/Screenshot_2013-01-22-21-57-16.png https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-NReWzbudobw/UP9RnJEiHpI/A...

ido 14y ago
How do you sell apps or IAPs?
- nickpresta 14y ago
  The apps that I have experience with have all been no-cost. I don't know what an IAP is, so I can't comment. :-) edit: Thanks to Samuel for the explanation. No, I don't have experience with IAP.
  - Samuel_Michon 14y ago
    In the context of the Mozilla Marketplace, 'IAP' stands for 'In-App Payment'. https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebAPI/WebPayment#In-app_payment https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebAPI/WebPayment#In-app_payment
- kevin_p 14y ago
  You can't yet. "The Firefox OS Marketplace does not currently support paid apps or in-app payments. We hope to enable this feature for testing late in the first quarter of 2013." (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Apps/Submitting_an_app https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Apps/Submitting_an_...)

batgaijin 14y ago

This can't happen soon enough. I hope it supports a terminal and basic dev tools. Mozilla, please create a decent cheapo phone and I'd pay 2x to ship another one to a poor country.

fzzzy 14y ago
It doesn't yet have a terminal or dev tools on the phone, but this is something I would absolutely love to see in the long run. It's open source, so if you feel like helping out to add these, please do :-)
mikeratcliffe 14y ago
You can connect to the phone using remote debugging with Firefox's built in Developer Tools (you are best to use the latest nightly). I think that only the debugger and Web Console are remote-able right now but that will change in the near future. We are working hard to make it easy for you to create and debug your apps because that is a win win for everyone.

notatoad 14y ago

My only complaint is that the Firefox app manifest and the chrome app manifest aren't the same thing. The Firefox and chrome developers seem like they work together pretty well, it's too bad they couldn't collaborate on this.

plansurf 14y ago
It's sad they aren't willing to allow for a central system with browser apps much like it is with cross-browser JavaScript for the web.
- ibotty 14y ago
  in the near future, you should be able to use the mozilla marketplace on android devices. apps there should (mostly) work on android (and even ios).
Yoric 14y ago
I'm sure that's going to happen eventually.

paul9290 14y ago

I'm very interested in Firefox OS as we skipped the native app route and just created a web app. Though I am concerned about it's performance. Firefox has always been prone to crashing. Thus I wonder is this a brand new piece of software not built on the Mozilla (Firefox) engine?

Arelius 14y ago
FirefoxOS does indeed run on Gecko, the Firefox rendering engine. I'm my experience, most crashes seem to be related to plugins and/or extensions, with that aside, I seem to get pretty comparable crash frequency from Firefox and chrome while developing code that relies on pretty state-of-the-art APIs (WebGL)
- paul9290 14y ago
  Cool .. also i wonder since our app is an audio app of sorts does Firefox OS's audio tag play .mp3s or still stuck with ogg vorbis? We haven't been able to get our app working in regular Firefox because of this - unfortunately!
  - fabrice_d 14y ago
    Yes, Firefox OS plays mp3 (and h264 videos), using the hardware decoder from the device.
  - doublec 14y ago
    MP3 and H.264 should play fine on Firefox OS if the device vendor includes hardware support for it. The initial devices do support this as far as I know. Firefox for Android for some devices also supports MP3 and H.264 now. Desktop support is in progress with Windows and Linux being the furthest along.

rmundo 14y ago

"When you're on a mobile device, you don't have time to go search the web for an app that does a certain function that you happen to require. You want a central place that will list all of the apps that are compatible with your phone" It seems we really need a curated site for mobile apps like the Yahoo of old for websites. Essentially, a more functional app store than the app store. Thoughtful reviews on par with those you see on Amazon. Algorithms equivalent to PageRank don't seem to apply to this space, so perhaps human experts like those seen on about.com might work.

zanny 14y ago
Mozilla already has that covered: https://marketplace.firefox.com/ https://marketplace.firefox.com/ Chrome also has their web store. The major bridge is there needs to be a standard interface for web apps, in addition to some standard way to use them offline. Since most local storage limits itself to 5MB max, you don't really have the offline storage you need to run a game, for example.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]

zanny 14y ago

I'm still confused how a platform running only html5 + js applications can target low power devices. Performance on Android, which runs a highly optimized JVM, is only barely reaching acceptable levels in the last year with Project Butter. Ubuntu Phone, targeting the same use case except with native apps (albeit scripted in qml) comes out next year. How is a device built on a browser engine supposed to provide good UX on low power devices? My Android tablet has Firefox stutter and wheeze through pages and loading, often freezing up on any reasonably sized amount of javascript, and it has a Tegra 3 (TF700) which many would call the high-end mobile device market.

CrazedGeek 14y ago
The TF700 has a known problem with its internal storage being incredibly slow, which could be what's causing your problems. http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2066849 http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2066849 Firefox on Android has always been fairly fast for me, for what it's worth.
- untog 14y ago
  I bought a cheap TF300 and was blown away to find the same slowness. If you're doing any downloading it's basically unusable. Especially disappointing as the rest of the hardware (including keyboard dock) are great.
- zanny 14y ago
  I've had the same experience on a Nexus 7, and when I turn on the developer system monitoring it always either pushes memory into swap or maxes out some cpu cores and doesn't properly utilize all 4. The biggest culprit I would say is that you have 4 cores but your computationally expensive javascript is never multithreaded. Though I do acknowledge the internal memory is slow as crap.
hosay123 14y ago
Android's performance problems are more to do with architecture than anything else: - Prior to 4.x the "highly optimized JVM" was "highly interpreted". - Access to the display is gated via userspace (SurfaceFlinger) which must be invoked to composite every frame, and at least in 2.x (if not still true) unconditionally repainted the screen each frame. - Accelerated 2D did not exist in Android 2.x, I'm not sure if it exists yet. - None of the standard GUI widgets knew how to handle partial repaint. I think this was fixed in 4.x. From the perspective of getting lag right, you only need to ensure there is some native code that can scroll around a bitmap efficiently. As for how that bitmap gets rendered, a few hundred thousand lines of C++ stands a much better chance of efficiency than an unoptimized, initially interpreted Java GUI framework that has no native way of expressing "allocate this temporary on the stack" ever did. The choices made for Android might have been valid when painting a 160x200ish 16bit display (about 64kb per frame), which AFAIK was roughly the original target hardware prior to the Google purchase, but for 800x480 24bit this quickly turns into a need to generate 34mb/sec to render at 30fps, all done in software, chunks of it interpreted, on (what was initially) a 500mhz ARM11 CPU. Really helps frame the panic Google must have been in to get something on the market and fast.

matthiasb 14y ago

I would not mind to own a cheap phone like these ones but in US you have to pay $70/month for the voice and data plan so it is way more expensive than the phone itself.

nsmartt 14y ago
The phones could reasonably neglect data in favor of wifi. I don't know if they do, but it's plausible.
- matthiasb 14y ago
  If you leave in an area with a good wifi coverage it make sense. Agreed.
PeterisP 14y ago
That's a pain. Here in Europe I've got a cheap voice/data plan for 6$/mth; if/when I start hitting the 2gig cap then I can switch to 10$/month for unlimited. I do have to pay full price for the phone(s), though. You really need to get some functioning market competition in USA telecommunications, it seems nonexistant.
- tsahyt 14y ago
  10$/month for unlimited? Where do you live if I may ask?
  - arnoooooo 14y ago
    I'm paying 9€/month in France for unlimited data and text messages, and 5h voice time.
pekk 14y ago
That is paying for the iPhone, if you go with monthly-prepaid you can get a good plan for $30/mo or $40/mo

jxdxbx 14y ago

As a mere mortal I find some aspects of "web apps" confusing. I never know whether I'm running an app locally in my browser, vs. what's happening on a remote server, etc. And I have a hard time knowing which apps are stored locally on my phone, vs merely bookmarked, and whether if they're stored locally they'll update. My preference is for app stores that work more or less the way they do now. If under the covers you're rocking some standard web technology, hey great. As long as my app works offline and doesn't randomly change.

bad_user 14y ago
Normal apps are confusing in the same way. Quick, answer this, does Facebook work when you are offline? How about Google Drive? Or the new GMail for iOS?

tferris 14y ago

refreshing!

est 14y ago

This really looks like an package manager with a name "market place"

meaty 14y ago

This is the first mobile platform that I've been excited about and I've been doing work on mobile devices since Windows CE 2...

PommeDeTerre 14y ago
Why is that? To a lot of us, Firefox OS sounds like a miserable platform with many serious problems. 1) There are basically no users at this point, of both the platform and the Firefox Marketplace. 2) Firefox OS is far back in line, behind Android, iOS, BlackBerry OS, several Windows variants, Symbian, MeeGo, and various other platforms that currently have actual users. 3) There's nothing really compelling about Firefox OS for customers. There's nothing that makes it more appealing that its competitors. 4) The emphasis on developing apps using HTML5 and JavaScript is not appealing to many good developers. Going from the power of languages like Java, C, C++, and Objective-C on other mobile platforms to HTML5 and JavaScript on Firefox OS is a pretty big step backward. 5) The Firefox Marketplace won't be publicly launched until later this year. Even if that was as early as tomorrow, that's still ages in the mobile world. 6) It looks like Mozilla is just playing catch-up with Apple, Google and others. So it seems to be a pretty big dead end to a lot of us, that's destined to failure.
- meaty 14y ago
  I've written software for all the main platforms apart from BB. My rationale is: iOS is closed / walled garden. Windows Phone is closed / walled garden BB is closed / walled garden. Android is a fragmented, buggy shit tip of an environment and is mostly closed and uncertain. Symbian is pretty much dead. MeeGo is dead. Nokia S40 is still alive but I'll be fucked if I'm writing J2ME any more. --- Some positive indications of FireFox OS: It's open. It's easy to access it. The environment requires little proprietary knowledge i.e. deep specialist APIs and languages (no obj-c, WPF, XAML, that awful XML thing Android uses). License cost for hardware manufacturers will be very low if not free I imagine so uptake on carrier's own branded handsets might be high. As for catch up, I remember everyone complaining about how the original iPhone and Android phones didn't stand a chance against BB and Symbian...
- 14y ago

bengillies 14y ago

> Basically, the main reason why an app store or marketplace is important, is because the web suffers from a discoverability problem. Isn't it the other way around? There's no effective way of publicising you app or helping people to find it in an app store short of hoping that the Apple/Google overlords will decide to stick it on the front page. It's remarkably hard to find apps that you're looking for unless you know the name of it (and it isn't a common name, etc), and there's no way of working around it. In contrast, on the web, if one site doesn't work very well, you go to another one. If one discovery tool isn't working very well (e.g. Digg), you use a different one (e.g. Hacker News). The web is very discoverable. It just doesn't force a particular discovery mechanism on people like app stores tend to do. That said, this is a large part of why FirefoxOS is so promising.

pedalpete 14y ago
The web has content discovery, the app stores provide function discovery. They are subtly different I would say. Though I can't say entirely way. I think we've been trained to go to google to search for content, but not to search for something to help us get a specific job done.