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Thanks for the feedback, let me be clear about some things from your message: > * Low-end smart-phone should not do basic things such as calling and texting wo

by soapdog 13y ago

Thanks for the feedback, let me be clear about some things from your message: > * Low-end smart-phone should not do basic things such as calling and texting worse than a low-end feature phone (dumb phones). Author is pining for his old, low-end feature phone after using ZTE Open Basic phone stuff such as calling, texting work pretty well. These are common things that all phones do well right now. > * While adaptive search may not be a market place, if it looks like one to the user, then it will be percieved like one and confuse the user. Adaptative search does not look like a marketplace, it looks like a search engine. There is a marketplace icon that launches the marketplace app which has a experience similar to other app stores. Bonus point: Our app store is open source, you can fork it and create your own. > * Platform ecosystem is a valid critiscism. The main criticism of windows mobile is lack of apps. While that is not the systems fault, MS are being active in improving this, since they know that this is the main feature of a modern smart phone. If Mozilla don't realize this either, they are in trouble. It may not be ffOS's fault that the twitter app is bad, by users don't want it if it doesn't have a good twitter app. Mozilla has paid staff and volunteers working on making the experiences better. Lots of the vendors are listening and improving. Remember this platform is on its first year and yet we're moving very fast. > * Critiscism of here maps should be directed at ffOS. Other maps exists, mozilla has strong ties with Google, Mozilla chose this one as default. Also see above. My limited experience with here maps from windows mobile showed me a great service, so maybe the author is off on this one. Here Maps is also going thru updates and is working better than before. Its a good map. I like the offline saving of maps, makes me use less internet. > I don't know what the feature phone market looks like in Brazil, but if its anything like the Chinese, then it doesn't sound like the ZTE Open beats the feature phone market. We don't have the ZTE open in here, we have the Alcatel One Touch Fire and the LG Fireweb. They are all similar. They perform better than the feature phones. Our main difficulty right now is the lack of apps (its getting better) and the quality of some apps (its also getting better). > I was getting a ffOS phone for christmas, until I realized that the only one available to me is a ZTE Open. It really does look like a crappy representative for ffOS, but if this is what Mozilla and ZTE decided on, then the software side should run more than decently. The ZTE is a cool phone but it is a low end device, you can't compare it with a heavily subsided phone such as the moto g. They have different purposes. One thing that some people often doesn't realize is that Mozilla launched an open system with at least 4 hardware partners and 18 carriers this year. A system that promotes open standards and freedom from a community that values your privacy. Mozilla doesn't operate to generate profit and answers to no one but the users. This is a system made by people that have the same values as we do and we're moving fast.

cpleppert 13y ago
> Adaptative search does not look like a marketplace, it looks like a search engine. There is a marketplace icon that launches the marketplace app which has a experience similar to other app stores. The reviewer was probably right to be confused as it isn't clear from basic descriptions of the OS exactly how it works. Instead, there is buzzword fluff (HTML5! HTML5!) and marketing jargon about the 'web'. I am very technical and I still am not clear about how firefox os applications work. Are there additional APIs available to applications from the marketplace? Are applications downloaded by the launcher or does every application act like a web link, or is there a combination of the two?
- rhelmer 13y ago
  You can add any web page to the home screen as a launchable icon (the "adaptive app search" lets you search through curated ones), which is basically a standalone chromeless browser. Open Web Apps can be packaged and served via the Marketplace (or downloaded directly), and have access to new platform APIs (via javascript), that are being standardized: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Apps https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Apps
- soapdog 13y ago
  There are additional APIs available to all applications. They don't need to come from the marketplace to use such APIs. An application can use the "Open Web Apps API" to install itself onto the phone (with the user permission) bypassing the marketplace. So you can distribute your own apps on third party marketplaces or on your own web page. There are two types of applications: Hosted and Packaged. Hosted apps are normal web pages that you host somewhere and access from the device. If you use appcache and responsive design, they will provide an experience like what native apps provide in other platforms. The packaged apps instead of being hosted are packaged and offered on the marketplace. Its basically a zipfile with your HTML/CSS/JS, when it is installed this zipfile is copied to the device and sandboxed. There are three security levels. Plain, Privileged and Certified. These security levels govern what APIs your app can access. Hosted apps are always plain apps. Packaged apps can be plain apps too but they can also be privileged apps that can access an extra set of APIs or certified apps that can access every API on the device. Only Mozilla and its hardware partners can build and deploy certified apps due to security reasons (you don't want an app with the ability to send SMS or make calls without user interaction). So in summary, you can have plain web links in the launcher and you can have links to packaged apps that are actually on the device. Both things are possible and indistinguishable from a user point of view. Both solutions work offline if you use appcache with the hosted app. If you want to know more, I've written a Free and Open eBook about it called "Firefox OS Development Quick Guide" available at http://leanpub.com/quickguidefirefoxosdevelopment/ http://leanpub.com/quickguidefirefoxosdevelopment/ you can also hop by Mozilla Developer Network portal for Firefox OS at https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox_OS https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox_OS =)

by soapdog 13y ago

cpleppert 13y ago

> Adaptative search does not look like a marketplace, it looks like a search engine. There is a marketplace icon that launches the marketplace app which has a experience similar to other app stores. The reviewer was probably right to be confused as it isn't clear from basic descriptions of the OS exactly how it works. Instead, there is buzzword fluff (HTML5! HTML5!) and marketing jargon about the 'web'. I am very technical and I still am not clear about how firefox os applications work. Are there additional APIs available to applications from the marketplace? Are applications downloaded by the launcher or does every application act like a web link, or is there a combination of the two?

rhelmer 13y ago
You can add any web page to the home screen as a launchable icon (the "adaptive app search" lets you search through curated ones), which is basically a standalone chromeless browser. Open Web Apps can be packaged and served via the Marketplace (or downloaded directly), and have access to new platform APIs (via javascript), that are being standardized: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Apps https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Apps
soapdog 13y ago
There are additional APIs available to all applications. They don't need to come from the marketplace to use such APIs. An application can use the "Open Web Apps API" to install itself onto the phone (with the user permission) bypassing the marketplace. So you can distribute your own apps on third party marketplaces or on your own web page. There are two types of applications: Hosted and Packaged. Hosted apps are normal web pages that you host somewhere and access from the device. If you use appcache and responsive design, they will provide an experience like what native apps provide in other platforms. The packaged apps instead of being hosted are packaged and offered on the marketplace. Its basically a zipfile with your HTML/CSS/JS, when it is installed this zipfile is copied to the device and sandboxed. There are three security levels. Plain, Privileged and Certified. These security levels govern what APIs your app can access. Hosted apps are always plain apps. Packaged apps can be plain apps too but they can also be privileged apps that can access an extra set of APIs or certified apps that can access every API on the device. Only Mozilla and its hardware partners can build and deploy certified apps due to security reasons (you don't want an app with the ability to send SMS or make calls without user interaction). So in summary, you can have plain web links in the launcher and you can have links to packaged apps that are actually on the device. Both things are possible and indistinguishable from a user point of view. Both solutions work offline if you use appcache with the hosted app. If you want to know more, I've written a Free and Open eBook about it called "Firefox OS Development Quick Guide" available at http://leanpub.com/quickguidefirefoxosdevelopment/ http://leanpub.com/quickguidefirefoxosdevelopment/ you can also hop by Mozilla Developer Network portal for Firefox OS at https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox_OS https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox_OS =)