On 30 January 2015 at 18:40, Kevin Grandon <kgran...@mozilla.com> wrote:
> Do we really want to fully deprecate packaged apps? I think making hosted > apps and packaged apps equals is a big win, but I'm not sure if fully > deprecating packaged apps is a good idea. > Packaged apps are not web apps. They don't have a URL so are not linkable, crawlable, indexable, searchable or discoverable like the rest of the web and they are always proprietary to one OS. We tried to standardise packaged apps, and it didn't work out. Packaged apps were always intended as a temporary solution, but we never figured out the security model to allow us to get rid of them. > > There are many developers who like the ability to not run and maintain a > server. It's simply less work and overhead for them to throw their code up > on a marketplace, and not have to worry about a monthly server cost, or a > server going down. > If that really is a problem then Mozilla should offer web app hosting, which is what we are essentially doing, but we're using packaged apps which force a centralised app store model. We can never possibly compete using that model because it relies on app developers submitting their apps to our app store. We have the same chicken and egg bootstrapping problem as every other proprietary OS. The only way the web can win is if the web itself is the one source of truth, all web apps have a URL, they use a standard cross-platform manifest format and anyone can create their own curated collection of those apps. If someone creates a web app with a W3C web app manifest so that it can be installed on Android via Google Chrome, then it is automatically useful on Firefox OS too. And every OS which supports the web. Having all web apps be hosted and cross-platform means that rather than trying to convince app developers to submit their proprietary Firefox apps to our empty Firefox OS app store, we just crawl the web looking for web manifests of apps people already created for the web. To save me ranting further in this thread, you can read more about my take on this here :) https://slack-files.com/T033ZPYCR-F03BRU38Z-1ce3da2e74 _______________________________________________ dev-webapps mailing list dev-webapps@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-webapps
