By Stephen Schenck | November 22, 2010 8:05 PM
The Mozilla Foundation revealed that it’s been working on an app store concept of its own, as discussed in its most recent “The State of Mozilla” report. Unlike the offerings from Apple and for Android devices, Mozilla-based apps would be fully cross-platform.
The idea for the store would have it be an “Open Web App ecosystem”, built around your smartphone’s web browser, with the apps themselves written in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It should be easy for developers who have written existing web-based apps to adapt them to work with Mozilla’s storefront and app repository. That last bit will be accessible to the user through a web-based app dashboard, where you can choose which programs to launch.
Some of these ideas really stand out as having the potential to be quite exciting. The ability to buy an app once, and then be able to use it not only on different devices, but across different mobile platforms, sounds like an incredible proposition. The tricky bit, at least from a developer’s prospective, is making sure that the user experience is consistent when dealing with all the variables that kind of system uncertainty brings into play. Reliance on standards like HTML5 should go a long way to help.
The technical documentation for Mozilla’s system is available now if you’re so inclined to wade through it.
