Mozilla Wants Hundreds Of Thousands Of Firefox OS Developers | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla Wants Hundreds Of Thousands Of Firefox OS Developers

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107 pointsmaudlinmau553 comments

I want mozilla to charge a reasonable price for app developers. Basically, not 30%, but 10%. I want them to be self sustaining and successful, but also apply pricing pressure on the other markets who are just charging waaayyyy too much. I can't believe even MS is getting into the game, making an app used to be free...

I was confused by this statement, which I think you're referring to:

"Firefox add-ons are free and those for Firefox OS will certainly be free also."

I'm not sure if that means there will be no paid apps for Firefox OS, or that Mozilla won't take a cut on paid apps, or just that Mozilla won't charge developers a fee to list an app.

I hope it's the last option. They should allow paid apps and take a small cut, as you said, so they have a funding source other than Google, increasingly their competitor.

But they have time to figure out the funding aspect. I just looked up the story about the latest Google/Mozilla deal in December (I'd forgotten the details), and it turns out it's almost $900 million over three years: https://allthingsd.com/20111222/google-will-pay-mozilla-almo...

There will be paid apps and there will be free apps. Submitting an app will not cost anything and can currently be done at https://marketplace.mozilla.org/en-US/developers/

MDN currently says it's 30%: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Apps/Marketplace_Payments

It might be useful to bring your idea up on the marketplace mailing list, if for nothing else than to get context on why the current number was chosen: http://www.mozilla.org/about/forums/#dev-marketplace

In order to provide phone-bill based billing, opposed to credit card based, Mozilla will need a large healthy margin.

Phone companies want semi-ridiculous fees which make paypal & credit card's 3% look generous. Yet I think Mozilla would be wise to leave phonebilling open as an option. Carriers demand profit and are scared of Apple making them redundant.

That 30% is thus leverage and running things close to cost at 10% would reduce Firefox OS's appeal to carriers. At the end of the day Mozilla needs to keep the carriers happy to succeed.

Before you make such demands, it is not perhaps a good idea to understand where that 30% fee goes? Hosting, distribution, payment collection etc are an important part of an app market and they aren't free.

I agree so much. Not-for-profit asking 30% ? Really? Really-really? Yes sure you need money to go on making stuff, but as much as Apple and Google? Give me a break.

That's for-profit, nothing more, nothing less.

Want devs? Well, just take whatever is needed to drive the infrastructure, not a penny more.

Remember, Apple doesn't make any money off the App Store, analysis has shown it's a pretty much break even business.

I would be interested in seeing the numbers on this, as I have a hard time figuring out how they could not make a huge profit on selling other people's work.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-20008540-37.html is one of many results on Google with the numbers.

Thanks for the link. It may not be a cash cow in comparison to the rest of Apple's business, but a 44% gross profit margin sounds pretty substantial to me.

I think you misread that article. In the most basic sense, it isn't possible for Apple to get 44% profit margin when developers get 70%.

Here's how I understand the argument in the article (but keep in mind the numbers are as of 2010 so they aren't current.)

Basically, the article is saying that Apple claimed that developers earned $1 billion through 2010. Since developers earn 70%, the total revenue coming into Apple would be a billion / .7 = 1.428 billion giving them a profit of $428 million (matching the figure in the article). Then the article does some estimations about how much of that $428 million goes to the credit card company and is used for processing instead of being Apple's profit and calculates that Apple only gets 44% of their 30% as profit. (Although comments on the article suggest that Apple might be able to get more favorable deals with the credit card company than what was used in the estimations.)

So if you trust the article's credit processing fee assumptions, then Apple gets $189 million of the $1.428 billion which is about 13%. And if you factor in their costs for free apps ($81 million is cited in the article), the effective percentage becomes ((189-81)/189) * 13% = 7%.

Edit: I'm pretty sure these numbers are the right interpretation of the article. Somebody in the comments mentioned that the 44% should be 14% net profit since it matches some graph that I haven't seen and that seems similar to the 13% I got in the above calculations.

I don't know anything about the app store, but the 70% is purportedly the developer's revenue from someone's app purchase. The 44% profit margin would mean that about half of Apple's 30% app-revenue-cut goes to the cost of running the store and a little less than half goes to Apple's coffers.

Right. But I think the more significant number is what percentage of a user's purchase becomes profit for Apple. After including expenses for free apps (assuming the numbers in the article are accurate and keeping in mind this is old data), the profit margin on that 30% drops from 44% to around 25% such that Apple nets about 7% of App Store sales.

Here you are: iTunes & App Store cost Apple $1.3 billion a year http://www.asymco.com/2011/06/13/itunes-now-costs-1-3-billio...

I'm pretty sure that's because they still insist on manually approving every single app.

I don't think the analysis shows that it's break-even. They may be failing to make money on it because they're reinvesting on capacity.

Making an app is still basically free, and if your app is free publishing to most App stores is also free.

Marketing and distributing professional apps on a commercial scale has never been free. That's what App stores do.

? How is making an app basically free ... paying a developer for 3 - 6 months is quite expensive, then artwork and sound.

They won't lock down the distribution source as Apple does so you might have competition among marketplace providers. If you think 30% is too high, you are free to create your own marketplace with a 10% cut.

“In terms of architecture, it is an operating system based on Linux, just as Android is. But we rely on Gecko, the Firefox web browser layout engine, to run applications written entirely in HTML5. We dropped XUL (the XML User Interface Language) in favour of HTML5, a language known to all web developers.”

It’s like WebOS all over again, but without its good looks.

I believe WebOS has its own development stack, whereas Firefox OS is pure HTML5 with some extension APIs: https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebAPI

Furthermore, quoting the above link: "Once we have an API that we feel that we are satisfied with, we will submit the new API for standardization to the W3C. The goal is to standardize all APIs."

As for looks, these screenshots look pretty slick to me: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/b2g/

My point was that HTML5 apps have proven not to be a suitable replacement for native apps. Not just for games and multimedia (can you imagine Infinity Blade or iMovie in HTML5?), but even simple tableview web apps are not as smooth as native apps.

“these screenshots look pretty slick to me”

You're entitled to your opinion, but it looks incoherent and garish to me. Like something you can buy from 99designs. Not even in the same league as WebOS.

The reason HTML5 apps have proven not to be a full replacement for native apps is that no-one has actually tried it (on the OS side). Apple (weirdly) have come the closest, but there's still a hell of a long way to go. From my personal experience making webapps, the following is needed:

- Some sort of app store like central place of discovery

- Access to far more native APIs / intents. Control over elements like the keyboard.

- Fixed positioning (finally arrived in iOS5, not sure about Android)

- The ability to actually play an audio file correctly

- More control over video playing

That's just a short list but it goes on and on. There's absolutely no reason why an HTML5-based app can't be as good as a native one. I think that Mozilla are ideally placed to be the ones to try. I'm still amazed/disappointed that Google haven't.

1. Exists in Firefox OS

2. Getting there in Firefox OS, already impressive.

3. Not sure what you mean here... "fixed positioning" without context makes me cringe. (edit: Oh... position: fixed has been available in Android browser and Chrome for Android for... a long time. I'm sure it's in Gecko [that, and the demo shows Twitter who uses position: fixed])

4. Not sure what that means, but I'd like to think it's a priority.

5. Popcorn.js, while I'm not a fan, is something Mozilla is pouring effort into. MediaSource API coming out of Google looks to add an appendBytes (ala Flash) style API to Javascript enabling adaptive streaming.

It's getting there. :)

Not sure what you mean here... "fixed positioning" without context makes me cringe

In the CSS sense. That is to say, the ability to have a toolbar that doesn't disappear when you scroll.

3. CSS (position: fixed)

4. Audio on the web stack sucks now

Fixed positioning works on FF on Android but native browsers on older Android versions...not so much.

"My point was that HTML5 apps have proven not to be a full replacement for native apps."

Taking an all html5 approach is an interesting one, and has the straight up advantage of harnessing existing html5 developer skills. But performance and polish are important requirements, which so far I've seen only native apps deliver best. Let's see if Mozilla can make good on its bet that html5 can equal native apps. I'd be happy to see them succeed.

Bringing up Infinity Blade is a bit unfair. Native apps have had a long time to reach a healthy state. HTML5 is a bit of a new world. Sure, the iPhone used to run HTML webapps, which didn't work. But the web wasn't ready yet (back when Javascript was very slow). The web is getting to a ready point. It's not quite there yet, but Mozilla is making an early move to influence the apps market where everything is web standardized and developers aren't forced to choose between Apple and Google.

> My point was that HTML5 apps have proven not to be a suitable replacement for native apps.

Not sure that's been proven. After all, companies like Apple and Google seem to disagree, as they put out HTML5 apps. We are seeing the same transition that occurred on the desktop now happen on mobile.

The two biggest issues with HTML5 apps are hardware acceleration and (on IOS, because Apple likes to fuck developers) lack of JIT compilers.

There is no reason why these things would be missing on a Firefox phone.

I hope Firefox OS will get frequent updates just like desktop browsers. If Mozilla manages to bring all the advantages of modern desktop browser technologies on to a mobile platform, I vision they will gain their market share.

but everyone hates firefox updates: http://www.forbes.com/sites/adriankingsleyhughes/2012/07/10/... ;)

I agree though, anything to push desktop browser technologies to a mobile platform faster is a great thing.

"75 percent of applications are already designed in HTML5, with an overlay to fit smartphones from Apple or Google."

I'd really like a source for this. He seems to be saying that 75% of apps on the App Store and Google Play are HTML with a thin wrapper – the PhoneGap model. This doesn't match the top apps on either store, they're overwhelmingly native code.

Is there some kind of a long tail of HTML5 apps out there? Does Mozilla count every app that uses some kind of a web view? Or did they just make the number up?

They probably mean that many applications also have an HTML5 version that's optimized for mobile phones.

It will be nice when this is available; to think we might actually be able to use a mobile device that doesn't try to siphon all our personal data through Google or Apple.

Apple wants your credit card on file for you to do impulse shopping. Apple would also like you to buy a new device every few years. It has little interest in your personal data, but it will hold on to it if you want a backup.

Google has a different business model, in which “getting to know the users” is essential.

I can't imagine Firefox OS won't have a cloud component. Already Firefox has a syncing service.

In the end, every consumer has to choose for themselves who to trust with their information. Mozilla's future business model isn't clear to me, right now it is way too dependent on Google. Just as I don't trust Google with my information, right now I don't trust Mozilla with it.

With their (partly) nonprofit status and history of open development, Mozilla is maybe the only player in tech that I _would_ trust with my information. That's why I find Firefox OS really exciting.

They have an interesting setup with a for-profit corporation (Mozilla Corp.), which is wholly owned by a nonprofit Mozilla Foundation. So as I understand it, they can make money, but are obligated to stick to the foundation's stated goals. Something like that... it sounds like a clever legal hack.

Pretty much all their development happens in the open, and you can read the details of everything they're working on on the wiki. https://wiki.mozilla.org/ And they designed Firefox Sync with end-to-end encryption, so they couldn't possibly read your bookmarks. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/mobile/sync/ You can't go farther to protect privacy than that.

As for the Google connection, apparently Microsoft (Bing) and Yahoo were competing for the contract to be the default search engine in Firefox, which is why Google ended up paying so much more recently (December 2011) than last time: https://allthingsd.com/20111222/google-will-pay-mozilla-almo...

I bet this is a big reason why Google is fighting so hard to get people over to Chrome. If they erode Firefox's market share enough, that price will go down. But so far, it doesn't look like Mozilla has made any concessions to Google. Rather the reverse.

> I can't imagine Firefox OS won't have a cloud component. Already Firefox has a syncing service.

Firefox Sync encrypts the data on the device, so Mozilla can't read your data.

>It has little interest in your personal data, but it will hold on to it if you want a backup.

I find that statement to be incredibly naive. Personal data has immense value to companies and Apple already has experience in advertising.

There's also a big difference between Apple and Mozilla. Apple clearly wants all your data in their iCloud and the new version of OS X will seemingly push that aggressively. Mozilla on the otherhand uses client side encryption for Sync and you can run your own Sync server. [1]

[1] http://docs.services.mozilla.com/howtos/run-sync.html

If Firefox (browser) is fully Open Source and doesn't require any patent fees (eg for H.264), will Firefox OS be the same? Will all hardware drivers be Open Source? Will Firefox OS never be able to play H.264 video? Or are Mozilla getting around this somehow?

At the very least I hope they require some sort of cross-compatibility from manufacturers, which Google never did, and just let manufacturers do whatever they wanted with it. Also no one should be able to modify it but Mozilla. I'm a big fan of Android, but I feel Google could've taken a different direction early on, and it would've still worked out for them, considering there was no real alternative to the iPhone in the first 3 years.

That's not how the market works. Every large phone manufacturer already had big investments in would-be iOS competitors, such as Symbian or Bada or Maemo/MeeGo or WinMo. These companies are also big enough to not see the impeding danger of their conservative investments until it is too late.

The iPhone wasn't considered a real threat (remember how Ballmer laughed at the iPhone?). If the requirements for Android would have been restrictive enough for manufacturers to realize that Android is a great deal, I don't think it would have caught on so well and Microsoft could have eaten their launch, since they are better at selling operating systems.

Firefox can use gstreamer as a backend for HTML5 video:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=422540

I guess a handset manufacturer could ship with e.g. H.264 support if they paid licensing fees. There are open source H.264 codecs by the way, but licensing is a separate issue.

I'm supportive of the effort here, but frankly expect this to go nowhere for a few reasons.

- O/S alternatives such as WebOS and Android already exist, so the premise isn't really new.

- Without hardware distribution, the experience is going to suck. Unless there are carriers and device makers signed up, this is a non-starter.

- Mindshare from market share: ios/android/win currently represent the aggregate market in terms of apps. And that's where the app developers are.

- As a consumer, what makes me want a phone with this OS on it?

As for the sales pitch, the combo of better-technical-solution + open-source-appeal doesn't really resonate with me as a difference maker.

Firefox OS = Chrome OS for phones

ie a way to encourage webapps rather then attempt to capture os marketshare.

What about the existence of other open source OS, such as Tizen, webOS, etc.

One of the interesting things of Mozilla's approach is that their entire stack is standard HTML (or, it is planned to get it standardised).

Assuming they stick to this, and other browsers adopt the standard, it means that developing an app for Firefox OS is also developing an app for iOS, Android, WebOS etc. Their big push is for a web-stack, not necessarily for their OS.

None of the other major mobile operating systems (open or closed) have the same cachet as Mozilla. In particular, Mozilla has gone to great lengths to zealously cultivate a consistent image of web-centric ideals above pretty much all else. Other mobile operating systems are tainted by corporate interests, even if only in [mis]perception alone when compared against Mozilla.

Mozilla has been trying to reinvent itself and adapt to the mobile onslaught. Increasingly, mobile is being seen as the gateway to billions of people coming online. Mozilla's mission is to "promote openness, innovation and opportunity on the web", and they have seen that desktops are being outsold by mobile units[1] and transitioned accordingly.

FirefoxOS is the foundation's big bet on mobile. Beyond just Mozilla's unique position(ing) in the mobile marketplace, IMO the biggest difference between FirefoxOS and other open source mobile operating systems is that they are betting most of the farm on this. Although the article references that "Firefox OS is a strategic project for Mozilla", I believe that Mozilla's long-term success and relevance will hinge on the success of their Firephones.

Frankly, I'm really happy and amazed that they've been able to get the number of carriers publicly announcing support in this manner that they did for distribution.

Carriers (not necessarily all of the ones listed) don't like how their brands are being potentially diluted and damaged by end-user Android upgrade hell. I don't know what upgrade vision Mozilla sold carriers on, but I sure hope they've got a more solid plan than "we'll copy Android!".

More than likely they said something along the likes of "similar to our near-automated desktop browser update process, less controlling than Apple but not as chaotic as Android." Too bad the carrier meeting minutes and agreements are not listed in the public wiki.

Carriers hate churn -- it's really expensive when they lose a customer. Contract penalties help mitigate economic losses somewhat, but brand loyalty and relevance are getting harder and harder for most operators to retain. Ironically, it's the same desperation to remain relevant that drives the Mozilla Foundation.

Without relevance, mind-share and brand/mission loyalty, it's hard to effect great change amongst billions of people. Money follows when you get the first three factors right.

[1] http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2012/06/massive...

EDIT: 'Desperation to remain relevant' could be misconstrued as Mozilla being coerced into this particular course of action. I'm not saying that Mozilla is currently in dire straits, but mean that they are voluntarily and pre-emptively putting considerable weight, energy and focus into the mobile arena where they feel they can make a big difference and considerably grow their mindshare footprint, which in turn leads to higher conversion rates for people willing to embrace their mission ideals of web openness.

Fair enough. It's interesting how Tizen fizzled out despite being the combination of like three previous mobile OS's.

also, they don't want to give them any google money.

good luck with that, bros.

In case you didn't read the article, Mozilla was talking about app developers, not system developers.

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