Comment by soapdog | Hacker News Reader

Comment by soapdog | Hacker News Reader

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Hi Jenna,

Disclaimer: I am a Mozilla Rep. When you face this kind of issue there are some quick ways that you can reach us for feedback and issue solving:

1) You can write to app-reviewers@mozilla.org 2) You can talk on IRC channel: #app-reviewers on irc.mozilla.org

The IRC is the best option in my opinion because there are always a bunch of people there and its quicker to talk to a human than to exchange emails.

Some marketplace tools are still evolving and its only getting better. Whenever you find false positives or bugs in the app submission process, you can fill a bug report on bugzilla. People will notice and act upon it.

Also remember that the Firefox Marketplace is not your only venue for distribution, you can distribute your app on your own site using the Open Web Apps API (http://wiki.mozilla.org/WebAPI). This API works well for hosted apps and even though it is documented for packaged apps as well I am not sure it works for privileged packaged apps yet.

Firefox OS is a great system with lots of potential and Mozilla is more open about its processes than other vendors. I hope you stick around with us and keep developing great apps. I am sure your RSS reader will be aproved soon, can't wait to use it (and I like the flat version more than the previous one).

Thanks for the tips, perhaps the email and the IRC channel could be promoted a bit more prominent during the submission process. I was writing on two lists b2g-dev and web-apps, and I was on IRC in #b2g sadly no one mentioned the app-reviewers channels.

I am definitely sticking around, just the fact that I can write apps and run them on my own hardware without applying for permission every year is worth more then the money I gave apple for it. And as others stated, at Mozilla you still can talk to real people through some other channels, so you don't just have to give up.

Indeed you can self-host and use the owa API to let user install your hosted or packaged application. This will not let you install privileged apps though since they have to be reviewed.

>This will not let you install privileged apps though since they have to be reviewed.

so even Firefox OS is a walled garden? Telcos controlled what can be on your phone, Apple was able to wrestle them and overtake that control - control means money. Google follows the suit, forcing their in-app billing etc... Why would Mozilla support that ugly ancient "tradition"?

Safety. If you don't have restrictions, you get something like Windows/os x. Everyone can install anything they want from any source and that is also what makes Windows/os x much more vulnerable then Android or iOS. Priveleged apps are special applications with more permissions then normal apps, for example they can access the sd-card, while normal (web-installed) applications cannot. For more information you could take a look at: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Apps/App_permis...

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