Firefox OS Apps run on Android
hacks.mozilla.org
hacks.mozilla.org
- Calculator. Whenever I press a number, it takes a second to be actually reflected in the user interface. If I try to press anything in rapid succession, the entire view zooms in. After this the entire size and scale of the user interface keeps shifting randomly. Completely broken.
- Wikihow. This is just a wrapper on their mobile site with an ugly search bar on top. Long pressing a link shows a context menu that lets me "open in a new tab" but there's no tab switcher to be found. I can select text by tapping and holding but can't figure out how to copy.
- Wikipedia. Pretty much the same. Scrolling performance is strangely atrocious considering that it works fine in Firefox for Android. Pressing the back button on the device boots me out of the app instantly instead of, you know, going back.
And all in all, they are all just slow and clunky. It feels like browsing a web page or using a web app in a mobile browser that just isn't up to the task.
In between this aim on building a more open platform for apps, there doesn't seem to be any focus in building apps or user interfaces that people would actually want to use.
...that app will then act just like any other app. It's pretty neat
I guess its just young.
"We share your frustration with the tradeoffs we have to make on Android regarding security versus openness, as I’m sure Amazon does as well. For example, it would be cool if we could ask people to trust apps they install from marketplace.firefox.com rather than from all sources. Unfortunately, I don’t think we have that option.
We, along with third-party native android app stores like Amazon, chosen to ask users to enable the third-party application setting because we think the benefits to users of our ecosystem outweigh the risks of doing so. We believe our security model and strict control over permissions for web apps means that the Firefox Marketplace apps that users install on their Android devices will be safe."
"it would be cool if we could ask people to trust apps they install from marketplace.firefox.com rather than from all sources."
This would be so handy for me, but it probably doesn't matter as my next phone is probably going to be an iPhone.
However, "We believe our security model and strict control over permissions for web apps means that the Firefox Marketplace apps that users install on their Android devices will be safe" basically misses the problem.
The problem is not that the Mozilla or Amazon marketplaces are unsafe, I would rate them at the same as Google Play itself, but that the phone now allows APK's from everywhere. While it would turn more users away from using them, it would almost be better to actually tell people to re-enable the restrictions, or have an install app that will turn it on, install from their marketplace and then turn it off again.
I understand why they are doing it but I think in the end it is really bad for end-user security on Android.
People are advised everywhere to not enable 'Install from untrusted sources' for very good reasons: Android is plagued by an insane amount of malware. And now we confuse them by saying that "our security model" is great and that it is all ok.
But it is not ok. It is half the story. Even if our apps are safe, we make it a little easier for that malware to get on a device.
And nobody will just temporarily enable 'install from untrusted sources'. Once allowed, people are most likely never looking at it again.
I am not saying that the Google Play store is free of Malware. It is not. But I do think that malicious apps are then at least contained and controlled. With the option for untrusted sources enabled, apps can come from any place. Email, web, other apps, etc.
It puts users at risk.
It is a step backward in Android security.
I'm pretty sure they added this option as an enforcement to use only Play. I would be surprised to see Google adding trusted sources. I do not believe that it's OK to kill competition in the name of so-called security.
On the other hand my mum doesnt know that option yet got Play malware pretty quickly. Go figure.
Think of the Children! :)
I've been to websites that automatically trigger the download of an apk to your phone. Without that setting it is only one or two wrong clicks and you've got all sorts of malware on your device.
It's not about competition, running a phone with that option switched off is dangerous.
It isn't dangerous at all, you can't 'accidently' install an apk. It is a very intentional, multi-step, action.
Much easier and safer to have third party stuff disabled entirely.
I think there should be a way to install third party certificates for things like the amazon store, don't get me wrong, but it's a decent security feature for the uninformed masses.
So chances are, on the spectrum you are more hacker than uninformed user.
Firefox Marketplace is a known source. It's just not something Google will whitelist.
What the community need to include in their AOSP-derived distros is a UI user-specifying trusted repositories.
If the user then wants to add the marketplace or, say, f-droid then they could mark these as 'trusted'. Which would then still prevent downloading an .apk from a dodgy site.
But yes, extending that to something deeper is probably needed, but you almost end up needing to alter the signing model of apks slightly. In the case of Amazon distributed builds I believe Amazon re-sign the apk completely, which is a bit of a workaround, whereas Google distribute the apks with the developer signatures. Really what you want is a chain of trust to sources of apps that the user trusts.
[1] http://phoboslab.org/xtype
[2] http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2014/02/developer_interview...
Mozilla is taking the opposite approach. Their platform already has reasonable support because it doesn't take too much effort to port an existing web application to their platform. By making apps for their platform compatible with android, they might get developers building for Firefox OS first and then just reusing their Firefox app for android. It sounds like a bit of a stretch, but developers already do this with tech like phonegap. This will attract the same crowd as other html5->native app development platforms do.
The advantage for Mozilla here is that if developers use their devevelopers tools to make apps, their apps will look more in place on Firefox OS and advance the platform.
-Symbian didn't
-MeeGo didn't (sigh, my beautiful N9...)
-Windows Phone didn't
-S40 didn't
You might be confusing Nokia with BlackBerry, which did make Android support a feature of BB10.
History is very slippery.
edit: Looks like there were press releases about it being available for N9 and N900. My history is slippery, too:) It never was.
...and have their apps universally panned for being just terrible in general.
And is it compatible with the equivalent Chrome OS APIs or are we looking at writing web apps two different ways?
See https://hacks.mozilla.org/2014/06/testing-your-native-androi... for an example
some API's are the same as Chrome OS, some are not; we are talking regularly with those folks about standardizing API's.
Mozilla's APIs: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API
[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/WebAPI/WebBluetooth
Cordova/phoneGap already has lots of plugins for in app billing, push messaging, etc....
It's part of Mozilla's push in their portion of the mobile space to get away from the walled garden app ecosystem as much as possible.
However, if you need rich cross platform support for your app (like iOS) I'd still suggest going with Cordova. There is a Firefox OS backend! https://github.com/apache/cordova-firefoxos
Another reason is that, while I am not very familiar with internals, I think running FxOS app on Android is much easier than native Android on FxOS. Because FxOS app essentially is just a web app, which Android is capable of running out of the box. Can't say the same about Android apps.
So not sure what's your argument for that?
I found a bug [1] mentioning that gecko has to be loaded in the web app's process and that takes much of the time. But it got closed because no one seems to know how to improve it.
It's better than nothing, but it's hard to send the user to Firefox on Android knowing that their experience is going to be plagued by this.
Chrome's "Add to homescreen" is faster but not quite there yet (2 seconds for launching duckduckgo).
I mean, if I were Mozilla, I'd work very hard to get Android apps to work on Firefox OS, not the other way around.
Running Android apps on Firefox OS would be in direct conflict with that mission. Allowing developers to target both FFOS+Android with a single standards-track web application is definitely on mission.
So people with very limited financial resources to begin with will be able to buy ultra-low-end phones that offer poor performance and a poor user experience. Then they'll only be able to choose among a very small selection of apps, none of which end up being particularly useful. And although they have basically no money to spend at this point, somehow their mere presence online will somehow induce companies, who need to make or take money from these users somehow, to create more apps?
It just doesn't follow. It makes even less sense when you consider that it's possible to get used Android phones in these target markets for the same amount of money, if not less. And these Android phones often end up being more capable than a new, low-end phone running Firefox OS. Plus they offer all of the numerous benefits (like better performance and far more apps) that even old versions of Android offer over Firefox OS.
I want to run firefox webapps on chrome and chrome webapps on firefox, and both of them on IE. Obviously that doesnt work today.
Supporting something and using it in real life is two different things. If you have really used Firefox OS, you will never want to switch to it, unless you want to experiment with it. It is not even a good match to the low cost android phones.
Android and iOS both offer "bookmark to home screen" features that include some of this functionality, but not all of it.