Comment by mikemajzoub | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikemajzoub | Hacker News Reader

I am SO excited about the possibilities Firefox OS provides. I do realize it's in early stages now, and there are many hurdles for the Mozilla team to overcome for it to become a real player in the market, but I'm crossing my fingers.

Specifically, I can't wait to see what local developers in developing countries create to improve the lives of people within their communities and societies. With the barrier to entry lower to develop these HTML5 apps (not only concerning the tech stack, but also regarding the cost to buy hardware), I expect the app development community will gain valuable members with more diverse backgrounds and life experiences.

From what I observe in myself and in those around me, I think we are best at addressing challenges we have been personally affected by. Therefore, I think great potential rests in empowering people from all around the world, living in incredibly diverse communities, to create local solutions to local problems.

Mozilla team - keep it up, my friends. I'm rooting for you!

>I can't wait to see what local developers in developing countries create to improve the lives of people within their communities and societies.

I can't resist the urge to plug my project here. It failed as a Show HN, but now it's very relevant: https://github.com/geomaster/beoprevoz. In short, it's a neat public transport FxOS app, specific to Belgrade, Serbia (but in theory and by design pluggable and easy to generalize to arbitrary areas), that boasts some cool features, such as Google Places/Google Maps integration, local data to make it independent of Internet access, an optimized client-side routing algorithm for shortest-path calculation, among others. Check it out, all feedback welcome! (It's even multilingual :)

Hey geomaster! Long time no see... You probably know who I am... That's a great app, mine (Wi-Fi password search) failed since Mozilla didn't want to approve it due to it sending location data to the server, so in the end it never even had the chance to enter the Telenor competition. Congrats on the app and the prizes.

I never imagined I'd run into you here, in all of places! Thanks for all the kind words and, having experienced something of a sort before, I really feel sorry for your situation with the app. I have skimmed through your websites and I see you have greatly improved in a multitude of aspects since I last saw any word from you. Keep striving for greatness, and if you wanna talk, drop me a line (email is in my profile) :)

Thank you very much. I am restarting that project for Android this time, so maybe I'll have more-ish success. I'll contact you.

i do think they're making a mistake by not providing FxOS (nightlies) for higher-end devices. they would have so much more dev talent to fill their store and help find bugs and provide feedback. i've been wanting to try it and make apps for it but there's nothing available that i can install without having to build it myself. (HTC Jewel / EVO 4G LTE)

Mozilla can't provide base images without licensing proprietary software (for the RIL primarily, although there may be others depending on the hardware).

Also the focus for Mozilla right now is on providing new low-end hardware and optimizing for that. It's possible to build and flash onto your own hardware, people on the XDA forums have done it.

Testing web apps in the simulator (or just with the responsive design tool) is totally doable right now, but it's hard to get an idea of performance without actually testing on a target device.

> Mozilla can't provide base images without licensing proprietary software (for the RIL primarily, although there may be others depending on the hardware).

how do the AOSP/CM11 devs do it?

For my device, they would just distribute the blobs of all drivers that they don't have the source to.

Unfortunately it is part of their push to lock down the web. Lock it down to legacy languages - JavaScript and HTML. Transpilation is of course not an answer, because it is not nearly same development experience. I hope mainstream platform providers and democratic solution providers such as Xamarin will keep on their good work in letting us use the languages we love, be it Scala, F#, C# on any other as beautiful.

Well said! Congrats indeed to Mozilla for making this happen.

Does anybody know of a good resource for asking folks that work in/with developing countries what apps would make the most difference in the lives of the folks living there? Is there a StackExchange site that might fit the bill?

Really well put, thanks for sharing.

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