Marketplace/Filtering

The Marketplace has been placed into maintenance mode. It is no longer under active development. You can read complete details here.

Overview

Content on the Marketplace is filtered. How this is treated is slightly different between the "Feed" pages (homepage and Feed Item detail pages) and other pages, but will soon be the same.

Homepage and Feed Item detail pages

1. The desktop promo area of the homepage is not filtered at all.
2. The apps list area (formerly known as "The Feed") of the homepage is currently filtered via the API (not client-side), which means that determinant data is sent with API requests:
   1. status -- apps need to be public to be shown
   2. region
   3. feature profile -- only on FxOS
3. The Feed Item detail pages are treated the same as the apps list area, explained above.

Which means that apps are currently filtered out by platform (user-controlled), and by feature detection (FxOS only).

Display logic

• If all apps of a specific container (Feed Item) are all filtered out, rendering the container empty, then the Feed Item is not shown (this goes for Featured Apps too, since they're just another Feed Item).
• If a Feed Item is a collection and does not contain at least 2 apps after filtering, then the Feed Item is not included.
• If the entire apps list area is empty, then we show the "Rest of world" feed instead. (This is mainly in place to deal with regions we don't provide a specific feed for.) As such, "Rest of world" is the overall fallback, so that content is currently and must continue to be curated in such a way that something shows up (otherwise, it's useless as a fallback).

Other Pages

(Note: other pages includes Category listing pages, Recommended, New, Popular, and Search Results.)

1. The apps list is currently filtered via the API (not client-side), which means that determinant data is sent with API requests:
   1. status -- apps need to be public to be shown
   2. region
   3. feature profile -- only on FxOS
   4. device type -- based on the compatibility filtering dropdown
      1. mobile values: All Apps, Apps for My Device
      2. desktop values: All Apps, Desktop Apps, Firefox OS Apps, Android Mobile Apps, Android Tablet Apps

("Apps for My Device" does not apply feature profile restrictions or device type or platform.)

Future Steps

1. add a device type filter to the homepage -- proposed design
2. platform selection filter will be on all pages (target mid-April 2015)
3. platform selection filter will persist across sessions for the device (completed)
4. default filter is the detected platform, including for Feed (completed)
   1. GA variable & event audit results: https://docs.google.com/a/mozilla.com/spreadsheets/d/1HcamhLL0EOOFYwVM6YgyWegDywZxvKA8OBtiGEaKLNs/edit?usp=sharing
5. far future: add full API-based feature detection for FxOS and filter apps based on the device's resulting feature profile (if hasFeature/getFeature APIs do not/appear to not exist, we will send a limited profile string that assumes little interoperability rather than do manual feature detection)

Decisions

1. Jan 23, 2015 - Filter selector will be same on home page as other pages.
2. Feb 2, 2015 - If filter selector does not precede new navigation, it will be sitewide; GA tracking will be added to it at this point.
3. March 9, 2015 - added by dbialer strikethroughs. Also filter should persist between sessions per device and default to the platform the user is visiting MP from.