Apps
(this page previously contained information about Firefox OS Apps)
Web App Developer Initiative
In 2015, Mozilla is launching a new initiative to energize mobile web app development. This initiative is part of a broad trend that includes browser makers, web frameworks, cloud service providers, and top 100 content providers. We don't yet agree on what to call these new web apps, but we do agree on their potential. What unites all these disparate parties is a belief in the combined power of several new web standards. By making web apps that work offline and can reengage users, we believe developers will deliver experiences that will redefine the role of the web on mobile devices.
In the short term, we are focused on the combination of several API's -- service workers, web push, and the W3C app app manifest.
Communications
Team
- (Placeholder) Representation of the WADI team. Direct reports, stakeholders, and dotted line org connections.
Find us on IRC
- #apps
Mailing Lists
- apps@mozilla.com - Broader opt-in list for those interested in regular WADI updates.
- marketplace-content-ecosystem@mozilla.com - Internal WADI members. Used for brainstorming and general conversation.
Reading List
- Paul Kinlin, "Living with Web Apps"
- In this post, Paul gives an hour-by-hour journal of a day using only web content on his smartphone. Along the way he offers a list of "ten deadly sins of a mobile web app" along with other reflections on his experience.
- Alex Russell, "Progressive Apps: Escaping Tabs without Losing our Soul"
- Alex lays out his best practices for modern web development based around responsive design and single-page apps, and moves on to how the addition of offlining and "save to home screen" capabilities enrich the mobile web.
- Alex Komoroske and Elisabeth Morant, "The Next Generation Mobile Web"
- In this 40 minute Google I/O talk, Alex and Elisabeth show examples using these new API's, especially concentrating on how web push creates exciting new opportunities for user reengagement.
2015 Q3 Deliverables
In Q3, our goals for WADI engineering were (1) to transition off our legacy projects, (2) to educate ourselves about serviceworkers and web push, and (3) to plan for Q4. We had roughly a month of Q3 to work with. We accomplished these goals by encouraging each engineer to build small prototypes and sharing what we learned in a daily standup. These prototypes led to our presentation in the Firefox OS all-hands, a Github Universe talk, as well as the filing of several important platform and product bugs (and fixing of one!).
- https://firekey.org/
- https://brendandahl.github.io/pdfcollection/
- https://marco-c.github.io/watchy/#/series
- https://mozilla.github.io/high-fidelity/#/podcasts
2015 Q4 Deliverables
In Q4, we will prepare for the launch of both Web Push and Service Workers in Firefox 44 by building one or two serious progressive apps and the infrastructure they require. We'll focus our engineers on one or two projects at a time, so we build team cohesion and benefit from collaboration. We'll carefully scope these projects so we can really hit them out of the park. Our tight focus, coupled with conference talks and blog posts, will make these apps useful references, helping build developer awareness for the launch of serviceworkers and push in Firefox 44. As we build real product code with automated tests, we explore the limits of our platform, find its bugs, and gather the knowledge we need to plan for the beginning of 2016.
Oghliner
Ship v1 of Oghliner, a library/tool to offline web apps using Service Workers and deploy them to GitHub Pages. We will base this on top of several existing open source projects, including sw-precache from the Chrome team (https://github.com/GoogleChrome/sw-precache).
- Oghliner v1 - https://github.com/mozilla/oghliner
Platatus
Ship MVP of at least one serious offline/progressive web app. We need to explore the space of possible use cases – to help developers, to find bugs in the implementation, to expand our own understanding. Much of the work of building even simple demo apps is app-related and not related to the underlying technologies. The leading candidate is Platatus, an app that offers a detailed, data-driven view of Mozilla's progress on delivering the technologies behind Progressive Web apps.
- Platatus MVP - https://github.com/mozilla/platatus - minimal viable prototype of reference app that describes standardization/implementation status of web platform features
Service Worker Cookbook
Create a cookbook of self-contained code snippets showing how to use Service Workers to achieve various kinds of cacheing and push notification use cases.
Bug tracking
These are bugs we've identified as critical to our ability to deploy these technologies to developers. We use bug 1201717 to track them.
Bugzilla query error
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