
Firefox OS Apps run on Android - rnyman
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2014/06/firefox-os-apps-run-on-android/
======
rcthompson
For anyone who wants to try this, just open Firefox on your Android device, go
to [https://marketplace.firefox.com](https://marketplace.firefox.com), and
click on the install button for an app. It will download an APK and prompt you
to install the application, and that app will then act just like any other
app. It's pretty neat.

~~~
veeti
It's hard to say this without being so negative, but I really have to wonder
if any of these apps have even been tested on an Android device. Because to be
quite frank, they are absolutely terrible. Here's what I tested:

\- 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.

~~~
wfwalker
No, we haven't done a lot of testing of these apps on Android, we've been
really focussed on testing them on Firefox OS up to now. BTW, which version of
Firefox are you using? Bug fixes are coming in pretty fast lately, I'd
recommend using Firefox Aurora for Android.

~~~
voltagex_
Where and how do I log bugs for Firefox Apps on Android? I'm on 4.4.3 with
Firefox Aurora and I installed WikiHow and the Gaia Team Calculator - open
WikiHow, hit back and open Calculator and I still get WikiHow. I have to
"swipe away" the Firefox app in the task manager to get it to work.

------
phoboslab
Shameless plug: the game shown in the screenshot and video is X-Type[1]. I'm
working on a much improved version that will be released on the Nintendo Wii U
soon[2].

[1] [http://phoboslab.org/xtype](http://phoboslab.org/xtype)

[2]
[http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2014/02/developer_interview...](http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2014/02/developer_interview_phoboslab_on_xtype_plus_impact_and_why_the_nintendo_web_framework_matters)

~~~
sgarman
Oh this is cool and that article was really insightful. I had no idea Nintendo
was doing this. Back in the day console dev was near impossible to get into
but this opens up all kinds of doors.

------
adrusi
This reminds me of Nokia's attempt to make their mobile platform popular by
supporting existing android apps. This backfired and lead to developers not
making native apps for their platform because they could just reuse their
existing android app and still reach all the users.

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.

~~~
sirkneeland
As someone who worked in Nokia developer relations, I have no idea what you're
talking about. Aside from the Nokia X (which _is_ Android), no Nokia product
has ever done anything to "make their mobile platform popular by supporting
existing Android apps"

-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.

~~~
pessimizer
Yeah, that never happened. It may be a reference to Alien Dalvik being rumored
to be included w/the first actual MeeGo release (Not N9, which was branded
MeeGo, but was really still Maemo.) Critics of this speculated that this would
keep developers from developing native apps, and now, in the haze of ancient
history and a lack of fact checking, a few people think that this actually
happened and are using it as a parable to inform future strategies.

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.

------
fidotron
Does this actually support the interesting parts of phone APIs like push
messaging (and notifications), bluetooth, in app billing via the stores etc.?

And is it compatible with the equivalent Chrome OS APIs or are we looking at
writing web apps two different ways?

~~~
kumar303
Yeah, a lot of web APIs have implementations that connect directly to the
Android equivalent. When writing a web app you'd always use a "web" API
though. Some of those APIs are still very new and Chrome and Mozilla haven't
reached consensus yet so you'd have to deal with prefixing and what not.

Mozilla's APIs: [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/API](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API)

------
Touche
What would be really nice if you allowed developers to export their apps as
signed APKs. That way they could submit them to the Play Store, Amazon
AppStore, etc. That would be truly amazing.

~~~
ozten
If there is enough demand, we'd love to build that. It takes quite a bit of
security resources to manage the developer's signing keys properly, which is
why it didn't make it into 1.0.

------
mox1
What's the "value add" here over just going the Cordova route?

Cordova/phoneGap already has lots of plugins for in app billing, push
messaging, etc....

~~~
kumar303
If you build an app with Cordova you can easily get stuck in their APIs. If
you build a Firefox OS web app you get stuck in Mozilla's APIs :) BUT Mozilla
is making a strong effort at standardization and is working with Chrome and
others to reach consensus. Cordova strays farther away from stable HTML5 APIs
than Mozilla does so in Firefox OS you will definitely be building a more
webby app. I.E. some HTML5 APIs work great on mobile, no reason to use a
custom Cordova one in many cases.

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](https://github.com/apache/cordova-firefoxos)

------
robgibbons
What they really need is Android apps running on Firefox OS.

~~~
gedrap
It would probably do more harm than use. People would stop developing for FxOS
because developing for Android would have a wider reach.

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?

------
throwaway41597
Is there any hope that startup performance will get on par with native Android
apps? It takes a good 6 seconds to start a trivial Firefox web app on Android.

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).

[1]
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=779974](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=779974)

------
r12e
This is great for me, I've just rebuilt my Android phone without GAPPS as an
ongoing effort to minimise my reliance on Google. The Twitter app does what it
says on the tin. Looking forward to the Facebook app supporting Android too.
I've always used simple bookmarks for these two services anyway (because why
should their Play Store apps need all those permissions?) so the performance
hit isn't something I'm bothered about.

------
zak_mc_kracken
Nice technical trick but doesn't this make Firefox OS even less necessary than
it ever was?

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.

~~~
oconnore
You're missing the point. FirefoxOS exists to increase the market share of the
web by giving lots of people in developing countries $25 smartphones built on
browser technology. This creates incentives for companies to develop for the
web.

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.

~~~
Pacabel
The reasoning in your first paragraph never really seems very sensible or
realistic.

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.

------
mundanevoice
Would prefer Chrome apps packaged by Apache
Cordova([http://blog.chromium.org/2014/01/run-chrome-apps-on-
mobile-u...](http://blog.chromium.org/2014/01/run-chrome-apps-on-mobile-using-
apache.html)) anyday to the apps on Firefox OS. The apps on Firefox are like
years behind in quality and quantity as compared to chrome apps.

~~~
zobzu
Would prefer if webapps were standard and not tied to a unique browser. What
happened to standards and stuff? We forgot its actually good?

I want to run firefox webapps on chrome and chrome webapps on firefox, and
both of them on IE. Obviously that doesnt work today.

~~~
mundanevoice
It sounds very nice but the whole user experience and feel of the apps looks
very substandard. Even my Nokia phone of 2008 had better and more useful apps.

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.

~~~
zobzu
i used it on the flame developer device,its quite decent actually. I certainly
wouldnt want a N95 instead of it. Its not at all in the same league.

------
suyash
nothing new about that…after all the app is rendered in html, for that matter
it will run on iPhone too..but if the app only runs on the firefox browser on
Android, I don't see many people creating apps for that reason rather using
Cordova.

~~~
mbrubeck
The new part is that the app is automatically packaged into an APK (Android
Package) file, so you can manage it (launch, restart, uninstall, reset data,
switch between apps) just like other Android apps.

Android and iOS both offer "bookmark to home screen" features that include
some of this functionality, but not all of it.

