+1. If you follow any kind of social media you'll know we've been getting slammed over poor support for updating certain devices. The more power we have over this the better.
Regarding moving apps from certified -> privileged, I think this will be a big win and will allow us to move quite a few apps over: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=900551#c7 Random thought - if you have a WebAPI for updating, do you think it would be possible to expose this from a privileged permission and prompt? It would be awesome to have a replaceable "Update App" which you could download from the Marketplace. Best, Kevin ----- Original Message ----- From: "Fabrice Desré" <[email protected]> To: "dev-b2g" <[email protected]> Sent: Monday, April 14, 2014 10:58:20 PM Subject: [b2g] Let's fix updates Hi all, The situation with updates on b2g is far from being ideal. On one side, phone manufacturers have little incentive to ship updates for a long time. On the other side, users legitimately expect to be able to get the latest version of the OS for as long as their phone works. I think a reasonable target is to support devices for 2 years. Since there's no hope that we will get partners to provide updates for so long, I've been thinking about what we could do to help users. One piece is to provide an *easy* way to change the update channel. Fortunately that's actually simple: we can just use a web activity that will be provided by the settings or system app, and then do the usual setting -> gecko pref mapping. That would let any 3rd party or mozilla provide gecko+gaia updates without any legal issues. Where things get a bit more complex is when oems use their own update mechanism, removing gecko's standard one. Currently in this case we can't even switch users to another update channel. To fix that, we'll need to provide a proper webapi for updates management instead of our current mess, with pluggable implementations and the ability to switch back to the default one. If we get these 2 parts done, I believe that will move us to a much better position, where we would be able to confidently recommend devices to users as upgradable. And I'm sure communities will provide cyanogenmod-like updates too. Another annoyance is that we still can't update gaia apps without doing a full update. That's pretty ridiculous to not be able to upgrade productivity and media apps for instance. That is blocked on some APIs being only available to certified apps. If we look at the calendar app, only the "settings-read" permission is blocking it from being privileged though. I may be wrong, but I'm less confident in a short term solution here. I really want to get the update channel and web api parts happen for b2g 2.0. Volunteers welcome! Fabrice -- Fabrice Desré b2g team Mozilla Corporation _______________________________________________ dev-b2g mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-b2g _______________________________________________ dev-b2g mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-b2g
