+1 to Gabriele's comments here, all valid concerns before we can roll out our better update mechanisms.
Re-certification is definitely the overhead that can't be ignored, in terms of time and money. We should deal with this requirement in mind when designing the new update. It should be flexible enough to allow users to update their own codes without the need of doing a maintenance release (and certification). Minimizing the core apps as Gabriele suggested is a reasonable approach. As FxOS starts to allow more things to be customized thru MarketPlace, such as home screens, lock screens, we will gradually move some of the update efforts to MarketPlace, not the "firmware" or "system" side thru OTA/FOTA. -- James Ho Senior Director of Mobile Devices Mozilla Corporation On Apr 16, 2014, at 1:34 AM, Gabriele Svelto <[email protected]> wrote: > Hello everybody, > in my opinion there's two major problems we have to face to be able to > roll out our own updates. The first one is certification; a > vendor-issued update needs to be certified against a set of > standards/rules before it can be rolled out. This is not an optional > step for them, and even though IANAL I think it's even a legal > requirement (*). AFAIK this certification covers mostly the phone > functionality (calls, messages, etc...). For these reasons I doubt we'd > ever be able to roll out updates covering that functionality via a vendor. > > The second issue is customization: vendors and carriers will take our > code and modify it to a certain extent. We marketed Firefox OS as being > more customizable than Android (which is true) so we have to expect it. > If we add a mechanism to push our own updates and vendors don't like it > then they will disable it on shipping phones. After all this is already > happening across all mobile OSes: an unlocked phone will allow you to > install whatever you want but most vendors sell only fully locked phones. > > Unless we find a way around these issues I don't think we'll have an > effective solution for updates. > > I remember a discussion some time ago about running different Gecko > versions side-by-side, that could be an avenue worth pursuing. If we > could enable non-core apps to use a more up-to-date Gecko while leaving > core apps and core functionality intact we'd be giving the users most of > the benefits of an upgrade without having to deal with certification > issues or having to require an unlocked phone for updates to work. > > Gabriele > > *) For example this includes verifying that emergency calls work at all > times: if you'd find yourself in trouble and your phone wouldn't allow > you to call the police or an ambulance because of a bug I wouldn't be > surprised if you would be entitled to suing the vendor over that. > > _______________________________________________ > 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
