On 06/18/2014 01:28 PM, Jonas Sicking wrote: > However if we can enable developers to sign their own applications, > rather than having to have them signed by the marketplace, then that > would still mean that developers could roll out updates as quickly as > web developers do today. I.e. no need to wait for review from a > marketplace.
I'd argue that for many (but certainly not all) apps, the existing state of affairs regarding installation is a feature, not a bug. In many cases, I expressly *want* the ability to control the version I'm on, and the web model doesn't really allow for this. To be clear, this is less about not trusting the app authors not to be evil than about not trusting them not to be stupid; there are a handful of desktop applications that I persist in using older versions of because the newer versions are flat-out broken. While I understand the desire to keep people up-to-date for security reasons, when the new version of your software crashes constantly, I simply can't use it. (This can also be extended to less severe issues, such as major performance problems in new versions, or loss of required functionality.) A good example of apps that benefit from this model are the built-in Firefox OS media apps (music, video, camera). These apps don't actually require a network connection, since they act only on local data. If an upgrade to one of these apps broke things for a user, they should have the ability to downgrade to an older version. (Obviously, this doesn't work right now, since the media apps are versioned in lock-step with the OS, but we should be working to fix that.) On the other hand, this probably *wouldn't* benefit apps that do a lot of network communication, since they likely need to upgrade in lockstep with the server backend. Nevertheless, this doesn't describe every app, and as we continue to support an "offline web" experience, we should remember that the web model is not a panacea. Hopefully these are things you've already considered, since it would be a shame for us to sacrifice things that foster user-control of their computing environment for the sake of adhering to a web-based distribution model. - Jim _______________________________________________ dev-b2g mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-b2g
