Hi all, 

I would like to echo this requirement from James because it is also requested 
by partners. 
And the reasons are 

1. Partners would like to build their own pre-installed and certified apps for 
differentiating their own product. 
And they need a way to upgrade these apps (the tied schedule may push them to 
ship first with small bugs). 
The cost of the only way now - FOTA/OTA is expensive then just doing a single 
application upgrade. 

2. In order to co-work with other service providers in the world, partners may 
need to create their own APIs for fulfilling various requirements. 
And partners also want to keep Web consistency so their APIs will be certified 
type only. 
Due to this vision, their apps can not be installed or upgraded from market 
place because our capability now. 

3. I also think that in the emerging market the narrow bandwidth is not 
suitable for doing FOTA/OTA. 
But an upgrade per app may be more easy there. 

So vote to this requirement. 

Thanks, 
Sincerely yours. 
----- Original Message -----

From: "James Burke" <[email protected]> 
To: [email protected] 
Sent: Thursday, October 23, 2014 3:07:54 AM 
Subject: [b2g] For v2.2: distributable certified apps 

For 2.2, I would like to see an exploration into allowing Gaia apps, and apps 
that can use certified APIs, to be distributed via marketplace channels, and 
updated outside full OS updates. 

That could take a few forms, including just pushing more/all certified APIs to 
"privileged" status. However, I expect that may not be feasible, so right now I 
am assuming there will be a continued need for "certified" apps. 

I wrote up something about this capability here: 

https://github.com/jrburke/certified-marketplace 

Feel free to file issues in that repo if you have questions about it. Happy to 
move the info elsewhere, just wanted to get something up. 

More importantly, it would be good to figure out the relative priority of this 
sort of feature for 2.2, which is the primary point of this thread. 

This sort of capability could be in opposition to some of the UX or product 
features. 

For example, I am thinking of the "themeable" feature, to allow apps to be 
themed, and to have that theming coordinated across apps, and for apps to have 
a specific dependency on a theme.gaiamobile.org "app". 

However, this type of app distribution capability is very fitting for our 
mission, as it allows more people to make certified apps (after being vetted in 
some way) and to allow those apps to get updates outside of full OS updates. 

--- 

If this is just too big of a project for 2.2, then I would like to get an 
awareness or some sort of agreement for allowing individual apps to follow this 
path, and to realize it may mean those apps are not able to meet some other 
goals if they pursue this route. 

Specifically, I work on the email app, and I believe we could still get to a 
"updatable via marketplace", and I would like to try for that for 2.2: 

Email app goes privileged, and the app just lives with what is available to 
privileged apps. I think this is possible and still have a great, usuable email 
app. 

However, it means email not picking up any gaia-wide efforts that my require 
certified stuff. For 2.2, that could mean things like theming and if custom 
elements are not fully enabled for non-certified use, any common building 
blocks. 

Even if custom elements are available for 2.2, I am sure there will be other 
things in other releases, just pointing out the need to get wider agreement 
this pathway is OK for some apps that may be seen as part of "gaia". 

It also means possible modifications to the l10n.js capability to load 
localizations from app storage, and to do downloads of localization bundles 
from somewhere. While I am willing to do the modifications, it would still 
require some impact on reviewers' time, and likely some server work. 

To clarify: I want to preserve the existing localizer workflow, just want to 
modify how an app pulls in the final localizations, see above link for some 
more background. 

--- 

In summary: I would like this “certified” capability considered for 2.2. I am 
not expecting an immediate resolution, as all the 2.2 work needs to be balanced 
in total, and is still in planning. 

This is just to get it on the radar and to call out some of the tensions. Also, 
dev could start some plumbing now while planning is still in progress, and 
where it makes sense for the email app, I will start exploring in these areas. 

James 

(sending to dev-b2g, as it seems the most appropriate for what this capability 
spans, and want to avoid cross posting to multiple lists) 


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