On 5/24/2012 12:14 PM, Anant Narayanan wrote:
On 5/24/2012 9:04 AM, Benjamin Smedberg wrote:
While installs_allowed_from may be necessary for paid apps (in order to
keep people from being tricked into paying for something which they then
can't receive), it is overall a necessary evil, and if we could
distinguish in some other way between paid and nonpaid apps, we (the
Mozilla UAs) *shouldn't* honor it for nonpaid apps. In general, we
should be giving the most control to the user, not to the developer.
Why shouldn't we giving control to the developer? They are the ones
who wrote the app, why do you think we should be deciding how and
where they are acquired?
Installing a non-paid app is technically the same thing as linking to a
website. We don't provide ways for a website author to say that you may
only follow links to their website from approved sources, and in fact we
provide ways for users to suppress the referer header. I think that it's
disingenuous to say that because we are presenting websites as an app
that we should give them more control over how the user gets to them
than we do for websites...
Would you be okay with allowing any site on the internet to distribute
Firefox? I certainly wouldn't be.
If Firefox were an online app available at firefox.com/app.manifest,
then Mozilla is providing Firefox, no matter how the user got it. An app
store isn't handing you an app: it's linking to an app.
You could say that users don't understand this, and they think that the
app store is actually handing them an app. But if that is the case,
however, then we should seriously rethink presenting websites as apps.
Users won't understand that their app could change at any time their
device is online without notice (unlike android or iOS apps, which are
explicitly updated).
--BDS
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