Mozilla Opens Its Firefox For Android Marketplace

Mozilla launched the latest Aurora version of Firefox for Android and with this, the organization is also opening the Firefox Marketplace to early adopters and testers. The Firefox Marketplace is similar to the Google’s Web Store for Chrome. Users can browse the store to find mobile web apps and developers can showcase their web apps. These apps run in full-screen mode and can also be pinned to the home screen. Distant Orbit, Jauntly, Soundcloud and Twitter are among the first apps in the store, where all the apps are currently available for free.

As Firefox engineering manager Bill Walker notes in the announcement, the goal behind this early release is to “collect as much real-life feedback as possible about the Marketplace’s design, usability, performance, reliability, and content.” He also stresses that this is meant to be an open ecosystem, where “users have choices and developers have control over their content, functionality and distribution.” In order to facilitate this open ecosystem, Firefox offers developers number of APIs for app submissions, payments and app discovery.