Engagement/Developer Engagement/AppsPlan

Developer Engagement Plan for the Mozilla Apps Initiative

[ Goals] - Through the Beta Period to v1 Release

• Support Apps Business Development in securing 100 premier apps for the App Store Beta
• Broad Reach Activities that result in 1000 apps in process during the beta timeline.
• Increase broad industry awareness of Mozilla as a leader in Standards Based Development Technology.

---

Mozilla Apps Developer Engagement Mission

One of the great potential values of standards based applications is the potential ubiquity of deployment options from a single code base.

Using Mozilla app infrastructure, apps can deploy across platforms from a single code base.

Each of today’s developer community segments has a different set of learning needs and pain points.

• Current Phone and Tablet Developers
• Android Developers
• iOS Developers
• Desktop Application Developers
• "Web" Developers
• Google Apps & Others

Existing “Apps” developers all have a common set of pain points.

• Each potential consumer audience is isolated to a different App Store and each App Store represents a specific device platform. Therefore reaching the widest possible set of customers means using multiple development technologies and languages and deploying to multiple stores. Or using some even less standard proprietary tool, cross platform compiler, etc. and trying to build you app once but get great results on multiple platforms.)
• Apps Developers are at the mercy of the App stores than the sell in.
• App listing placement, search optimization, etc. - in fact the whole findability process is different in the different stores.
• Each App Store customer base has different buying and usage patterns so effective monetization strategies differ based on app specific market segment.  
  

HTML5 Application developer appeals to nearly all developer segments which we can start to catagorize as follows.

Web Developers

• Server Side Web Developers - Web developers who work in PHP, Python, Ruby etc are used to writing HTML etc, but there are many new technologies to be learned (Workers, Sockets, Etc.) Also, many of them have not previously worked with client / server interactions (AJAX)
  
  In addition, they have not previously had to think about their web apps including an off-line experience. Therefore HTML5 and “Web Run Time” specific guidance should be usefully to them.
  
  
• HTML/JS Developers - Some developers have been writing HTML/JavaScript code and server-side interactions. These developers are a bit ahead of the curve but all of the HTML5 and off-line technologies will be new to them as well.

Microsoft Web Developers

• Conventional ASP.NET developers have not had to learn much about Web Application Technologies and, relative to Apps building efforts will need a great deal of foundational learning to come up to speed.

Desktop Developers

• Windows
• Mac
• Linux

Though much of the apparent interest in “Apps” development is focused on mobile devices Standards Based Application development has interesting prospects for the desktop as well.

Developing an application that runs on the desktop is traditionally been a compromise.

You could:

• Choose to support only one desktop platform and ignore the other potential markets.
• Develop the same application 2 or 3 times, once on each platform that you want to support.
• Develop your application in Java and test across multiple OSes. (Though most developers find this to be an arduous process that often yields sub-optimal results.)
• Choose anyther cross platform technology like Adobe Flex and accept the posibility of discontinuation.

Some of the broad developer guidance that Mozilla needs to provide.

• Application Architectures for HTML5 Applications
• Sometimes Connected Patterns and Practices
• Device Specific Scenarios
• App Instalation and Versioning
• Application Monitization Options
• Advanced Engineering Practices
• Using BrowswerID for Apps
• Using IndexedDB for Apps
• HTML5 Gaming Specific Concerns
• Multi Platform and Form Factor User Experiences
• Hardware Access
• App Performance and Optimization

Planned Developer Engagement Activities:

• Web Apps Weekly Podcast
• Series of Event’s in a Box for Developers
• Apps Patterns & Practices Tutorial Series
• Post Beta Apps Developer Conference Tour
• Games Specific Tutorial Series
• BrowserID Tutorial Series
• 1-3 reference applications representing unique application scenarios

Engagement Goals:

• To inform the developer community at large in regards to Mozilla’s industry leadership as an HTML5 innovator
• To fill a gap in broad developer understanding as to what can actually be done with HTML5 and how HTML5 drastically changes web development
• Catalyze a vibrant development ecosystem for building and monetizing HTML5 Apps

---

All Developer Engagement folks are starting to seed interest in the Apps ecosystem in anticipation of the developer preview.

---

[ Deliverables ]

• Docs
• Sample Apps
• Tutorials
• Code samples
• Snippets
• Case studies
• Libraries, Toolkits, Frameworks
• Presentations
• Events