What does Firefox Marketplace offer to developers that Appstore or Google Playstore don't?

Question

In other words, why should developers build HTML5 applications instead of iOS or Android apps and deploy to Firefox Marketplace? What are the incentives that Firefox Marketplace offers to attract developers from other application platforms?

Answer 1

It's an interesting question, and i am going to paste you some text that i find out related to the topic. It explains better the idea than probably I could do.

Open Web Apps are essentially no different than standard websites or Web pages. They are built using standard open Web technologies — HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc. — and can be accessed using a Web browser. The main differences lie in their ability to be installed on a device and work offline, and access to advanced APIs that allow interaction with device features such as the camera, address book, and other such things. In addition, they are built on open technologies as much as is possible. Where differences lie in technology implementation between platforms, efforts should be made to ensure that both are supported, through a combination of feature detection and appropriate code for different platforms, and graceful degradation.

From the ground up Mozilla has been building an apps system that lets users buy an app once and run it on all of their HTML5 devices. When you purchase an app through the Firefox Marketplace, the system installs a receipt on your device. The receipt is a JSON Web Token with metadata that links to the Marketplace’s public key and its verification service URL. When an app starts up it can verify the receipt but the receipt on the device is not tied to the Firefox Marketplace. The receipt is just a cryptographically verifiable proof of purchase. Anyone can sell open Web apps if they follow the receipt specs. When you buy an app, it is intended to be portable across any device that supports the Open Web Apps system.

In the future the Open Web Apps system will support syncing your installed apps across devices. Since receipts are portable you could just sync them yourself if you wanted to. In case it’s not obvious, you can always run a free open Web app in any browser because it is no different than a website. It might, however, use new mobile specific web APIs which are not implemented on all platforms.

To me the main thing is not start thinking on create Firefox OS apps, create web apps that is better to you and the web, and Mozilla is making a good job making it real.

Those links are interesting to read and to see what will come to the web in the future:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Apps/Quickstart/Build/Intro_to_open_web_apps https://marketplace.firefox.com/developers/