Firefox Marketplace

» see marketplace.firefox.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Mozilla's argument was that the app store should not have needed to exist. An app on Firefox OS was a web page with a manifest file next to it. No proprietary SDK, no signing authority, no platform tax, and no reason a developer could not host the thing themselves and hand out the link. The Marketplace was there to be a directory and a payments layer for people who wanted one, not a gate.

It opened to developers and early adopters in October 2012, running inside the Aurora build of Firefox for Android, where an installed app got a full-screen window and a home-screen icon. Four months later Mozilla put Firefox OS on stage at Mobile World Congress with hardware from ZTE and Alcatel and eighteen carriers signed up, and the Marketplace became the store for an actual phone.

The phones did not sell. Mozilla stopped shipping Firefox OS through carriers at the end of 2015 and stopped developing it for phones outright not long after. The Marketplace did not close with it. That is the part worth recording, because a store with no device is a strange object to keep running, and Mozilla kept it running for two more years.

~ the record ~

~ what a web app was supposed to be ~

The technical bet was that the browser would eventually expose everything a phone could do. Camera, contacts, telephony, battery, orientation. Mozilla wrote the APIs and pushed them at the standards bodies, and the reason your web browser can do a chunk of what it does today is partly that this work happened.

What the bet needed and never got was a reason for anyone to write a Firefox OS version of an app they had already shipped twice. Writing software for a living, the pitch reads well from where I sit: one codebase, no review queue, and nobody taking thirty percent at the till. None of that moves a developer who already ships on two platforms and has a backlog. The store filled up with what a hobbyist could port in a weekend, and stayed empty of anything that would make someone buy the phone.

~ the two years after the phone ~

On 29 March 2016 the Marketplace stopped supporting Android and desktop. Tablets went in the same change, and so did payments of any kind, which finished paid apps. Developers could make their app free, wire up their own payment provider, or switch it off. Mozilla removed the Web Runtime from Firefox 47 on Android and Firefox 48 everywhere else, which meant an installed web app no longer had anything to run inside.

What was left was packaged apps for Firefox OS devices, and the commitment was explicit and small: it would keep serving them at least until January 2018. Users were pointed toward progressive web apps, which is the same idea with the store removed, and which is roughly what won in the end.

~ what got saved ~

The notice went up on 28 February 2018. It said the Marketplace would shut down on 30 March and that anybody who wanted an app should download it before that date, which is an unusual thing for an app store to have to say out loud.

Archive Team pulled a metadata dump on 8 March, and the entry in their wiki is honest about what it is: a list of apps, without the manifests, without the packages, without the images. Their status field reads lost except metadata. The archive has no capture of marketplace.firefox.com after 28 March 2018, and the last one it does have is a page saying you need JavaScript to see the store.

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