Expose Storage Area, so people can write apps

[André Jaenisch]

So Firefox OS is heading to Africa.

Great! I'm really excited!

But thinking of it, I joined a chat on Twitter [0] yesterday.
The topic was whether Firefox OS can bring web literacy/development
to mobiles. You probably have heard about the Firetext project [1].
It's a text processor for Firefox OS, which can also run as website.

However, when I assume, that people in Africa does not have a Laptop/
Desktop, but "mobiles" (= smartphones/tablets) at hand, WebIDE is
unsuitable as working environment. I myself learned HTML through a
text editor + browser.

The text editor is their. What is needed is a way to be able to
install webapps locally on a device without the need of a PC.
I opened a ticket [2] to discuss this their, but other developers may
be interested in this feature as well.

What are Mozillas rationales about this topic? Is it possible to open
an API for this ideas? We have to protect the users against
vulnerabilities! What is needed to open up a locally stored html file
in the browser app (using file://)?

I would like to discuss this topic.

Regards,



André

[0] https://twitter.com/WarrenWhitlock/status/529955398036762624
[1] https://github.com/codexa/firetext
[2] https://github.com/codexa/firetext/issues/214

[Jonas Sicking]

We already have APIs for reading/writing to the SD card or other
internal device storage areas. See

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Device_Storage_API

But we were lacking the ability to install an app that has been
written to the SD card. However that was recently added here

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=982874

So this should be possible in the 2.2 release.

However we still don't have the ability to install an unsigned
privileged app. I.e. if you do local development this way you won't be
able to access any privileged APIs.

We likely need a way to turn on "installing unsigned privileged apps
using the import API". But we need to be very careful about how we do
it so that we don't end up with users getting tricked into turning it
on and then installing malware.

/ Jonas

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