B2G and portable apps across mobile devices

[dbv]

I understand the motivation and goal of the B2G project but I'm not
clear if portable (web) apps can be built across the key mobile OSs -
iOS, Android and WP7. The test I use is the following: can the list
of installed apps on a device be read from an app. On Android this is
possible by calling the appropriate Java package manager function. On
iOS, Apple doesn't allow apps to access the system function to get the
list of installed apps. I don't have experience of WP7 to know if
this possible.

Would appreciate your feedback and thoughts.

[David Rajchenbach-Teller]

I do not think that there is a WebAPI/DeviceAPI for this specific task.
What would you be trying to do?

Cheers,
David

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--
David Rajchenbach-Teller, PhD
Performance Team, Mozilla

[Chris Jones]

Privileged web apps can read the list of "installed" web apps. This API needs a permission bit because it exposes sensitive user information. On b2g, this API will expose *all* installed applications.

We're not planning on exposing the list of installed "native" applications. It's not totally clear what an "installed native app" is across all platforms that Gecko supports.

As David asked, it would help to know what you're trying to do.

Cheers,
Chris

[dbv]

Generally, I want a web app (given the users permission, if required)
to read file names from the device storage sub-systems. Specifically,
I want the web app to read the list of installed apps (native and web
apps) on iOS, Android and WP7.

A different example: say, we want to build a simple web app that
performs two-way file transfer between a mobile device and a host. On
the mobile device, the web app needs access to the file system to
display to the user so that they can select which file to transfer.

Another example: say, we want to build a web app that provides app
usage metrics (to the user) for both wen and native apps. The web app
needs access to each installed app to determine the last used date.

Hth.

[David Rajchenbach-Teller]

On 2/7/12 8:02 PM, dbv wrote:
> Generally, I want a web app (given the users permission, if required)
> to read file names from the device storage sub-systems. Specifically,
> I want the web app to read the list of installed apps (native and web
> apps) on iOS, Android and WP7.

I do not think that this is going to be possible in the near future (iOS
does not support that, does it?)

> A different example: say, we want to build a simple web app that
> performs two-way file transfer between a mobile device and a host. On
> the mobile device, the web app needs access to the file system to
> display to the user so that they can select which file to transfer.

That should not be a problem.

> Another example: say, we want to build a web app that provides app
> usage metrics (to the user) for both wen and native apps. The web app
> needs access to each installed app to determine the last used date.

Same problem as above. If the OS does not support the feature, there are
few chances that the applications will.

Cheers,
David