Bill Walker: Firefox Marketplace: Breaking the Stranglehold of App Stores
This summer, Mozilla launched Firefox OS for mobile phones along with an Apps ecosystem based on the open web. The ecosystem includes a a payments mechanism that offers direct carrier billing for web apps, a cross-platform solution that provides a native app experience on every supported device, and the Firefox Marketplace for discovering and purchasing Apps.
The Firefox Marketplace is an app on every Firefox OS phone. More than that, it is a community of developers, reviewers, curators, and consumers and a suite of web services made available to the whole ecosystem. The power of these communities and services creates an unfair advantage with which this ecosystem will transform the mobile Web.