Writing apps for Firefox OS phones
Life on Planet Firefox
Cooking up an app for the Firefox OS is in no way difficult. All you need is a good measure of HTML and a dash of CSS. A few drops of JavaScript will bring it all to life.
Although the smartphone software market seems polarized between iOS and Android these days, other contenders are filling out or creating their own niches. Mozilla, for example is aiming at the modest part of the market share: the very low end phones. That doesn't mean that Firefox OS phones are bad. Quite the contrary. The few models I've seen so far are perfectly adequate considering their price tag. Additionally, they are real smartphones, with a great potential market in developing countries or for those who think that spending more than 100 bucks on a phone is a waste, which, let's face it, is most people.
Firefox OS can do most, if not all, of what you can do in Android and iOS, and it's easy to make apps for it. If you can write HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript to create web apps, you've already mastered 90% of what you need to know. Even if you are bit rusty with your web technologies, I'll try to show you in this article how to get from idea to marketplace quickly and easily.
The Hardware
Having a real device on which to test your software definitely helps. The good news is that Firefox OS handsets are cheap, and you can pick up a ZTE Open for less than US$ 80 (or as little as EUR 39 if you live in Spain). Even if you don't have a physical device, however, you can run, test, and debug your app using the Firefox OS Simulator.
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