Mozilla has brought a few Firefox OS apps to Android

While we have heard much about Mozilla’s Firefox OS in recent times, perhaps it is time to shift the attention a wee bit and concentrate the proverbial spotlight on the Android mobile operating system. Thanks to the introduction of Firefox for Android 29, Firefox OS now gains the ability and capability to run on Android devices, and all of this is made possible simply because the apps happen to be built with the help of HTML5. Such apps do resemble native apps, which means you can choose to install it, update it, or even uninstall it once you are done, all the while popping up and making its presence known in one’s App Drawer and Recent Apps list. The best part of this news? Developers are able to prepare their Firefox OS apps to see action on Android with minimal effort, and there is no need to make a single change to the coding.

Mozilla’s Firefox OS is based on Gecko — the same core rendering engine that its desktop and mobile Firefox web browsers use. This unified framework goes to the essence of what Firefox and Mozilla are about. Mozilla sees the future of apps and browsing as two sides of the same coin. To push its vision for “Open Web Apps,” Mozilla has rolled out v29 of Firefox for Android, which enables you to download and install Firefox OS marketplace apps on your Android device with no additional configuration. When developers create apps for Android or iOS, they need to build them using Java or objective C, respectively. This has traditionally allowed for a more robust set of APIs and vastly improved performance compared to web-only technologies, but things are slowly changing. Firefox OS apps are built using HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript. The upshot of this is that they can run on any platform with the proper rendering engine, in this case Gecko. Mozilla isn’t the first company to push web apps on mobile devices as an alternative to native ones. That distinction goes to Palm, which used a similar approach to the app ecosystem on webOS. That didn’t go so well, but the capabilities of browsers have advanced considerably in the last four or five years. Mozilla’s WebAPI documentation provides methods for accessing hardware (camera, battery stats, sensors, etc.) as well as a variety of data management and communication features. The gap between native apps and web apps is more technologically narrow than it once was.