Responding to Google’s announcement last week of a Chrome Web Store, Jay Sullivan asks on the Mozilla Blog for ideas about an alternative Open Web App Store. This is something that I’ve been thinking about and discussing with Mark Finkle for a couple of years now in the context of Mozilla Prism. In fact, I originally wanted to launch the first Prism 1.0 beta with a “web app bundle library” that I think closely mirrors what an Open Web App Store might look like (and I blogged about this over a year ago). While at the time I succumbed to the realities of resource constraints and abandoned the idea, perhaps the time is ripe to revive it.
There is no point in launching a “web app store” just for the sake of countering Google’s move. The web is a pretty good way to distribute web apps already, and if there is going to be a new distribution mechanism, it should have clear advantages over the status quo. In the case of the Chrome Web Store, Google’s blog post cites a few concrete advantages: easier discovery of quality web apps, increased permissions for installed apps and a new business model for developers (specifically, selling apps directly to users).
Easier discovery is a no-brainer, but of course this could be accomplished by a simple web app directory that links directly to various apps on the web. There’s no need to “install” apps to achieve this. There has to be more to a web app store than this. In particular, I love the idea of charging (optionally) for apps. Developers need to eat, and plastering web pages with ads shouldn’t be the only way for them to monetize the fruits of their labor. At one point I thought long and hard about starting a business around a marketplace for Prism web app bundles.
So I agree broadly with Google’s vision for their web store. But we can do better. For one thing, we can be more open, as Jay suggests, rather than using the store to lock users into a specific browser. In addition, we can take advantage of Prism’s much more mature and technically sophisticated platform for adding value to web apps when they are installed locally. After all, Google is promising to deliver something “later this year” whereas Prism web apps like Zimbra Desktop are already being used by tens of thousands of users every day.
I’m proud of what we’ve achieved so far with Prism despite limited development resources. Now is the time to start experimenting with other ideas as web apps continue to meld with traditional desktop apps. How should web apps be discovered and delivered? What does it mean to “install” a web app locally? What new capabilities (and associated APIs) are needed for web apps to rival their desktop equivalents, beyond what is already offered by HTML5? How might a web app payment model function? I believe Prism would be a great vehicle for Mozilla to tease out and play with potential answers to these questions.
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