One of the most critical phase of game/app development, is it’s distribution. Android has Play Store and iOS has Apple App Store. Similarly, Firefox also provides store to distribute your HTML5 powered Apps and games.

Firefox’s Marketplace contains Apps for it’s all new mobile operating system FireFox OS. Firefox OS is a HTML5 based operating system.

Distributing your HTML5 games and Apps through such platforms can surely give you a lot of audience. We tried to port our HTML5 sample ‘The Chat App’ to this platform and it ran perfectly on it. The source code for our ported sample is available here

You don’t need any extra effort to bring your App and games to FireFox OS other than simply creating a manifest file. Firefox Marketplace have a particular format for its manifest file, which each developer has to follow in order to put his app on their stores.

Firefox Marketplace

Firefox marketplace requires you to create a manifest.webapp file. This file will describe your App. A basic manifest.webapp file looks like this

{
"version": "0.1",
"name": "The Chat App",
"description": "Chat Application Powered By AppWarp",
"launch_path": "/index.html",
"icons": {
"128": "/icon_128.png"
},
"developer": {
"name": "Shephertz Technologies Pvt. Ltd.",
"url": "http://www.shephertz.co.in"
}
}

As you can see, the above file is self explanatory as every keywords means the same as it means in english for e.g. name is the name of your App and description provide description for your app. One must provide the ‘launch_path’ as this parameter defines what will the first file that will be executed when user will click on the app icon to launch it

To test your App, download the Firefox OS Simulator from here

.Once downloaded, launch the firefox browser and choose Firefox OS Simulator from Web Developer menu. Start the simulator from sidebar. Now click the Add Directory button and select the folder where you have stored your manifest file and app files.

This will execute your App on Firefox OS simulator

This is how, you can build apps for Firefox Marketplace. Once you have developed your App, you can go to their developer page and submit your App.

Our AppWarp HTML5 SDK is 100% compatible with Firefox OS, so go on start creating multiplayer games for such platforms too.

If you have any questions or need any further assistance, please feel free to write us at support@shephertz.com.