Mozilla Will Give You a Firefox OS Phone for Porting Your Apps

Depending on what part of the world you live in, you may have to be creative to get your hands on one of the new Firefox OS phones. They've only rolled out in a few countries. Now, though, Mozilla has announced the latest step in its efforts to get Firefox OS devices to developers building apps for it. It's phase two of the Firefox OS Phones for Apps program.

This phase of the Phones for Apps program is for "porters only." In other words, developers who are porting apps to Mozilla's mobile platform can qualify for free Firefox OS phones. According to Mozilla:

"This program is for *porters* only - developers who already have an HTML5 app published and are available *now* to make it work for Firefox OS."

"Show us your built app. If it's selected by our reviewers, we'll send you a Geeksphone Keon Firefox OS Developer Preview phone. One of our technical evangelists will stay in touch as you complete the port and submit it to Marketplace. There’s a limit of one phone per app proposal."

This is actually very shrewd on Mozilla's part. I've made the point before that even though Firefox OS phones are aimed at the lower ends of the mobile phone market, they'll only be as successful as apps for the phones are. 

Over the next five years, Mozilla is aligning its entire company strategy around Firefox OS, and finding ways to make apps successful will  be key to the company's mobile strategy.  And of course, getting good existing apps ported to the Firefox OS platform should be a top priority.