Mozilla Touts Thousands of Apps in Firefox Marketplace

Back in August, in a post titled "The Success of Firefox OS Will Depend on the Success of Apps For It," I made the case that Mozilla needs to drum up a lot of developer interest in its Firefox OS mobile platform in order to seed a healthy app ecosystem. And, sure enough, Mozilla has been steadily holding developer days in various locations and has even offered incentives for app development.

Now, in a new post online, Rick Fant, Mozilla Vice President of Firefox Marketplace, says: “We are excited by the developer interest in the short time since we’ve opened the Firefox Marketplace and are impressed by the creativity and innovation inspired by Mozilla-pioneered WebAPIs.” Mozilla is pointing to thousands of available apps in the Marketplace.

In the latest report from Juniper Research, there is some good discussion on what future app stores will be like.  The report, Future App Stores: Discovery, Monetisation & Ecosystem Analysis 2013 – 2018, explores how the growing app ecosystem will be strengthened over the next five years. The report determined that through 2017, the proportion of revenue accrued from apps paid for at the point of download will fall to almost a quarter of the $75 billion total. This presents a challenge for developers who are seeking to maximize the number of users and revenues from their apps.  And, it especially presents a challenge to developers seeking to monetize apps they create for Firefox OS.

According to Mozilla, though, Firefox Marketplace is doing quite well in terms of apps:

"In just a few months since the Firefox Marketplace opened with the first Firefox OS launch, we’ve seen significant momentum with thousands of apps submitted and available today, including some that are currently exclusive to the Firefox Marketplace, like the Manana reading app, Senzari Music Graph, Jaxogram photo-sharing app and games like TrippyTap."

"Some of the favorite popular global apps include Badoo, Box, Chatty (phrase translator), Cut the Rope, Discovery, Disney’s Wreck-It Ralph – Fix-It Felix, Easy Taxi, Evernav, Facebook, KAYAK, multiConvert, Poppit from Pogo, Projector (task manager), Rhapsody, Sticky (photo stickers), SoundCloud, The New York Times, The Weather Channel, TimeOut, TLC, TMZ, Tuenti, Twitter, wger (diet and exercise), World Radio Player and YouTube."

Many of us will always remember Mozilla as the entity that ushered in the Firefox browser, but it's now clear that Mozilla's future is pinned to Firefox OS. The company has realigned its entire executive team around the mobile platform, and it's starting to look like Firefox OS will bring in healthy revenues. If the Firefox Marketplace is doing as well as Mozilla claims, Android may not be the only open source mobile platform to take seriously.