Technology Network

      Mozilla has claimed that the Firefox mobile will put an end to app stores like the iPhone's App Store or BlackBerry App World. As the smartphone web browsers will share much of the desktop Firefox's engine and render both complex HTML and JavaScript, the Mozilla mobile Vice President Jay Sullivan anticipates many developers opting to write web apps instead of producing native code.

      "As developers get more frustrated with quality assurance, the amount of handsets they have to buy, whether their security updates will get past the iPhone approval process. I think they'll move to the web," Sullivan explains. Firefox Mobile is being developed for virtually every smartphone platform that embraces a comparatively unrestricted app environment, including Android, Nokia's Maemo, Symbian and Windows Mobile. It's currently only in beta stage for Maemo phones like the N900 but will be entirely unavailable on platforms like the iPhone, where Apple's submission rules ban most code interpreters and thus third-party web browsers.

      Web apps may still face a difficult road ahead based on user reactions. As a consolation to iPhone developers, Apple in 2007 tried promoting web apps as an alternative to the then-absent support for third-party native software. Most still objected, and whether due to this or other factors Apple launched its App Store a year after the iPhone became available.