Скачать или смотреть FOWA: Increasing app discovery beyond the app store

When it comes to mobile apps, it seems that Apple and iTunes has a lock. Yes, Android has its marketplace, but it isn't generating the volume of downloads and revenue that Apple is making through its app store. They just announced 15 billion downloads. Quite an accomplishment. It seems that iTunes is the only place iPhone users are discovering mobile apps.
When it comes to web apps, which are definitely bleeding over to mobile apps, there is no one-stop shop where everyone is discovering apps. Mozilla is hoping to open up new opportunities for web app discovery beyond the online store.
At the Future of Web Apps conference in Las Vegas, I spoke with Todd Simpson, Chief of Innovation at Mozilla. In his presentation, he demonstrated two alternative ways of discovering apps beyond an app store.
Discover apps on websites: Using an example of a visit to NYTimes.com, Simpson showed a great example of how a visitor could simply discover and install a NYTimes web app.
Upon visiting, they get a pop up asking if they'd like the NYTimes Web app. When they say yes it just replaces their NYTimes.com experience, with a richer app-like experience.
App replacement of a website goes well beyond a "bookmark this site" recommendation. More importantly, if you have Firefox Sync installed on all your devices, it will sync that web app install across all of your devices.
Social discovery: As we all know, people are more likely to install a new app if it's recommended and being used by your friends. Mozilla is working on making it easier to share web apps with your friends.