Mozilla helps you make an app store

New development standards make app publishing an open source affair, in web and mobile browsers

App stores are big business. There is simply no disputing it. Apple's App Store makes millions, and can boast over 1.5 billion downloads. Of course, they are not the only ones to profit off of the app model. Google has apps going on Android-based phones, which have seen a 886% growth in sales this year.

So, the big question is how can your company make its own app store, and benefit from its potential profitability? There's a lot of money to be made by both selling your own apps and by taking a percent of the sales of others developers who will place their apps into your new store.

I know, it sounds like a pipe dream. Creating an app store of your very own would require a substantial outlay of time, energy and developer fees, which puts it out of reach for most startups. Well, at least that used to be the case.

Mozilla is now bringing the potenial of your own app store to you. They are giving developers the means to make their own app stores by releasing technical documentation for a proposed ecosystem, centered around web- and mobile-based apps. The design standards supported include HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

The documentation, available through the Mozilla Labs page, provides users with both a proposed system and a developer preview prototype that are designed to help you install, manage and launch web apps. A sample of the store can be viewed on the Mozilla site.

The system is compatible with the following browsers: Firefox 3.6 and later, Firefox for mobile, Internet Explorer 8, Chrome 6, Safari 5, Opera 10 and WebKit mobile. This list of browsers provides for a fair variety of options, but obviously this system will not work on iPhone, which runs on its own proprietary standards.

Most people know Mozilla as the maker of the Firefox Web browser. The Mozilla Project is a non-profit organization founded in 1998, based in Mountain View, CA. They create and support open source projects, both within the company and via grants. Open source is a philosophy of development, in which access to the code behind the product is available, and often sharable, depending on the specific license applied.