One way we could mitigate the EDGE problem is by distributing an offline-first packaged version of the Marketplace. This would mean: - Rather than pull data from the API for user display, we would pull data from localStorage. - We would distribute the app with a subset of the data: perhaps the top X% apps, where X is the number of apps it would take to fill up the 1.5 MB we've allotted. - In an async task, we use the existing APIs to continue populating the data in localStorage. - We would probably want to create some sort of changelog API to optimize how this async fetching takes place. Potential problems: - This could be a strain on users with metered bandwidth. - We currently don't have a way to detect user connection speed, or more qualitative characteristics of the connection (e.g. Wifi vs. 4G vs EDGE) - We would need to develop APIs for automated submission of packaged apps. See bug 920081 - I'm not sure how well our existing front-end architecture (e.g. Commonplace) would support this kind of pattern. - I don't think that this is something we could realistically put into production before Tarako goes live.

Another problem to keep in mind: - It would severely impact updates of the Marketplace package in Firefox OS, since the update mechanism for apps in Firefox OS downloads the entire file (it doesn't do a binary diff)

The local search part of this might be tough. You'd have to search the local catalog, but maybe search the whole catalog if you're online.

Demo: http://metropolis.paas.allizom.org/ Source: https://github.com/cvan/metropolis/ Architecture: https://github.com/cvan/metropolis/wiki/Technical-Architecture