It’s been the Year of the Apps.  There’s an app for everything:  from the alarm clock to running trackers to maps and shopping engines, going through e-readers, music players and restaurant finders. For every minute of your connected life, for every activity there is an app.

Each app is a new world of ubiquitous possibilities. But as with everything, there is a price to pay: fragmentation and closeness. Each platform has its own store, and owns your apps.  Add that app stores have been built without much of an “intelligence”, besides the top and new charts.

So what are the alternatives?

For a year and a half now, Mozilla has been working on what promises to be an “anti-app store”: Fennec, the first version of Firefox Mobile, which will be released on Nokia’s N900 handsets by the end of the year, and then on Windows Mobile and Android.

Mozilla Mobile Preview

What will Fennec do?

• Synch with the desktop version. Any web page open in a user’s desktop browser will automatically open in the mobile version in real time, without the user having to do anything!
• Tabbed browsing
• Tapping of the screen to zoom in on a page, plus auto-scaling of all images to fit the mobile screen.
• Add-ons- to add functionalities such as news readers or online games.
• Geo-location

And all of this will come without draining the phone’s memory. Take Mozilla’s word on it.

So,the question is: can Fennec win consumers and therefore attract developers?

The advantages of the Mozilla Mobile solution are tangible:

• Product focus: developers could focus on enhancing one product instead of recreating the wheel for each new platform.
• Reach: one release of the product could reach a cross-platform audience.
• Time to market: no approval process, no waiting or unclear rules to hold up the release process.
• Marketing: just the open world wide mobile web to conquer, not 10 different battles for 10 different chart highlights.

Despite all these advantages, native apps still seem to have an edge, and a strong one, when it comes to focus of the user experience and monetization. People pay for apps, they are not so inclined to do the same while in a browsing frame of mind. Apps are perceived as “products” that users pay for, especially when the payment method is a secure one click method. Apps are also “closed” environments and therefore focused on conversions, whereas browsing is always one click away from closing that tab and moving on.

Will Firefox be able to deliver an equally focused monetization path to its developers? Time will tell and that time is getting closer.