2015-05-17 at 09:01:16
On April 25 and 26 the 7th edition of the MobileCamp was organized in Dresden, Germany. Mobilecamp is a barcamp with "Mobile" as topic. It's probably the most important barcamp regarding mobile in the German-speaking countries. Therefore the German-speaking Mozilla community decided to host a Firefox OS day on Saturday. The organizers of the barcamp were kind enough to lend us a room specific for that.
Since the MobileCamp was mostly dominated by Android, iOS and Windows Phone in the past, we decided to do a Firefox OS day to educate people about the power of the Web. On Saturday I held a talk (slides 1, slides 2) about Firefox OS and showed how to create open web apps. Since this was a barcamp I left enough room for discussion and there were some quite interesting questions.
For the rest of the day we were available for helping out with creating apps and doing demos. The schedule of the Mobilecamp was quite dense and very interesting, so people didn't stay long in our room. Nevertheless a lot of people came by quickly to check out Firefox OS. We did a lot of demos showing off the newest features and having discussions with interested attendees. We did not only show Firefox OS on phones, but also a build of the emulator showing the GUI for TVs. That looked quite well on the big TV we had in our room, a real Panasonic TV with Firefox OS would actually have been better for this to show all the features. But it was great nevertheless :)
One person came back from time to time to figure out WebNFC and building Firefox OS by himself together with Michael Schloh von Bennewitz who gladly assisted me at this event. Thanks a lot to Michael for the great help!
For the whole weekend we also talked to Android users to make them download Firefox for Android. Many didn't know that Firefox is also available for Android and therefore were using Chrome on mobile. I think we will have at least 30 new Firefox for Android users now. One person showed up in our room and told me that it would be great if Firefox would also have tabs-on-top on mobile. At first I was quite confused, since I've been using that for quite some time but wasn't sure if it was Nightly/Beta only. It turned out that he just had an old Firefox installation and everything was good after an update through the Play Store.
For pictures it's probably best to check out the Twitter timeline.
Since Mobilecamp is important for the mobile market in Germany I'm glad we could attend Mobilecamp and show off Firefox OS and educate people about the Web since we believe that the Web is the platform. Also a big "Thank you" to all the organizers, it was great! Thanks for everything!