For the past few months, the Firefox for Android team has been working on Firefox Hub, a project to make your home page more customizable and extensible. At its core, this feature is a set of new APIs that allows add-ons to add new content to the Firefox for Android home page.

These APIs are new in Firefox 30, but there are even more features available in Firefox 31, which is moving to Aurora this week. As we’ve been working on these APIs, we’ve been building plenty of demo add-ons ourselves, but we’re at the point where we want more developers to get involved!

Next week (May 5-9), we’re holding a distributed add-on hackathon to encourage more people to start building things with these APIs, and I want to encourage anyone who’s interested to participate!

This hackathon has three main goals:

  • Find bugs with the APIs
  • Find bugs with the documentation
  • Start building a collection of awesome add-ons

To kick off this hackathon, I made an etherpad that links to documentation, example add-ons, and a long list of new add-on ideas. Since our community lives all over the world, we’ll hang out in #mobile on irc.mozilla.org to ask questions, report problems, and share progress on things we’re making. In addition to building add-ons, you can also participate by testing new add-ons as they’re made!

At the end of the week, everyone who participated in the hackathon will receive a special limited-edition open badge, as well as pride in contributing to Firefox for Android. And maybe I’ll try to dig up some special prizes for anyone who makes a really cool add-on :)