The seed for the entire idea was actually people in mobile-first environments—developing countries, etc—and helping empower them to make software for themselves and their communities.

We started with desktop authoring, and it's been a useful step on the way to a mobile-first UI.

Will be really cool when people can generate apps on their phones, publish and share them, using only touch.

Yeah, not yet ready for primetime. This hasn't launched yet, and won't for a while. But you can look under the hood:

https://github.com/mozilla/appmaker

and check out where we're intending to go:

https://github.com/mozilla/appmaker-words/wiki

Some fair points—but, it's worth reiterating that there was no intent to push this out for evaluation :)

We work in the open, up to and including staging pre-alpha software on public URLs so we can gather feedback in-progress.

In this case, we were showing this off in super early state at a company summit. Word of mouth appears to be powerful!

That's right—and the priority is to let people with little or no progamming experience make their own mobile apps. Think Hypercard.

We're shipping a bunch of starter components to begin. In the future, we're looking at opening to contributors to submit their own components. We may have some advanced component editing at some point in the future, but the priority is a delightful experience for people who don't know how to code.

From someone peripherally involved in the project:

This is an open source project, community-built from the beginning. It's pre-alpha. Pre-pre alpha, even. There has been no public launch or fanfare. That's why you'll see no blog posts or explanatory text yet, why many of the components don't work, and why the tutorials aren't built.

But it's cool to see that it's already found its way to HN.

It's meant to be like Hypercard for mobile apps.

If you want to learn more, check out the repo:

https://github.com/mozilla/appmaker

or the vision stub / wiki:

https://github.com/mozilla/appmaker-words/wiki