[HN Gopher] Purism - Fund Your App
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Purism - Fund Your App
Author : teddyh
Score : 117 points
Date : 2020-10-08 18:05 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (puri.sm)
(TXT) w3m dump (puri.sm)
| amelius wrote:
| I think our best bet to end the duopoly of Apple and Google is to
| have a cross-platform language that runs on all platforms (iOS,
| Android, and perhaps the web).
|
| The reason is that there will otherwise be important apps that
| never end on anything other than Apple or Google OSes, like (for
| example) bank applications, government apps (for taxes, alerts,
| covid tracking), perhaps things like netflix or perhaps the BBC
| news app.
|
| Also, why would developers spend time developing for an open
| platform, when they can make 10X the amount of money on the
| closed platforms?
|
| So effectively, we need the spirit of the web, but in the app
| stores.
|
| (I know, this sounds a bit like embrace, extend and extinguish;
| but this time it's from the "good" side :)
| KarimDaghari wrote:
| The power of the web is that it's accessible from ANY platform
| and there's already an app to use it which comes preloaded with
| whichever platform you're in: the browser.
|
| That said, native app performance is still unmatched (but not
| by a long shot!) the react-native project (both by FB and MSFT)
| looks promising.
| amelius wrote:
| There's also Flutter, interestingly by Google (not sure what
| their strategy is here, as their main interest should be to
| keep the world's information indexable which becomes
| difficult when people use more native apps as opposed to the
| web).
| t0astbread wrote:
| This sounds a bit underwhelming but I think web apps (in the
| system browser), Electron and Cordova are as far as we'll get
| in that direction. (If you exclude projects that are
| technically more "elegant" but never used in the wild.)
| afwe wrote:
| What about React Native?
| [deleted]
| megous wrote:
| > Also, why would developers spend time developing for an open
| platform, when they can make 10X the amount of money on the
| closed platforms?
|
| Yet, GNU/Linux distros exist with a ton of FOSS software.
| amelius wrote:
| Yes, but this time it's "free competing with free", or
| almost-free (or paid for by your personal data, which sadly
| for most people is equivalent to free).
| jamil7 wrote:
| How does one actually build native apps for the platform? I
| couldn't really tell last time it was posted. Are they QT based?
| GranPC wrote:
| They're the same as native Linux desktop apps. For the most
| part they're using GTK3 with libhandy, but it's also possible
| to run Qt apps, or any other toolkit really.
| fsflover wrote:
| https://puri.sm/posts/easy-librem-5-app-development-screen-r...
| gaius_baltar wrote:
| What I think is that Purism got it wrong by creating its own
| mobile distro instead of starting from a pure-FOSS Android (AOSP)
| and patching the missing things with thinks like microG, better
| permission system, isolation and ways to force closed source apps
| to behave and obey the user (app wants my address book and refuse
| to work if I deny it? Nice, take this randomly generated list of
| names and numbers! Location? Take this random place. Phone or
| cell ids? Take this random stuff...)
|
| Advantages is that they can start with a bunch of free apps
| (F-droid is nice!), do not get too far from what SoC vendors
| already have and can move to another distro (even running both
| them in parallel) once they sold a good number of devices and the
| business is sustainable. All while respecting user freedom even
| when they really need some proprietary stuff (e.g. bank apps).
|
| But, well, that ship has sailed. Let's see what we can do.
| slothtrop wrote:
| Eschewing Android for an actual Linux OS was the point.
| Alternative Android distros have been around a long time.
|
| The link addresses one point about apps: "With the Librem 5
| phone you are running a full-blown desktop computer in a mobile
| form factor. If you plug it into a keyboard, mouse, and monitor
| you will have PureOS and the many thousands of applications
| available as you would from any desktop computer. This means
| that we are starting with many thousands of applications that
| "just work" as a desktop application"
|
| Besides web apps and dedicated apps, you can also just run
| anbox if you want something from F-Droid.
| gaius_baltar wrote:
| > Eschewing Android for an actual Linux OS was the point.
| Alternative Android distros have been around a long time.
|
| Correct, but we have Android _distros_ not phones that
| support them well.
|
| We need to get some expensive phone from a supported list,
| unlock it (losing warranty in the process) and flash the
| distro. Not a thing we can say to even technical users who
| are not really inclined to HW hacking. To say nothing about
| the non-technical people who are the ones more vulnerable to
| the current mobile environment.
| gnufx wrote:
| See https://esolutions.shop/
| fsflover wrote:
| https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Freque...
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| When I see things like this, and aweSIM, and the not-yet-
| materialized Purism USA Edition (and the price tag associated
| with that), and the expose by a former manager, and their
| unethical resale of open source software... I can't help but
| wonder how well Purism is doing, financially speaking. It seems
| desperate.
| raspyberr wrote:
| What part of their reselling open source software is unethical?
| RandomBacon wrote:
| I'm 100% behind Purism and the Librem 5 project (placed my pre-
| order three years ago), but the "Hold My Order" seems pretty
| ridiculous. I don't think they should have made that an option at
| all. I think this is actually my first criticism of
| Purism/Librem.
|
| They should have just wrote something like:
|
| When the software you donated for is ready, rest assured your
| Librem will receive the update. Librem 5 is the only phone that
| gets better with age... (some marketing they've used in the past)
| bszupnick wrote:
| I kind of appreciate that they gave the option. If having X app
| is a blocker for someone to using the phone, instead of having
| it sit in my underwear drawer until that app is ready, I'd
| rather wait for later versions of the phone and more kinks to
| be worked out.
|
| In my mind giving someone options isn't a bad thing.
| minimalist wrote:
| This is good! Hopefully Purism can build on their recognition to
| funnel resources toward FOSS-mobile applications because this
| will help us all.
|
| This reminds me of something else. What would be the best model
| for a FOSS "app store" with mechanisms for compensation? Lowering
| the barrier for transactions to FOSS projects really helps their
| survival and sustenance by individuals who cannot contribute
| code.
|
| Here's a very half-baked thought: One can imagine users
| supporting community servers (matrix, activitypub/mastodon, etc.)
| and applications through a cryptocurrency wallet that is loaded
| in the same way that people load their g--gle/a--le wallets. One
| can also imagine applications that can tie into this wallet to
| compensate publishers based on some model (a transaction API like
| g--gle/a--le or something like what brave is doing with the BAT).
| My question is what are the failure modes of such a model?
|
| For example, this still wouldn't stop the perverse incentives of:
|
| - Content publishers going for the types of bait that generate
| the most clicks. Clicks=compensation regardless of it's from ads
| or some sort of attention token.
|
| - Application developers casing addiction mechanisms that go
| after whales. The same loot-box mechanisms can be implemented
| with a FOSS game that uses a crypto wallet API.
| greggyb wrote:
| I'd be happy to use an app store that tracks active screen-time
| per app and disburses a monthly "subscription" proportionally
| to the developers of all the apps I use.
|
| I don't have any concern about the type of currency used to
| pay.
|
| A quick check of my screentime over the past few days shows
| only two apps which wouldn't benefit from this: DAVx and
| Syncthing. Both of these are essentially daemons I configured
| once, and ideally never see the app interface of ever again
| until I get a new phone. Otherwise, apps I benefit from are
| represented in the screentime of the past couple days.
| dividedbyzero wrote:
| > I'd be happy to use an app store that tracks active screen-
| time per app and disburses a monthly "subscription"
| proportionally to the developers of all the apps I use.
|
| Screentime is a really, really bad proxy for usefulness
| though. Weather apps, email clients, maps (without turn-by-
| turn directions), the alternative app I use to control my Hue
| lights, ... will starve, while the Kindle app and social
| media will get showered in money. That alternative camera
| app, hardly any screentime at all. My to do app shows me lots
| of notifications but gets very little screentime. Netflix
| however...
| phh wrote:
| I've started developing something like that, and I started by
| noticing like you that basing on screentime isn't fair to
| apps that are purely in background, so I tried to compensate
| for that.
|
| Then I found that some apps, even though they were useful,
| didn't actually do much under the hood. Like say Frost for
| Facebook which is mostly a webview with few extensions. So I
| wanted to add a section for things that are mostly a
| "viewer". An additional example of such a thing is a media
| player: if you look 10h a day at videos, it's thanks to the
| content, not to the viewer.
|
| And then, there are behaviours you maybe don't want to
| trigger, like getting people addicted. 2048 using the
| screentime metric would have gained a lot of money (and it
| does deserve a lot!), but IMO people who got addicted to it
| should give them less.
|
| And what about apps that have paying variant on Google Play?
| Which deserves more money, the app that is simply free on
| fdroid and Play Store, or the app that is free on fdroid, but
| paying (or free reduced) on Play Store.
|
| So, I spent few days trying to make something fair, and at
| the moment I believe that the most fair I can do is to give
| equally among all apps that I've used in the last 7 days.
| greggyb wrote:
| Yeah, there's plenty of edge case handling you might want
| to do.
|
| My first pass would be to do it based on screentime.
|
| My second pass would be to give the screentime ratios to
| the user, allowing them to tweak the ratios themselves.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > My second pass would be to give the screentime ratios
| to the user, allowing them to tweak the ratios
| themselves.
|
| Absolutely. Look at what Humble Bundle does, where you
| can tweak the proportion of your payment that goes to
| various things. That's still quite novel.
| [deleted]
| tehjoker wrote:
| I wouldn't want any monitoring of which applications I use.
| In any case, such an incentive would make developers of apps
| that should have quick, fast actions do things to make the
| apps slower. For example, if it takes a user 1s to use the
| app, they'll add a 0.5 sec animation to open it and 1.5x
| their money and so on.
| greggyb wrote:
| And those seconds will be dominated by the tens of minutes
| I spend in other apps per day. And Android and iOS already
| monitor which apps you use. The calculation of ratios could
| easily be done locally.
| necrotic_comp wrote:
| Isn't apt-get, pacman, emerge, etc. more or less equivalent to
| an app store ?
|
| I don't think there's necessarily a need for projects to be
| funded or paid for - giving back to the mobile ecosystem the
| same way we give back to the desktop ecosystem seems like a
| pretty fair way to go.
| TylerE wrote:
| Not really, because they have no discovery mechanism. (And
| no, a search command that kinda sort matches on description
| strings doesn't count)
| gnufx wrote:
| In what way? I don't see any fundamental difference between
| discovering GNU/Linux packages and Android ones (in the
| "stores" I've used -- f-droid, /e/ apps, and Aurora).
| e12e wrote:
| There are a few gui apps that leverage tags for browsing
| dpkg/apt?
| throwawa3495 wrote:
| I dont care about the cost or any of the pysops from you google
| and apple employees. I want to see and support more free software
| mobile operating systems period.
| fit2rule wrote:
| This looks pretty great, and shows progress towards becoming a
| replacement for my iPhone - but, one question - what are these
| apps? Am I missing the ability to navigate to a page describing
| each of these apps? I can probably guess what some of them are,
| but doesn't it seem a little strange to have a list of apps, but
| no descriptions for the apps available?
|
| (On Safari, MacOS, in case its just an anchor bug..)
| fsflover wrote:
| https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/List-o...
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(page generated 2020-10-08 23:00 UTC)