As a (satisfied) owner of a Purism laptop, I wish they would concentrate on just one thing and get that thing perfect, rather than spreading themselves thin with laptops, smartphones, security tokens, and now an app store. What do they have, 30 employees? For that many complex endeavors (including hardware development!), something is going to give. There is still a key privacy/security/openness feature promised for the laptop that is not complete. Though I can understand that their focus may have shifted to smartphones rather than laptops since smartphones seem to be a much bigger market nowadays.
People want apps. Sideloading apk is a recipe for being p0wned. Therefore, a store is neccessary, to build confidence and trust in the "ecology" of apps, to motivate people to buy apps, which then motivates app developers to write apps for purism, which therefore sells more units.
It's not diversionary: its neccessary. The lead question I see on alternate AOSP sites after how to make it work is "how do I get the google apps"
I think they are underestimating how much time and effort (and employees) it takes to be a successful gatekeeper of an app store.
If too many malware or scam apps make it onto the store, people won't trust the store anymore and the whole thing is ruined. So you have to vet every release version of every app or enough bad stuff will slip through that the users will leave.
Pretty soon people will start complaining about arbitrary rejections so you need to start documenting a system of rules and applying them consistently. If you don't do that, the developers will leave. Even if you do it, the developers might still leave unless being in your store is worth the hassle of obeying all of the rules.
Then some parents will complain that their kid spent a lot of their money buying stuff in an online game or spent time chatting with a pervert and it's your fault because the app came from your store. You might need to spend a lot of money on lawyers and PR people to get out of that one.
Most of these problems are nontechnical -- they are really people problems. It's hard to see how such a small company can run an app store that can be trusted by users and app developers unless it handles a very small volume of apps.
Microsoft couldn't even get their phone app store to a point where people trusted it and could get the apps they wanted.
I'm cheering for Purism as much (probably more) than anyone, but I think they seriously need to make sure they get this right, and give it the appropriate resources (technical, and people).
I remember it during the 8.1 period, all you would find is slow garbage. I can't remember using a single app from their store that wasn't a slow mess. I'm betting it is still the case with their app store too. It wouldn't surprise me that the same issues would hit the windows phone app store.
Really? I had a windows phone from WP7 up to one of the last released and one of the reasons was that most apps were fast, snappy and started pretty quickly, while android phones in the same price range (about 50$) seemed to struggle with basic stuff.
Of course there were exceptions, but IMO that wasn't the major problem.
I remember all the scam apps. I would search for “Facebook” and there would be at least 5 apps with that name, all with the Facebook logo. The real one was somewhere in the middle of the search results, not at the top.
> It's not diversionary: its neccessary. The lead question I see on alternate AOSP sites after how to make it work is "how do I get the google apps"
I'm not sure this is because they're in a big hurry to stuff themselves with apps. I think that a handful of apps like Uber, Whatsapp, etc are the drivers, and people want Google apps because none of these work on Android without Google Play Services.
I think people are less concerned with "apps" than these services, and if you could cover them, you wouldn't need an app store.
However, since the difference between an app store and a package management gui is the branding, I'm not so sure this is as big an engineering lift as the grandparent fears.
I agree with your sentiment but this is nothing more than a "package repo" for their os. Ubuntu has an appstore too last I checked. Both their laptop and mobile phone endeavor need an app store.
I had emailed them 5 months ago about whether they planned such a store and whether it would be worth planning to make an app in time for the librem release, but did not hear back. This is the answer I suppose. The question is whether they plan to monetize it. I think they have to - there has o be a way for developers to pay their rent when working with free software. I hope they can pioneer something along those lines
How did the elementary app store pay off BTW? Are there any numbers available?
As another commenter has eluded to, I would love to see them propose some monetisation models for the store. Personally, I think they should make Patreon-style donations possible with a super-low barrier to entry (only 1 to 2 clicks to donate). Maybe they take a tiny (~2%) slice of every transaction to help manage the whole thing. Donations only imho. That would be awesome.
kinda ot: I almost bought a Librem (a few times)... but going without built-in ethernet is a show stopper for me. It's a fundamental feature for a hacker-friendly laptop.
