
Purism announces PureOS Store - alexkavon
https://puri.sm/posts/purism-announces-pureos-store/
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mysterypie
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.

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ggm
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"

~~~
twblalock
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.

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Sendotsh
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).

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Something1234
Their app store, period.

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.

~~~
SahAssar
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.

~~~
twblalock
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.

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jammygit
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?

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Konryan
I wonder whether they're building it from scratch or leveraging some of the
work put into other stores\app centers like Gnome's or Elementary's.

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confounded
I imagine this is going to be flatpak based

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socceroos
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.

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fractalf
Purism rules! I ordered the phone today. Hopefully this is the start of free
linux os on the mobile platform, sorely needed. Support!

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alexkavon
What’s even nicer is that you can always install/create another store, if this
one ever lacks.

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jakeogh
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.

