Comment Sorry, we don't support your OS yet (Score 1) 195
1. Make it easier to make new apps. Visual Basic for AI.
How might that work? Every approach I've seen has a drawback:
- Write the app using "web app technologies"? You end up shipping with each application a redundant copy of most of Chrome. Your users can't afford that kind of storage bloat in this SSD shortage.
- Use native code that calls the facilities of the operating system that the hobbyist developer uses daily? "Sorry, my app doesn't support your OS yet."
- Use native code at all? "Sorry, my code signing certificate ran out; I recommend building from source code. Here's how:" followed by a script that downloads and installs 20 GB of build-time dependencies.
2. Stop using browsers. For every thing you normally do with a browser, make an app for it.
And end up with a lot fewer people installing your app because of SmartScreen Application Reputation (on Windows), Gatekeeper (on macOS), App Review (on iOS and Android), and other deliberate friction that operating system publishers have ostensibly put in the way of wide distribution of malware that can read and exfiltrate every document in your user profile/home directory. A domain name, an entry-level VPS, and a TLS certificate to operate a web application are a lot more affordable than the code signing certificates to sign ports of a native application to all major platforms.
And again, the SSD shortage. Web applications keep working even if evicted from disk cache for capacity reasons.
3. Open source versions of every service people depend on big companies for.
Years ago, I thought of three application categories that won't get Free replacements any time soon: video games, players for rented movies and TV shows, and individual income tax return preparation software.
4. "Local Internet". Your town, city, state, etc, all have people running the FOSS services. It's not run by big corps, but volunteers and municipalities.
I live in a US House district that FiftyPlusOne has marked as a "safe" seat for the incumbent member of the low-government-services party. How would I go about convincing the public that a municipal bulletin board system is anything other than a waste of tax money?
5. "FOSS Devices". Apple and Google still control all our devices, what apps we can install. They will stop the plan, to control us and the internet. So we need to control our devices. A truly open, unrestricted OS for mobiles.
Under current law, mobile carriers have power to exclude those devices from their networks.