[liamcardenas]

I’m sure people will disagree with this but I think they should focus on getting an easy way for people to target their devices with React Native, NativeScript, PWAs and every other cross-platform framework.

That way they can much more easily acquire software. Seriously making an app from scratch is no small task, and often time isn’t worth it for such a small market.

[flukus]

Have you seen what development for this is like? You can slap together simple apps (the UI anyway) with a few dozen lines of C. It's extremely simple, lightweight and fast, everything react/PWA's/etc aren't. This is what excites me about librem the most, it's so easy to just write code with no bloated IDE, 15 xml files, AbstractFactoryBuilders and the rest of the android crapfest.

PWA's and the like can stay away, I want software from developers that actually respect their users, software that doesn't waste resources, software that actually looks native.

[liamcardenas]

I’m sure it’s just as easy as any other UI.

My point is it’s so small, nobody will focus on it. However, if they can easily port their existing codebase, it will have more apps.

[Apaec]

Web centric didn't work for FirefoxOS.

Contrary to popular trends, programmers can know more than a couple of languages and not everything has to be javascript.

I'm sure many hackers would be more excited to make an app with go, rust, haskell, etc than to do js, that just feels like work.

[liamcardenas]

Yes, FirefoxOS was certainly web centric and mostly did not succeed. That doesn’t mean it failed /because/ it was web centric. Every mobile OS has struggled other than iOS and Android because getting adoption for a new OS is hard.

Some additional thoughts:

1) maybe shipping a new OS with hardware, catering to a privacy focused niche is key to succeed this time

2) maybe web technology wasn’t ready to have wide adoption for making cross-platform apps at the time FirefoxOS was launched, but is now

3) maybe PureOS will fail regardless of how apps are built. In my opinion, the best chance of succeeding will be from actually being useful. In order to be useful, it needs software. Unless, of course, you seriously believe that getting hackers excited by not using web technology will be a better solution.

[TACIXAT]

Yea, I think PWAs are a great substitute for apps. I wrote a websocket chat that my girlfriend and I use. It works great on desktop and mobile, makes for a seamless transition from commute to work. I'm less hyped about the electron ecosystem, but something performant that allowed those front end tools would be great.