Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by blowski 906 days ago
This is the kind of feedback all such projects get. A million "if you just implement this one critical feature...".

It must be really hard to balance giving all those users what they want, building quality code, keeping the project focused, and having low costs. Is it possible to enable this through extensions, or leveraging a product like OpenCloud?

3 comments

Yeah, and it's a huge trap, because the authors might believe the users. The truth is, if the app gave you that much value, you would have been using it, and would have found a workaround for the bookmarks export.
I really like this post by Mark Cuban and the HN discussion about Why you should never listen to you customers. Worth checking out..

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1244756 [2010]

https://blogmaverick.com/2010/04/06/why-you-should-never-lis... [2010]

"Save everything to the cloud by default" is a standard piece of functionality for mobile apps now, not a small side feature.
Not requiring any cloud can also be a feature, and an important one for an offline-first project.

Saving things to the cloud as an option, or an officially blessed way to auto-export data locally for your own backup setup, is important though.

It's a bit much to require an open source project to deal with the infrastructure to provide that, don't you think?

All reasonable solutions would require the user to have done their part in setting up a nextcloud instance or something akin to that. And then, as the repo discussed, you would still see "oh, the majority don't know that".

On the iOS side, Apple provides the infrastructure via CloudKit.
Given the project's goals, that would be off the table.

Someone could always fork it and add that feature though!

What exactly do you mean by OpenCloud ?
Sorry, I meant OwnCloud - similar to SandStorm. I don't have much experience working with them, so I might be talking rubbish.