Other open app ecosystems

DigLife.com has great potential but is not that much further along in reality. I am happy you will join as connections will enable us to do more together than we might accomplish independently. There is a wealth of good work in progress.

As I've said before about DigiLife, as soon as they replace their use of Slack with a self-hosted, free code chat system (eg Riot/ Matrix, or Patchwork/ Scuttlebutt), I'll start to take an interest.

EDIT: added Patchwork

DigLife doesn't use Slack. Currently using Mattermost, which is open source

Hmm. My mistake, sorry about that. Will post a correction on my blog. I was looking at the DigitalLife homepage yesterday and I thought I saw a reference to Slack. Now I don't see it, but I don't see a reference to MatterMost there either.

We saw a demo, and mattermost was definitely their chat app.

Now I will also need to try https://disroot.org/ , prompted by @strypey

And I think also start a catalog of different OAE flavors or types or approaches or ideas about what that phrase might mean...

Like, for Mozilla, it seemed to mean an app marketplace. For Starcounter, a marketplace of possibly non-open apps using their possibly non-open framework.

For Disroot and DigLife, it means a bunch of open source apps tied together by a dashboard and single-signon, and at least in DigLife, some data-sharing among the apps and a bot that works in at least some of the apps.

We think we are working toward a somewhat different flavor but haven't gotten there yet (but it will include the DigLife approach, too - might even be able to live in either of Disroot or DigLife, I don't know yet).

From the description given by @bobhaugen here, StarCounter sounds like classic openwashing. They are talking more about "apps" in the marketing sense of the word, the little hooks you try to get onto people's devices so you can track them and bug them with constant notifications, making your service as addictive as a slot machine. Whereas I think we are using "app" as a shorthand for "an internet-based service provided by a hosted instance of a particularl software package".

The Mozilla proposal sound like it's using "app" in the same sense as StarCounter. Their call is for more independent app repos like F-Droid, which was released a couple of months before this Mozilla blog post. This would have been about the same time the iThings and Android took over the handheld market, and the now defunct FireFoxOS project was being gestated.

@bobhaugen I've added it to the list of the potential partners we could work with (at different level) : https://cloud.communecter.org/index.php/s/CanHl03CCNB8lip

If you haven't already, you could also add IndieHosters, OpenMailBox, and Cozy Cloud. Really surprised to see that SandStorm isn't on the list too.

Another couple of candidates:
* Gibberfish are planning a similar system to Disroot.org, but with a particularly focus on privacy and encryption. They are currently in private beta and I've applied to be a beta tester.
* Comunes Collective: developers of a number of commons-orientated, collaboration platforms, running on free code, including OurProject and Kune (a fork of Apache Wave I believe).