Indie Phone Cloud

There’s a new project called Indie Phone, and they want to build a new, open phone with, amongst other things, their own data sync solution:

http://indiephone.eu/

Seems like an ideal project for using remoteStorage to me. Everybody could then either use the hosted one they offer, or configure their own. Let’s keep an eye on it, and maybe contact/meet them and have a chat about it.

@raucao Pretty cool. I’m interested to see how it develops. Do you know if they already have a solution for their proposed cloud service? Maybe they’d want to use remoteStorage for their hosted solution?

No, I don’t, and yes, that’s exactly what I’m hinting at. :slight_smile:

Just for the record. @jan just started a conversation on Twitter, asking if they already have decided on a solution.

Long story short: they haven’t, they’re looking at the possibility of using existing things like OwnCloud, Hoodie, and remoteStorage, and would use something that fits the bill as well as makes it possible to provide as top-notch, seamless user experience. The latter is the focus I believe.

Hey Basti, Nick, et. al.,

First off, thanks for reaching out. I’m heading up Indie Phone and I wasn’t aware of RemoteStorage until it came across my radar a few minutes ago on Twitter. Needless to say, sounds like a great initiative and I look forward to reading up more about it.

As Basti mentioned in his last message, our focus is on creating a seamless experience that just happens to empower people to own their own data. The goal is to create an open phone that can compete on user experience with the likes of iPhone and Nexus. (i.e., we can’t simply expect people to buy/use it just because it is open — not consumers, anyway. And we really need an open alternative for consumers if we’re going to safeguard our privacy and civil liberties in the future.)

So, all this to say that we will be looking into what’s already out there before deciding on how to proceed with regards to the data storage/sync layer.

And, regardless, I hope we’ll be in touch as we’re all working towards the same aim :slight_smile:

I suppose you are referring to the unhosted and redecentralize movements additional to bilateral peering.
It’s true there’s a lot networking of networks going on, but I find it kind of hard to anticipate when this process will reach critical mass; it still seems very loose.

Always a tricky question how to group advocates of decentralization.

i think there are two distinct parts to that question, depending on how you want this grouping to influence what people work on:

  1. making sure that we “redecentralizers”, people who work on tech freedom, stay informed and don’t duplicate effort. although there have been a lot of similar closed-but-federated open source social networks,and there is a big divide between the linked data believers (centered around w3c) and the rest, i think duplication of effort is still pretty low when compared to for instance the thousands of commercial “killer app” startups which all reinvent the wheel and then die again. a bit of duplication is just the price and inefficiency of innovation, i think. i think we’re doing quite well on this front just with people telling each other about new projects (exactly like in this case). projects will collaborate where it makes sense; in other cases, there will be healthy competition and co-evolution.

  2. making it easy for newly interested people to find the projects they wished they knew about. i think this part is harder and most new contributors probably spend the first 6 months or so researching and discovering ever new and different projects with ever more names and concepts to get your head around, and many of them not actually active projects anymore. i think the redecentralize.org website is doing a good job at grouping some active projects. Francis told me we’re up next this week, maybe that will draw some new visitors to our site as well. also, overview sites like http://libreprojects.net/ will help different projects find each other.

having said that, of course remoteStorage should be adopted by Indie Phone, Firefox OS, PhoneGap, and everyone else as the default way to cloud-sync per-user data. :slight_smile:

2 of the 3 you mentioned are open-source, meaning do a pull request to get things going or just give up on adoption.

A Cordova plugin might actually be quite easy to write, especially when you can look at how other cloud storage plugins are written.

sure, see step 3 of Roadmap, three phases
but we’ll do steps 1 and 2 first :slight_smile: