Ah, interesting! Just reading the home page wearing my developer hat makes this stand out: "Each document, chat room, mail box, notebook, blog, or anything else you create is a "grain" in Sandstorm. Sandstorm containerizes each one in its own secure sandbox from which it cannot talk to the world without express permission."

The notion that every document is its own independent unit sounds pretty menacing to me. Could be fine for some things, but getting things running there is sounding like a fair bit of work to me, and very limited.

And then this part is especially bad: "[maybe someday] You won't have to deal with payments | Eventually, we hope to make Sansdtorm implement in-app purchases and deposit the proceeds directly to your bank account"

Right there a lot of incentive to integrate has leaked out. "Please build for our platform in exchange for no money" is not quite the worst offer I've had, but it's definitely not appealing. Looking through the Wayback machine, I see

But the part that really concerns me is that they seem to think that server apps can run like mobile apps. To me one of the most powerful things about SaaS products is that the aggregated use information drives both product and operational improvements and allows rapid response to bugs and issues. So as a developer choosing between this and a SaaS approach, this feels like having one foot in a bucket to me.

For example, I recently outsourced my mail hosting to Fastmail precisely because I want experts to run things. Would I be happier if the data were stored somewhere I control? Definitely. But not if that means the experts aren't paying attention anymore.

Sandstorm's design is a little bit menacing! And it does require a fair bit of work sometimes to fit web apps not built for Sandstorm into Sandstorm's model. (The holy grail here is apps built for Sandstorm, but the platform needs to be bigger before more developers do that.) Usually packaging for Sandstorm largely entails locking an app into a single-document model, and stripping out authentication (since Sandstorm handles it).

But the end goal is pretty well worth it: Any grain is incredibly secure by default, and for the most part, app vulnerabilities are irrelevant. A grain where only you have access doesn't need any sort of authentication or security in the app at all. And since each document is it's own sandbox, sharing a document with someone doesn't give them a way in to exploit access to your other documents as might happen with a vulnerability in a more traditional design.

The business model story for selling Sandstorm apps isn't super great right now, you probably could have a licensing model that requested network access through the Powerbox to check the license or something, but in many cases, there's already a wide variety of great open source apps that are free and just frustrating to host and manage without a platform like Sandstorm (or Cloudron). (EDIT: Now that I think about it, Sandstorm used to have a paid license key/feature key system that made no callbacks, I think the licensing info was encrypted asymmetrically.)

As for your support of SaaS data collection, I just can't really agree with you: People who want to give data to a developer can choose to do so, but I think it's ethically wrong to collect data without permission. (Sandstorm servers do have the ability to opt in to provide basic app usage data back to Sandstorm's development team.)

I love FastMail, and have been an enthusiastic customer since 2016. :)

I feel the exact same way and am currently trying to solve this by decoupling the application from the storage. So the "experts" control the business logic and UI, while I, the user, store the data. It's similar to what Firebase does for app developers but is split by the end user who can also control that data.

> But the part that really concerns me is that they seem to think that server apps can run like mobile apps. To me one of the most powerful things about SaaS products is that the aggregated use...

That definitely seems like the current state of affairs but I think there isn't a reason why writing server apps like mobile apps has to inherently throw away aggregated data. Especially with Google's research in federated learning, apps will soon be able to get insights across their users while preserving their privacy.

Please don't past-tense Sandstorm! The community is still working on it. Albeit a little slower. ;)

I actually didn't realize that. I think I confluated the death of Oasis with Sandstorm in general. I'll have to poke into running it:) Thanks for the correction!