How to create a good app.store for a smartphone OS?
Users should be able to install whatever software they want. Similar for developers, they should be free to publish whatever software they made.
Apple/Google approach is suboptimal because centralized point of failure. And they do censorship on their stores, both political and arbitrary.
Linux approach is suboptimal because users don’t have keyboards to create these sources.list text files. Even if they had qwerty keyboards, I don’t like the UX, too hard to use.
Traditional P2P like bit torrent + DHT is suboptimal because smartphones, would use too much electricity + bandwidth to be practical.
So far, I’m thinking about developers-hosted binary packages, and existing code-signing infrastructure for authenticity and integrity (Verisign, Comodo, Digicert, these guys, up to developers to choose one). The configuration issue from Linux should be solvable with QR codes scanned by camera, plus a custom URI handler for the web browser on the phone.
The main thing I don’t like about that approach — a store app on the device is a good UX from end users’ perspective. Yet it seems impossible to make one with that approach.
I’m very far from being blocked on that yet, but I will face that problem eventually.
P.S. I’m not going to solve security at that level. As Android store shows us, it’s borderline impossible even with Google’s resources. Modern mobile SOCs have enough juice to solve that properly, on the lower levels of the stack. Most of them support hardware-assisted virtualization. All of them are fast enough to run proper multi-user Linux, with security permissions and SELinux kernel module.
Users should be able to install whatever software they want. Similar for developers, they should be free to publish whatever software they made.
Apple/Google approach is suboptimal because centralized point of failure. And they do censorship on their stores, both political and arbitrary.
Linux approach is suboptimal because users don’t have keyboards to create these sources.list text files. Even if they had qwerty keyboards, I don’t like the UX, too hard to use.
Traditional P2P like bit torrent + DHT is suboptimal because smartphones, would use too much electricity + bandwidth to be practical.
So far, I’m thinking about developers-hosted binary packages, and existing code-signing infrastructure for authenticity and integrity (Verisign, Comodo, Digicert, these guys, up to developers to choose one). The configuration issue from Linux should be solvable with QR codes scanned by camera, plus a custom URI handler for the web browser on the phone.
The main thing I don’t like about that approach — a store app on the device is a good UX from end users’ perspective. Yet it seems impossible to make one with that approach.
I’m very far from being blocked on that yet, but I will face that problem eventually.
P.S. I’m not going to solve security at that level. As Android store shows us, it’s borderline impossible even with Google’s resources. Modern mobile SOCs have enough juice to solve that properly, on the lower levels of the stack. Most of them support hardware-assisted virtualization. All of them are fast enough to run proper multi-user Linux, with security permissions and SELinux kernel module.