Thank you! As someone who as of a week ago is hardcore switching from Apple to Linux, I applaud you. I've purchased a 16" MBP, both Airpod models, iPhone, and iPad in the last 24 months. Now on to System76!
Whatever the past is, I believe there's a new market in 2021 for Apple-switchers that will unleash new funds for companies like yours. De-Google movement will pale in comparison to this in terms of economics. Looking into signing up just on principle. Non-E2EE encrypted, closed source, without ability to self host is a dead end, why put a penny more towards it. Open source options may suck today but it's the only path forward. Thank you for what you do - whether your company succeeds or simply inspires 1,000 new companies in its place.
What are your plans for Linux support? Your site only mentions Android and iOS, I see electron mentioned, but again I'm one of these Apple switchers, I have no idea what I'm doing really but I'm willing to pay for solutions.
I think that you are overestimating the size of the audience of people who have nerd rage over whatever we’re pissed off at Apple about or have meaningful concerns about government surveillance.
They’d be better off focusing on making a better user experience instead of E2EE drama.
The size of the audience may be small indeed. But Apple users on average have deep pockets and are willing to spend. A quick search suggests Apple users spend >2x what Android users spend. No data yet on what Apple users spend compared to Linux users. It's part of the reason "but 5% marketshare!" was never a good argument against the rise of Mac/iPhone.
The moms and kids dropping 1000$ on candy crush every month are not going to switch off apple. The big spenders in apples echo system are not the tech literate. The tech literate normally cost way more to maintained from a client perspective. Also they are allot more concerned over costs with regards to space as seen by allot of comments on this page talking about how expensive storage is.
Indeed, this is why you would be foolish to use Ente as you cannot self host it. At any point they can choose to lock things down, make their clients closed source, etc etc, and you'd once again need to spend time jumping ship because you'd need to find a new ecosystem.
Ente is just convient and is coming at the right time (hence the massive amount of upvotes) but does not give you total control nor your freedom back. Using them instead of something you can self host is just running in circles.
> open source may suck...
What? This was extremely random and out of place with the rest of your comment.
What you really want, if you care about self hosting and all the other stuff you mentioned, is Nextcloud[0]. And if you don't want to self host yet, you'd be better off hosting Nextcloud in a VPS, even on Linode you can just 1 click deploy a Nextcloud instance in their app store[1]. That way you don't become dependent on a service you cannot control/deploy yourself.
I think ente does fill a niche, people don't mind paying dollars for companies because it is supposed to guarantee a level of service/polish. And in the case of photos, if the service were to shut down, there's very likely a path one can take to perform a migration.
I'm a big user of open source solutions, I use Linux on my machine and use syncthing to sync files across all my devices. I'm aware that my solution is not doable for everyone and that's the problem with most open source solutions, the lack of polish/ease of use. There are tons of systems that aren't open source that we are forced to rely upon for day to day, airplane software, traffic lights, telecommunications) and we've just accepted it because of convenience and trust.
What I'm trying to say is that we don't have to worry about self-hosting everything and force ourselves to only use open source tools. I do think that if we do use private tools, we should understand how our data can be exported to a new system if necessary so we're not "locked in".
Standard Notes seems like a good example of this balance to me. While you can self host, I assume 99% of people don't. It must be an option, otherwise I wouldn't use it.
I've tried NextCloud, even 1-click hosted by a third party. For all the power, it's not built with me in mind, it seems to treat my photos like files/data, not like photos. I want to pay money for that extra oomph, for algorithms, searchability (about $10/month for my photos seems about right), and I want to pay money so I don't have to pay with my time. Is there something I can buy that's on top of NextCloud?
There are many people like you willing to spend money on a good solution that gets the job done who have no interest in self hosting and reviewing the source.
After experiencing the ease of Google photos, any basic file management system to store photos is a downgrade after that.
If ente can figure out how to do the extras (search, face matching) without invading privacy (not even sure how possible this is) I can see this being valuable to the people who want to de-google and maybe even de-apple.
Not that I know of. Could have a look through the nextcloud marketplace for something or another. Tbh, I don't see any open platforms having Google/Apple photos kind of functionality for at least a little bit. Google and Apple trained their algorithms on the people using their free tiers for years. Google especially had access to so much information on the user using Google Photos that it was able to build the algorithms it has today. For an open platform to have this functionality, it would need to wait for an open source model/algorithm to exist, else it would need to build it itself by using user data (no E2EE then).
Unless Google open sourced whatever models it uses in Google Photos today, don't expect this level of searchability yet. Actually even if Google did, it would probably be so tied to Google user information and be incompatible with E2EE.
Sorry for the delayed response, I missed this comment.
If you're on Linux you can either use our web app[1] or our desktop app[2]. The latter is just the former wrapped in electron, but with the ability to sync uploaded files to your local disk drive.
Whatever the past is, I believe there's a new market in 2021 for Apple-switchers that will unleash new funds for companies like yours. De-Google movement will pale in comparison to this in terms of economics. Looking into signing up just on principle. Non-E2EE encrypted, closed source, without ability to self host is a dead end, why put a penny more towards it. Open source options may suck today but it's the only path forward. Thank you for what you do - whether your company succeeds or simply inspires 1,000 new companies in its place.
What are your plans for Linux support? Your site only mentions Android and iOS, I see electron mentioned, but again I'm one of these Apple switchers, I have no idea what I'm doing really but I'm willing to pay for solutions.
Take my money!!!