This is the kind of feedback all such projects get. A million "if you just implement this one critical feature...".
It must be really hard to balance giving all those users what they want, building quality code, keeping the project focused, and having low costs. Is it possible to enable this through extensions, or leveraging a product like OpenCloud?
Yeah, and it's a huge trap, because the authors might believe the users. The truth is, if the app gave you that much value, you would have been using it, and would have found a workaround for the bookmarks export.
It's a bit much to require an open source project to deal with the infrastructure to provide that, don't you think?
All reasonable solutions would require the user to have done their part in setting up a nextcloud instance or something akin to that. And then, as the repo discussed, you would still see "oh, the majority don't know that".
Let's be honest, the average user will not do this. In fact, this comment reminds me of the infamous Dropbox one which suggested a similar failure of UX.
This attitude is why open source userland applications' UX is so bad. Sure, people who use them are not average, but everyone appreciates good UX, even within the constraints of being "privacy respecting, FOSS, fully offline."
I'm OK if Organic Maps isn't designed for the average ignorant user. I've been using it for over a year now and its great, don't need it ruined so a bunch of casuals can download it
I'm not sure about that, Google Maps and many other apps these days now autosave such that the average user today likely doesn't save anything manually anymore. But even still, I have the same question as the sibling above [0], what is the proposed workflow for saving such a file?
I think Apple solves this pretty well in iOS… there’s pretty simple iCloud API’s apps can use to store basic data (also structured data with CKDatabase/etc) which automatically just use the user’s iCloud account storage and implicitly are synced across devices. Apps don’t have to implement any cloud storage or consensus/etc, they just use the platform API’s and everything just works. I’d be shocked if android/play store didn’t have a similar thing.
Huh, on Android or iOS? On Android the backup settings page offer a backup to Google Drive, it also says "Your messages will also back up to your phone's internal storage."...
On my phone the on-device backup can be found in /storage/emulated/0/Android/media/com.whatsapp/WhatsApp/Databases, and I remember reinstalling WhatsApp, logging in with my phone number, and it found the backup and restored the messages.
As comments in the first link suggest, the project emphasizes privacy, and it would have to be done in a privacy-respecting way.
The second link is asking for iCloud synchronization.
A project that emphasizes privacy and open platforms might want to just deprioritize requests coming from people on privacy-violating, closed platforms, since those people hurt their own credibility in the approaches they suggest.
If privacy advocates want to persuade people outside their bubble, this is surely not the right attitude. Imagine telling someone who wants iCloud sync, "oh you're hurting your own credibility"? Uh yeah (backing off slowly), guess I'll go back to Apple/Google maps and miss out on the ineffable benefit of your non-functional, but deeply virtuous, software.
These kind of projects aren't trying to cater to people who don't care about privacy. It caters to people who care about privacy, inside the bubble. I don't think Organic Maps is trying to become a unicorn Google Maps competitor that everyone can use.
We've lost a lot of ground on various open projects because of a bunch of people taking the free gifts, while being oblivious -- or indifferent -- to why we have those.
You shared things and people used them, yes. Now the new approach is… what exactly? Write software aimed at a minority of activists who pass its purity test? Be my guest, but spare me the piety and attitudinising of OP, and don’t be surprised when small scale results in high unit costs and missing features.
Most of the privacy advocates I know have given up on persuading people outside their bubble and now merely want tools that don't spy on them.
Proseletyzing doesn't really work, mostly because any attempt to have this conversation attracts people like you, contributing nothing but bad-faith sumamries and pretending anyone who disagrees with you is crazy or dangerous. Calling the software "non-functional" because it doesn't assume that everyone wants everything they do shipped off to a third party 'sync' service is disingenuous. "Backing off slowly" is just a pointless ad hominem.
It's nice that the result is a slowly increasing collection of applications which don't make the same assumptions as the walled-garden offerings. It would be nicer if it could happen without the peanut gallery attacking everyone.
From reading the bug, they don’t support iCloud backup, which is surprising to me, since I thought supporting backup was trivial on iOS.
As the bug points out, they could use core data sync for people that are navigating using multiple devices.
I believe all of the above supports transparent E2E encryption at this point.
(For backup, there is a toggle, since E2E makes your backup useless if you lose the only device that contains your keys, and many people only have one apple device, and don’t want to bother enlisting their friends to secret-share their recovery key).
https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/issues/622
https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/issues/1694
... right now your bookmarks aren't synchronised anywhere so if you lose your phone all your bookmarks are gone.
When that's working I'll change over in a second!