Genuinely interested as I'm looking to explore this as a potential project myself with my team.
* In app library, ability to filter apps by permissions required
...... Specifically, I would want to be able to blacklist permission sets. Eg, search for Keyboard apps, but exclude any apps that require access to my contacts.
* Ability to pay for apps directly through those apps rather than having to go through the smartphone's software author.
...... Totally fine with the software having a default payment option in case I don't want to entrust a certain app with my payment info.
* An interface that lets me see logs of which URLs each app hits and what data it sent.
* An interface that lets me see which servers are sending data to my apps and what data is included.
"App Library" here representing the same sort of app as the Play Store, but looking to disassociate from the term "Store", as that model is not necessary.
Edit: Formatting sub-lists on HN isn't intuitive, apparently
- network connectivity as a separate permission (no reason every app should be allowed network access)
- also, permissions systems everywhere need to get updated for this millennium. Some thoughts:
-- to read my photos is OK as long as they don't have direct network access.
-- but today every app has Internet access by default
-- and just because I trust an app to read my photos doesn't mean I should have to give it permission to delete photos
And in general, I would prefer most apps actually don't have any access to photos, the photo picker could be completely OS level and the app never actually has access.
I guess you could also have non-free repos and some kind of payment API (does Ubuntu/Snap do this?) but I really want to see if I can just write apps for the gaps I find when trying to use a PureOS or KDE Plasma device.
edit: see some comments on permissions. Honestly I've not looked into this space very much. I assume there might need to be some cgroup isolation that can be used to lock off hardware and filesystems, similar to containers (not sure if Snap/Flatpak use cgroups).
I suppose malicious code could get in and spy on you, but we've got the same concerns on Linux desktops and official package repos. I don't know exactly ... there's a lot to think about there.
Just letting developers get paid without taking a 30 percent cut, or not banning open source apps for including a Patreon link [1] would be a great start.
I don't think that any financial model can fit all usages. Except, of course, paid up front with paid upgrades (and a subscription if there is a cloud component). But that ship has sailed.
That's the real issue with computing nowadays, this desire to lock everything down. You see it with DRM, you see it with walled gardens, you see it with almost everything nowadays.
I fear that a world like the one described in "The Right to Read" [0] is closer than ever.
0: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html (yes, I know it's Stallman, but even he was right on a few things, as disgusting as he was in a lot of other things. Stopped clock right twice a day, etc)
