2019 Year in Review: Librem One

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Purism

Beautiful, Secure, Privacy-Respecting Laptops, Tablets, PCs, and Phones

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Accomplishments

We launched Librem One, with open protocols that any app can use. For convenience we released branded apps on both Android and iOS.
Librem Tunnel got mentioned as “App of the month”.
We quickly dealt with and reported on security issues as they arose.
We continue to refine our sign-up process and cross-platform support.

Storage

We currently have quite low storage limits. Our goal for the first quarter of 2020 is to allow paying subscribers to upgrade their storage capacity. This will involve some boring work in the middleware layer, but lays the foundation for Librem Sync and Librem Files, which we hope to release by mid-year.

Safety

Like you we want the world to be a nicer place, so we’ve done our best to clarify our long-term vision for our social service and for social services in general (before marketing companies colonized and centralized what we now call social media). These are collected on our blog under the tag “User empowerment”.

We have released a very basic proof-of-concept client on both Android and iOS. It is not suitable for everyday use, but it does demonstrate that Flutter is a reasonable framework to achieve single cross-platform-but-native app on those platforms. We will use it as a test bed for our proposed safety designs in 2020. We encourage others to follow our example: adopt these design proposals in your own clients, or release your pre-development designs for public comment.

Packages

We have begun the very long road to getting all the software we use (clients and server applications) packaged in Debian, our upstream operating system, so that anyone running a Debian-derived system can apt install any service or client. We aim to make any home-baked software “flagship-friendly but vendor-neutral”, so there will be sensible defaults for the librem.one domain, but you will always be able to reconfigure the packages to target an alternate domain. Or, for those that like a challenge, you could release your own distribution preconfigured to a service you run.

(You will find this fair-minded, mix-and-match philosophy throughout Librem One offerings, on Android and iOS too.)

You can find lists of all the software that Purism is helping package in various places:

Salsa (preparing for inclusion): team page, packages shared with other teams
Tracker (released in Debian): team page

Of course, we still need to get clients and server applications running on PureOS today. For that we have “rapid” and “server” packaging tracks. Expect more news on those in 2020.

Librem One in 2020

As you can see in the report above, there is a lot more the Librem One team could achieve. Your support will help us release and maintain new services, as well as:

improve account support in middleware
implement safety features in Librem Social (but usable by anyone on any compatible service)
package clients and server applications (usable by anyone)
upstream relevant and welcome fixes

…and most excitingly, unlock storage services in early-to-mid 2020.