Fund Your App to Vote for the Future

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Purism

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

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Fund Your App is available for app selection and donation from https://puri.sm/fund-your-app/.

A common question asked about the Librem 5 phone is “How many apps are available?” This can be answered simply by “Many thousands, asterisk.” What most people desire is a dozen or so applications they may need and a handful more they want, but there are other variables too.

Market need

Purism offers product to many markets, B2C (Business to Consumer) market is the most publicly facing market and when bringing an innovative new product to market–like the Librem 5–it includes early adopters, tastemakers, influencers, enthusiasts, and professionals. The B2C market is where the question of number of apps is most often asked. And we have many thousands*.

B2B (Business to Business) and B2G (Business to Governments) are markets that are much less publicly facing, but only require two or three apps beyond the core basics. These few apps are easily tested and can be verified to work for large-scale deployments.

Native or External

Native applications are defined as a local application written and integrated into the operating system PureOS, these are what we also call “pixel perfect” applications to showcase that they are curated applications for the best user experience. There are two approaches to native applications; Porting, direct port of the application from a different platform; and Adapting, modifying a desktop application to make it adaptive (usable on a small screen).

External applications are websites that can be rendered in an isolated application, emulated application from Android, or even an application that is served from the Internet (cloud).

As you can quickly see, the number of applications are ever increasing from Native as soon as you include Web Apps from external sources.

Mobile or Desktop

One area where Purism’s vision and innovation far outpaces Apple or Google is around true convergence. With the Librem 5 phone you are running a full-blown desktop computer in a mobile form factor. If you plug it into a keyboard, mouse, and monitor you will have PureOS and the many thousands of applications available as you would from any desktop computer. This means that we are starting with many thousands of applications that “just work” as a desktop application; where to be usable from a finger on touch-screen in a mobile form factor separated from the monitor, is just adapting it using Purism’s libhandy library.

Number of Apps

Even though we have many thousands of applications* available today within PureOS, we recognize that to increase in the B2C market it takes consistent effort and perseverance to transition that asterisk away from the answer. The asterisk can be removed when the applications the majority needs are available natively or as optimized web apps, while we march on toward applications the majority wants.

Fund Your App

To bring awareness to this we are launching a Fund Your App page to allow people to vote on applications they desire with their wallet, so we can fund greater development directly advancing on a regular release schedule with an ever increasing number of applications.

Fund Your App is available for app selection and donation from https://puri.sm/fund-your-app/.