Indeed as you mention, complex apps like Taiga are quite time-consuming to package in a way to ensure proper updates for the future. In fact I am right now in the process to iron out the update to Taiga v6 and that price-tag allows us to focus on such things so our users get a smooth experience without missing out on updates (disclaimer, I am one of the Cloudron founders :D )
For sake of our vision we surely would like to make it more cost-effective in the long run, however we are bootstrapped and thus walk a thin line with a focus more on long-term sustainability not just blind growth. (10x cheaper though would realistically even pose an accounting problem with micro-payments or plain transaction fees taking large chunks)
Cloudron also has a full email stack ready to go, however you are totally right about the residential IPs. They are basically all blacklisted by default, which is also why we had to add easy relay-provider support.
> They are basically all blacklisted by default, which is also why we had to add easy relay-provider support.
While I understand why people are doing this, I believe it's not the right way to deal with the problem - basically we're handing over e-mail (as a service) to a few big corps. Each time I have this problem I go through the long and painstaking process of whitelisting the IP and fight to make it work. Usually having it work with Gmail, Yahoo and Microsoft is enough - many smaller orgs don't use balcklisting by default because they have enough problems with mail deliverability already.
This looks really nice and the online demo is quite slick also on Firefox.
I saw that there is either a Qt or GL backend, which made me wonder how this is used then in the online demo or is the browser backend a third, undocumented one?
Also how is input (pointer, key) supported across the already apparently supported platforms?
Everything is currently rendered using OpenGL ES 2.0 (WebGL 1). What's currently called a "Qt Backend" uses QStyle to produce textures of the individual controls.
We use the excellent winit crate at the moment for input handling, so that abstracts it away for us.
While I tend to agree from a personal perspective, however the Wekan project especially seems to be able to pump out lots of very nice features at a high rate, thanks to meteor. Additionally to this, we at Cloudron update the app package about twice a week due to that and so far had very little breakage or regressions, compared to other apps. We do not update meteor often though, which is maybe contributing to the stability.
Yes that helps but brings in other problems. For example many many security problems in the thousands of used npm packages of meteor and its dependencies.
Unfortunately thousands of dependencies is not unique to meteor, it is the hallmark of any popular npm package. So even react and vue would have too many dependencies.
This is great to see and is pretty much the same reason why we have initially started with Cloudron [1]. There are not many technical reasons why running your own apps on the server has to be harder than using a phone. There are tons of great apps already out there and from my perspective the biggest issue, as mentioned in the blog post, is the onboarding and ease of installation/maintenance of those apps including the server itself. The building blocks are all available but as a complete solution hard to use, unless one is a kind of a sysamdmin. This makes it just very exclusive. If you ever tried to setup your own email server there is so much crud work to be done and things to be learned. Learning about this is as such a great opportunity to understand the underlying technology and how things work together, but it is also a huge barrier.
I tried cloudron recently and the experience was pretty smooth. However the 30$/month price tag put me off. Yunohost offers the same (please correct me, if cloudron has features yunohost doesn't have) for free, and it's hard to compete with free.
Agreed the price is steep but it's probably good they're focusing on profitablity. IMO what killed sandstorm.io is the lack of resources to keep apps integrated and updated. It's awesome tech but just didn't hit critical mass.
That is indeed a shame and I was also not aware of them shutting down some of their services. But as far as I know their text document editing tool is a slightly improved etherpad, which is mentioned in the article.
This looks great and would surely be a great addition. If you like, join us at https://chat.cloudron.io and we can together start working on an app package.
