Ind.ie
 

Is anyone following what Aral Balkan & co are doing at https://ind.ie ?

They're crowdfunding development of a phone but also software that doesn't involve using privately owned cloud services to share messages, data etc.

I saw Aral give a talk on 'Digital Feudalism' a year or so back and he's quite a charismatic presenter but the resources he has make Jolla look like a megacorp.

The software side so far is 'Pulse' which is what was once Syncthing, Waystone which is a place to meetup and Heartbeat, a peer-to-peer social network.

The hardware is a mockup just now with nothing expected before end of 2016.

https://ind.ie/assets/images/phone/found-object.jpg

The crowdfunding has just started and seems to be doing well.

https://ind.ie/be-the-hope/

Re: Ind.ie
 

Nothing there about the device OS, at least I could not find anything?
Seems they are concentrating on the social network side or something like that.

Re: Ind.ie
 

They've not announced what the OS is going to be yet. It would be nice if it was based on Mer of course.

Re: Ind.ie
 

That would be great, but I wouldn't be surprised if they took the Blackphone approach: "let's take a phone with closed source hardware (binary blobs for drivers), put Android (AOSP) on it, throw in some proprietary apps and call it safe" :-/

Re: Ind.ie
 

For latest news :

https://source.ind.ie/project/ind-ie/commits/master


https://twitter.com/aral/status/531032866264973312

We’ll be deploying at noon for a 1PM release. Thunderclap hits at 5PM.+@indie

Re: Ind.ie
 

Yesterday they released a fundraise and a roadmap plan.
They expect to release a private pre-alpha (for those who donated $100 or more) on December 10th.

Edit: by the time of this post, 49% of the $100,000 needed was funded.

Re: Ind.ie
 

57% now far more reasonable than ubuntu campain isnt it

but workforces can not compare

https://ind.ie/blog/focus/

{

So, going forward, we are focussing the efforts of our tiny team on just one platform: Apple’s. We are starting with Mac and our goal is to also support iOS in the near future.

}

Ok next one

Re: Ind.ie
 

They should've just said from the beginning that they were going to work in very small steps due to being with literally only a couple of people. It's really silly that they first make all this buzz that they'll do this and that and write an OS from scratch and release a phone and now backtrack to say "sorry, we're only going to make something nobody will use on a proprietary platform, maybe in 20 years we'll write the first lines of a kernel for indieOS". Aral seems to be a great guy, but I pity the fool(s) who believed that this could actually become reality anytime soon.

Re: Ind.ie
 

It's disappointing that they've gone from an OS all the way down to another social network app that almost nobody is asking for.

You'd think also that if Mac/iOS already is being acknowledged by Aral as being more privacy oriented than Android, they'd target Android first for their secure social network app. I can't see the logic in going up against iMessage.