My Second Phone Is in the Cloud

There are already multiple implementations of this:

- nextcloud (https://nextcloud.com/), more like a "dropbox-like" with added applications - sandstorm (https://sandstorm.io/), with a high focus on security - yunohost (https://yunohost.org/#/), a full-on debian distribution with all the scaffolding to one-click install known applications (mail server, file storage, IM server and client, ...). All linux software can be used as an "app". The process to make it into an app is the same as creating a package for a distribution, except specifically for this one. The good thing is that installation is way easier than using a package manager and configuring the database for the user, etc... It seems to be the most in line with the author's vision.

Hugged to death.

“If you were using federated Kuberenetes with node auto-scaling and the latest cloud-native AI-enabled service discovery OSS tools for geographically aware traffic distribution your static site wouldn’t have gone down.”

I was hoping this as someone else who, like me, has ported their primary phone number to twilio and runs their own personal telco, in the cloud.

That is not what this article was about.

Cached copy by Google:

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:lIMDg7...

This is a really cool idea. In fact, I was thinking about it but in the form of a PC [1].

Most desktop computers today are a magnitude more powerful then the small VMs we rent on the cloud. While you go on with your day, your desktop computer can be put to work in Your service.

[1]: https://idiallo.com/blog/bringing-back-the-pc

Sounds like a similar idea as the (failed) sandstorm.io.

The problem is in the details.

When openssl has a bug, who notices, decides, installs the new package and restarts all the dependent services?

That person or group has the actual control over your personal cloud server. And it's more efficient, and thus cheaper, if they are a large scale organization. Once again it will be more attractive to most people to centralize.

I like the sentiment (and run my own Synology NAS to sort of achieve this), but I'm trying to understand the difference between saying "my second phone is in the cloud" and "I want my phone to be a thin client for a server that I run using open standards".

Is there any meaningful difference? I feel like the second idea has been around for a while.

Incidentally, because I've read so many articles recently bemoaning the state of the iPad, I think if Apple really embraced the "thin client" model for the iPad, they would have a much better shot at product market fit. For example, if the iPad could seamlessly view and edit files from, say, any SMB server as easily as it can from iCloud, I think that would get people excited. It would be decoupling the interface from the underlying standard, but also make sure that they work well together. Who knows, it also might lead to having a standard file format where we're missing them today, e.g., for handwritten notes?

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.

1. https://cloudron.io

Very cool idea. I do however have some comments:

- The "appstore"-like experience already exists in the ecosystem, in a sense. You have package managers with post-install and configuration scripts (Installing slapd for example yields a perfectly functioning instance within 2 minutes), or maybe Ansible playbooks that run the instance with a simple file configuration and one command. For package managers, it all depends on the packaging.

- Again the ecosystem somewhat already exists in a way if you consider Docker for example. All the dependencies are neatly packaged, and if you think kubernetes, then you you have helm as the appstore. It even solves the possible problems with ports and schenanigans that the user mentions. (But again, post-install triggers in debconf for ufw on ubuntu for example already do this. It all depends on the packaging.)

But as the author points out, not everyone is keen on hitting the terminal, but that has been a problem (or rather a business opportunity) for long enough that there are solid, uncomplicated and perhaps way more convenient (and eco-friendly) ways to achieve what the author is thinking of accomplishing.

One thing that comes to mind is the amazing Synology products. In fact, they implement the exact vision of the author: Run your software on your NAS, and have a dynamic DNS graciously provided by synology to access it. E-mail server, file sharing, photos app, even photo recognition, and a plethora of other stuff. You can even run VMs or Docker on it ! And all within the synology appstore (with some magic nat traversal I presume because it does not need any port forwarding)

And that is just one example of something I've seen and witnessed to work very well and reliably too.

I guess what I'm saying is, the author's vision is shared amongst a lot of people and there may even be commercial solutions out there that implement it. But I would for sure love to see an open-source attempt. In fact, I think there's already one that I'm just not aware of.

I'm trying to create EXACTLY this with my latest project (https://www.aspen.cloud) and it is challenging to find the right balance between ease of use and decentralization. The path we're taking is a service that you can pay for and we provide everything you need or you host it yourself. Because sometimes letting experts manage your system is more reliable and you can avoid getting the hug of death like this site!

The idea of owning your personal computer in the cloud with instant, always updating apps completely in your control seems inevitable but making something easy for anyone to use will take time. That's why we're focusing on the developer experience to make it simple and cheap to make apps in this new paradigm while shaping the experience for the end user so it does ultimately feel as simple as using the App Store.

This seems more like the Urbit "personal server" idea than the cloud replacement for a phone I expected tbh

So... VDI, but for Phones? VPI? Seems like a cool idea worth some effort to streamline.

These days, it's fairly inexpensive to get a home server, set up a VPN server, and run stuff like a web browser through RDP. Guacamole (https://guacamole.apache.org/) makes desktop apps through a web browser even simpler.

Again, setting all this up is more than trivial, but I believe it's something that could be a "one-click app" for a VPS. See https://marketplace.digitalocean.com/

Isn't this (pcc) urbit.org?

I 've been using nextcloudpi on an rpi for 3 years to achieve most of what the author describes. It's been awesome and I d suggest people give it a try.

I've been thinking about and working on the same problem for a while. My conclusion is that this has to be done with a physical device of some kind over which the user has physical control. Otherwise whoever provides the personal cloud servers ends up being the centralized lock-in element in the system.

This is a neat idea.

Am I right in the inking that even if a big tech company did this it could still be good. Because they are just providing the ‘device’ like Apple do now. I guess they would still have power over what you could / could not install though.

I get wanting to be serverless, but hosting the static parts using S3 and doing clever database things using Lambda and DynamoDB also achieves that goal, while surviving the hug of death.

Thought this was going to be more literally. A phone-virtual-machine, for stuff like your robot vacuum cleaner to keep it from infesting your real phone and spy on you.

If apps on personal servers can’t collect data, then they will need to charge money in order to have an economic incentive to support the app, ship updates, upgrade UI, etc. If there is a competing “free” option then from a centralized monolith, then it’s going to be very difficult for the PCC app to deal with.

Paid apps are also inherently less viral and can’t tap into network effects as well due to the friction resulting from payments. In order to overcome this, PCC apps need to develop a viable revenue model without putting a paywall.

I see the PCC model work for applications where neither the consumer and the business want to store sensitive data because the security overhead is too high.

E.g. trading bot that doesn’t want to store user’s API keys. In fact, running private servers is something that is pretty common in that world.

But is there an alternative to iCloud backup or to photostream/photos? Even Dropbox does not backup my photos unless I run it and wait.

Isn’t https://solidproject.org going in that direction?

Demand for this article is outstripping server.

Wouldn't my server have to run on ARM in this case.

welp ddos’d by apparent popularity!

So, a virtual desktop in the cloud? That's new