Comment by jbverschoor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jbverschoor | Hacker News Reader

Warning - google accounts only. What's the deal with all these google-only apps? And on the other hand the de-googling of everybody on HN. It's super annoying, and basically forces you to use a throwaway google account.

Also, with the whole supplychain security, why not just also promote your webapp, instead of a bundled electron app?

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In order for Routine to provide the value you are looking for, it needs access to some of the Google APIs, most specifically the following:

Google Account

Google Calendar

Google Tasks

Google Drive

Your data privacy is paramount to us. We will NEVER share, sell or use your data in any way that could violate your trust in Routine.

The reputation of the founders (Julien Quintard and Quentin Hocquet), the investors and its employees are on the line. We hold ourselves to the highest of standards

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No it's not, as I have no idea who you are. Also, you might say you'll never share, but what about some misconfigured backend? The investors invest in your company and take no liability. That's the whole purpose of a limited liability company

We prefer to warn users instead of just using their Google Account.

As for why we use Google services. It's because most professionals do use Google Calendar. Some don't, we understand. We might serve them in the future but we have to start somewhere.

We advertise the desktop app (instead of the Web app) because Routine is intended to be used through a desktop-wide keyboard shortcut so you can capture thoughts and tasks from anywhere. A Web app requires that you switch to your browser, then find the right tab and click it to then be able to interact with the Web app. We believe it is too slow for a productivity tool. But some people do not have a choice (Windows) this is why we've answered them.

If you do not trust our service, we understand. We don't force you to use it. It's obviously your right.

But just to make things clear (which we explain in the Privacy section), all tasks are stored in your Google Tasks account. All events are stored in your Google Calendar. And all your notes are in your Google Drive. This means we store no data on our servers (for now at least).

Thank you for making clear how it works, as that was not directly clear. This is one of the problems with granting access tokens.. there's no way of knowing what'll happen with them.

Why not just release a macOS version on the appstore? Or, if you've created a swift version anyway, use that codebase for a universal app? There are also quite a number of apps that allow myself to 'convert' it to a 'native' app, with the exception of some features of course (such as global hotkeys).

Both desktop and webapp versions don't work for me (401 from google apps, not gmail), and show a blank screen. Login -> uncheck some checkboxes -> retry and check the boxes -> still blank.

Note: This could be create completely (afaict) using the built-in cal/task integration features of macOS/iOS, and would allow you use all supported calendar/task-services. For example, noteplan simply uses that, and will support dropbox as storage in later versions I think (it was removed from the beta version)

We could have released on the macOS App Store but there was no benefit at first. We want to control how many people use it at first to make sure that we fix the bugs as they come. We've been working on this for only a few months.

Let us check the problem regarding your 401 and come back to you. Sorry about that.

(for now at least)

That's why advertising the service around privacy is being criticized. It's a business. It will do business things. Saying it won't do those things is a distraction...like this conversation.

People who seriously care about privacy are not using Google to manage their information. They are not even your potential users, because they don't use Google.

Not storing data on your servers is a sound way to reduce your liability and attack surface. But that's an operational tradeoff that comes with a business dependency on Google's terms of service.

In B2B sales, not storing on your servers is a feature. But it's not really privacy. It's security.

We are not trying to say that Routine has been built around privacy like Protomail could say. We do not make such claims on our website.

But since we are asking users for their Google credentials, we thought it was more transparent to explain, for each service, why we needed it and what it meant. We prefer to be transparent than just ask for a bunch of permission without explanation as other services do.

And yes we are tight to Google because it was simpler for us to start this way. Again, most of the professionals we target use Google Workspace. In the future, the service could evolve and support other services like Outlook.

My critique is this seems a distraction.

Just have standard terms of service.

A snowflake is always “for now.”

Placating people who don’t like your ToS is not connecting with people in your market segment.

Your market segment is people who don’t care. Your differentiation is treating them better than you can get away with.

Again I don’t have any issue with what you are doing.

I think privacy theater is a waste of your time and energy.

Probably a stupid question: why not CalDAV?

A Google Account integration is an easy and relevant MVP for your product. It allows you to get up and running quicker. You can always add other integrations and self-hosted user management later as you prove out your business model.

If Google Accounts, then >1 Google Accounts. Haven't looked yet, TBH.

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