Show HN: Neverinstall – A platform to bring desktop applications to the browser
neverinstall.com
neverinstall.com
So they don't offer any pricing on their website until you sign up. Cool.
But anyway...
You rent this £ per hour (seriously) with a maximum single payment of 100 hours. For their max spec (7gb ram and 7vCPU) it costs £68.38 for 100 hours.
If I'm an actual power user (which this seems to be targeting as it constantly goes on about power hungry apps) then I'll assume I need 40 hours a week.
That would cost me £1422 a year. For that price, I could purchase a laptop (and only need to pay once) with 16GB ram, Ryzen 7 5800H and an RTX3080. To boot, I could probably get it on finance at the same monthly cost.
Why would anyone not just do that?
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Useful for people running extremely low power machines I guess but this is is literally about as far from what I want as possible.
Not content with creating every bloody application in electron or some other web technology, we're now trying to move even the native apps into the browser and require an always on internet connection too.
God help us.
EDIT: just an additional point - I initially thought this could be really cool for schools etc, buy low power machines and run effectively thin clients. However, that actually would be even worse because of the insane network bandwidth you'd need to run hundreds of instances at the same time. I literally do not see the point of this.
Their cheapest seat has 5gb ram. If I had a laptop with 8gb RAM I would consider it under powered.
If I had 4gb, as low as tolerable, why would I pay a premium for 1gb extra with a likely probably throttled CPU.
So I guess this may be aimed at a similar niche – laptop not enough to run everything well, but the most important things, and use such a service for the occasional peek into a CAD file or the like. Pricing would still turn me off, but I'm certainly not their target audience.
Not to mention that to run multiple apps and have them be visible means you need multiple instances of the video streaming active...
That's not really what this app seems to do. When you run an application on this neverinstall product, it doesn't magically transpile the native app into JavaScript. The app still runs natively on a real virtual server on a server farm somewhere.
The only JavaScript your browser downloads & interprets is the networking & rendering code necessary to connect to what is essentially a VPS.
But yes, I agree. This is a network bandwidth (+ privacy!) nightmare.
Also its not £ /month. It's hourly. To run 24 hours a day the cost would be 3x more.
The sell of this is the preconfigured web access portal, for which you pay a hefty premium.
To emphasise, a £40 month VPS is so astronomically better value if you can config it.
We are blessed with a platform team who know what they're doing even with their small resource budget.
As a PO I am sure that deliver us value for money when it comes to how we execute our codebase.
I wouldn't feel OK doing around 90% of my web browsing on what is basically someone else's machine. I wouldn't feel safe logging in to websites, exchanging cookies, secure tokens, and just being in control of my browsing history. It's kind of akin to doing your everyday browsing on a library computer—it's a no-no.
We don't know how secure their VMs are, the VM-to-VM separation (can other instances use exploits/loopholes to peek into my home directory?) and at-rest data protection (encrypted at rest? can the owners see the saved data?).
What is neverinstall?
neverinstall allows users to access & run native applications like - Android studio, Chrome, VS Code, IntelliJ, etc. through a local browser.
How does it work?
We run these applications in cloud-native environments with virtual displays and stream the video directly to the browser while the user's input context (mouse, keyboard, etc) is forwarded to these applications in near real-time. The platform has a very generous free plan for all free applications and as we improve our cloud we intend to make all free applications fully free always. The paid applications will have a BYOL or a fully-loaded pay-as-you-go model. Of course, these might change in the future but keeping the free applications with a generous free plan will not. We believe as access to good and cheap high-speed internet grows everywhere, accessing and using software should change and be a lot more optimal than what it is now.
Some key problems we are trying to solve -
Saving hardware resources
Modern-day applications are becoming resource-heavy, users often need to make the decision on whether to upgrade their devices or seek out a new one. This is expensive and wasteful.
Real-time collaboration
Our favorite desktop apps often lack real time collaboration, we are trying to bring these applications to the web so that we're able to bring more flexibility into app workflows.
Accessibility
A lot of apps are not accessible on multiple devices especially the developer apps. We solve this by bringing these apps to your web browser and make them truly accessible from any device or OS.
We have a strict privacy policy and support multiple login providers.We do not access or share users data to any third party.
I’m not creating an account without knowing pricing.
What does it say?
That said, both compute and bandwidth are expensive. How can you afford such a generous forever-free plan? Is there a catch?
Why would publishers pay us? They dont have to worry about piracy and users environment as everything is sandboxed.
With us they can give on demand pay-as-you-go option to users as opposed to expensive annual licenses.
For example, opening https://neverinstall.com/apps/intellij on Firefox just shows a low-resolution screen shot with a list of features, and no CTA.
How do I use neverinstall?
EDIT: I was able to launch an app after disabling my ad-blocker, but
- the latency for clicks/keystrokes was > 1000ms (despite choosing a server within the same country)
- the video resolution was poor (despite fast.com claiming 240Mbps)
- the app window was stuck to the bottom right corner and I could not get it to fill my screen
- the app kept picking up ghost key strokes ("key" would result in "keeeeeey")
All this aside, I appreciate the intent behind creating this product. From an engineering perspective some improvements are warranted, and I'm sure you guys will get there. All the best. :)
What is my escape hatch for my workflows and data if your startup dies, though?
Once signed in, clicking apps just opens the marketing page for them. How do I actually launch one?
Also your customer support messaging system is limited to a _very_ short message, ~150 characters or so.
What a bleak view of the future. Imagine 20 people in a cafe, absolutely wrecking the free Wi-Fi so they can design something on figma and send some messages over slack.
The future of computing should be smarter, faster architectures for CPUs and software, not the enablement of shoddy web development practices.
Also why would anyone run chrome remotely? You already have to have a browser open so…???
> All Information provided by you, save and except upon withdrawal or termination, shall be retained in locations outside the direct control of the Company (for instance, on servers or databases co-locates with hosting providers). We will delete Information based on a request received from you within a reasonable period and latest within thirty (30) days of receiving a deletion request. However, we may retain such portions of Information and for such periods as may be required under Applicable Law. Notwithstanding anything contained herein, Company may retain data after account deletion for reasons including but limited to the following purposes: If there is an unresolved issue relating to your account, or an unresolved claim or dispute; If we are required to by Applicable Law, and/or in aggregated and/or anonymized form, or Company may also retain certain information if necessary, for its legitimate business interests, such as fraud prevention and enhancing Users' safety and security.
https://neverinstall.com/privacy
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If I understand it right, information is kept for an unknown period of time unless the user sends a deletion request. I am not sure pressing the "delete" button at the end of a session acts as a deletion request, but I hope so.
Also, specifically around the browsers unless the user opts in for save session the workspace along with its data is auto deleted after the session ends.
Furthermore if the user is inactive for more than 48 hours we send a reminder that their workspace will be deleted after another 48 hours. Apologies for lack of clarity in our privacy policy, we will soon update it.
I can see how this is part of an industry trend, but it's a bad trend. Please don't.
If this didn't have the minimum hours of usage, the concept would be neat if you only spend 8 hours a week in some intensive software. That would be a great use IMO. I bet there are already a handful of those offerings though.
It would be helpful to readers to explain how your product differentiates itself from the existing offerings.
As someone who has lived and worked in those cities, their salary offerings in INR aren't worth considering, especially when:
- The pay is average (poor for a startup even) - The equity range is 0%-1%?
If not, this seems pretty much useless.
Also, I don't really see the advantage of this compared with full Windows cloud workstations offered by Amazon and (soon) Microsoft.
>When you choose to save a session, our automated >servers handle your session data objectively. We >dont have acceess to this data and have protocols >in place to ensure data privacy.
Can you provide any more details on this? For such an important area, I'd like to know a bit more first. I don't understand what it means to handle my session data "objectively" and would like to know what you have in place to ensure privacy. Thanks!
(Also, there are a couple of typos to fix in the copy quoted above--"access" and "don't".)
If you only occasionally need an app or are travelling and don't want to carry even an ultraportable then I suppose its great. I can't see any scenario where this can see mass adoption (at these prices anyway!)
I would consider using this to avoid running resource pigs like MS teams on my local machine.
Nice launch, congrats!
That's pretty much the entire point of a thin client. If you've got a device with, as the user said, "limited network bandwidth", then downloading hundreds of megabytes or even gigabytes of Docker images or npm packages or whatever within a reasonable amount of time might not be doable but streaming at 10 Mbps might.
You still need enough bandwidth to stream the video. That is not up for debate. Their servers do not magically mean you can stream things from their servers to your client as if you had a fast internet connection if you do not.
Nobody is arguing that they did. The point is that you don't stream things from the server that require a fast internet connection, just video of the server.
I don't like Figma. I use it for remote work. And feel really uncomfortable, training some "automation" behind the scenes is always a reality. In my view for the companies this is like free petrol. We all work for them and pay monthly and devalue our work by the hour.
Intellectual ownership. Security. If you are professional the idea of not owning a computer is nonsense.
Its obvious that someone is getting "big VC funding" to bring browser as a replacement of computer OS. It will not work. Hopefully.
Those who don't understand the idea of freedom and personal computing didn't know the history. We live in the past. Not in the future.
Encryption and personal computing are pillars of democracy. Using one use case (collaboration) as universal reason for moving everything in the browser is not the way forward.
Giving people software thattheycan use on their own machines is not without problems (e.g. updates, incompatibilities, ...), but ultimately it is the more logical solution. If you buy a hammer you expect it to work as long as you don't burn your toolshed. You don't expect it to change shape while you are using it, you don't expect it not to stop working once the manufacturer decides to give up on the design or once they go bust. Change being in your hands instead of the manufacturers is a feature, not a bug.