I love the minor movement toward self-hosted web apps. I wish they were easy enough to setup as installing an app on Android or iPhone.
Use your old PC, a Raspberry Pi, an EC2 instance, whatever you like, a single small Docker Compose file with Watchtower for auto-updating the container image when new one published etc. I've got self-hosted services that have ran untouched for years this way at home from a handful of lines of YML. Docker Compose will also take care of restarting the service on reboot/powercut if thats a concern.
Given the ubiquity of container images, you can run largely any web application this way and the container image likely already exists - this project also has a Dockerfile and would run fine this way too.
docker run coolapp:latestEdit: this app would probably make for a great Sandstorm app.
I think there's still a world in which you can buy an rPi with software preinstalled and updaters packaged without much effort though.
If that could take off, you could easily have this type of service. However, I think it falls apart because you need to govern the app store and that is expensive and difficult.
Umbrel is just plug-and-play with an app store, haven't personally tried it but looks very cool.
I've been slowly moving everything to self hosted to reduce the pain if/when I'm ever randomly banned from Google or some other huge network and can't get it re-enabled.
The downside is that I'm now my own IT department and need to perpetually monitor these things.
Virtual android device in the cloud might be a great model for it since Android has good built-in security and process isolation.
Web apps don't magically produce their own compute, power and networking. They still need to be run on something.
(Web app does not automatically equal SaaS, especially in this case that is explicitly billed as self-hosted.)
I promise, everyone, it is very legal and very cool to just write applications that run without TCP roundtrips. I promise.
This sentence makes no sense to me. "Self-hosting" and "software as a service" are diametrically opposed things.
This seems extremely arbitrary and seems to assume some implicit definitions that are not common, and in fact are the opposite of what I've heard used.
IME software as a service generally speaking means somebody else is doing all the hosting and you as an end user just point your browser to it or in some cases install a local app (and often you put in your credit card and pay a monthly subscription). Self-hosting means you do all that hosting yourself. I've never seen something marketed as SaaS that expected you to host the server-side yourself, but I'd be happy to hear of an example.
> I promise, everyone, it is very legal and very cool to just write applications that run without TCP roundtrips. I promise.
That's a hell of a strawman against an argument I see nobody making.
(Rephrased to be less mean.)
"The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is the continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry" -Henry Petroski
Efficiency is very important to me. (And in the era of climate change, it should be important to everyone.) I consider web apps to be about the least efficient form of software yet discovered. We suddenly need two relatively beefy computers with multi-GHz multi-core processors and GB of RAM, one of which must be powered on 24/7, to do something that could have been done on the hardware of the mid-80s.