whatts

Can you explain why you would suggest CouchDB? Of course, it seems to be a great project. Nevertheless, it has no built-in support for publishing and subscribing, and real-time notifications.

We would have to built this ourselves. However, CouchDB has a "_changes" API that can even be turned into "continuous" mode [1]. This is the perfect data source for pub/sub.

hood.ie, Meteor, etc. offer more features, but they are also more cluttered and not as clean as CouchDB.

[1] http://docs.couchdb.org/en/latest/api/database/changes.html

Independently, without seeing this thread, I had already posted this today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8563103

I would definitely participate as a contributer, if it's open-source. I'll email you.

By the way, I have already tried Meteor which relies on MongoDB. However, Firebase allows you to read and write data at any arbitrary location. MongoDB, on the contrary, expects you to have some basic "collections" and write complete documents in there. Anything that is on a deeper level inside is called "embedded document" and the support for common operations is much worse.

100% agreed. Consider this to prevent the lock-in: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8563103

Well, it is. Just like Meteor. There are dozens of possibilities how you could do it nowadays. You can even use your own Node.js server with WebSockets, use CouchDB, etc.

But nothing comes close to the first experience and ease of development you have with Firebase. And I'd love to build my products around Firebase and embrace their service if there was not that risk of them shutting down some day.

An API that works as a drop-in replacement would let us developers sleep much better, wouldn't it?

So I'd like to know: Which open-source product would you consider best as the foundation for something like that?

Couchbase? hood.ie? Meteor? CouchDB?

I'd love to work on such an open-source "clone", and maybe we'll even find some more collaborators.

Maybe Meteor would work as well. But they don't have any client libraries ready, in contrast to Couchbase.

Okay, skobbler has now published an update for its Android app where the "Scout by TeleNav" brand is introduced.

Well, skobbler did all this for iOS and Android. And TeleNav bought skobbler for $24M in January [1] -- so it's obvious why TeleNav might be able to do this now.

But will skobbler support stop? Why switch from skobbler to TeleNav's own products at all? With skobbler, you can get your whole continent's maps for roughly $7.50.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/30/telenav-buys-skobbler/

90% of people write DropBox, as well ;)

You can still count clicks without associating it with the user who clicked. Anyway, the "doesn't track you" part is the whole point of DDG. If you don't like/need that, you can simply use Google.

The question remains whether we (or rather you, the Chrome team) should leave such a decision to some "metrics". What has happened to smart decisions, bold moves and instinct?

Apple has all the resources, and they had the "goto fail". You should not underrate open source. Bugs are shallow, but that can never mean every single bug. Some bugs will always be overlooked, no matter if open source or closed source.

Me too. And I feel they won't be the fastest here ... Certainly a downside of Heroku, where you cannot just re-compile and fix things yourself.

Agree in general. This is worrisome. However, (1) is most probably exaggerated. On mobile, you have an unbelievably broad selection, this will never become an oligopoly. But big players will get bigger. Anyway, Firefox OS may become a promising alternative, althought it comes with some of the same downsides.

That's Apple's system, right? Android does have a different one. Fortunately or unfortunately, I'm not really sure. Android's system definitely has advantages as well. But it goes without saying that there are serious issues that must be fixed.

Well, you're right, but Apple's model is fundamentally different. I don't think Android will switch to such a model in the (near) future. That would mean a lot of things have to be changed, and hundreds of thousands of apps would break. So we can safely assume Android will stay with its current system. Thus there is only one possibility left: improve the current system. Rejection of individual permissions would definitely the most powerful improvement, while still being easy to implement.

Auto-updating without asking if the user is okay with the new permissions? How should this work?

Android just needs App Ops back -- all privacy issues solved. But it seems this won't happen. Pressure from Facebook etc.?

That depends. If we talk about high-quality apps, innovative applications, products used by millions of users, I'm sure you're right. And I guess most HN users (if involved at all), will probably doing these things. But for smaller apps, smaller companies/clients, I definitely disagree. Those companies will start to think that every business should have its own app, just as everybody needs their own website, and so they turn to "chayns" (or competitors) to get a free mass-produced app. That does harm to the overall quality of apps as well, of course.

Sort of, because I'm sure he/she knew exactly what the title was referring to ;) Anyway, that's not really important. By the way, it affects Android, iOS, Windows Phone and Blackberry -- what platform are you using then?

Yes, definitely. And we can see that 1,000+ apps per week, maybe even growing, can quickly result in 47,000 apps here as well.

I knew that some nitpicker would discuss exactly this phrase ;) It's the appstore that "you are using", or the appstore that is "installed on your phone", in case you don't know what I'm referring to, otherwise.

Pure's stylesheets are already minified, the only result of re-minifying them is that the copyright will be removed: http://yui.yahooapis.com/pure/0.2.1/pure-min.css

Cool guy, is an "open-source advocate" but removes PureCSS's copyright notice: https://github.com/yui/pure/blob/master/LICENSE.md

Actually, their Developer Program Policies prohibit "a webview of a website not owned or administered by you": https://play.google.com/about/developer-content-policy.html But this is only a rule, that does not mean anybody enforces these guidelines ...

Google does nothing about "cloned" fake apps, just look at this ask.fm clone, for example, which has been there for years and the developer is getting rich from 5M+ users and tons of ads inside: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.wAskFM

Is such a copy legal at all? I mean, it's not our "problem", but it's against my desire for fairness ...