ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Martin Albisetti <argentina@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, Mar 28, 2015 at 6:08 AM, zed123 zed <linux5@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> i heard that it's not possible to download apps from the ubuntu touch app
> store without having an ubuntu one account. I think you should change this:
> Firefox OS allows downloading apps from its marketplace without an account,
> so i don't see why this shouldn't also be possible with ubuntu touch.
>
> "While the usual tradition of linux distributions is to have repositories
> accessible to anyone, why do I need to have a ubuntu one account in order to
> download apps on the ubuntu store? While ubuntu has until now been very
> strong into providing open alternatives to mainline products, e.g. from
> microsoft or apple, this requirement is a serious threat to the open
> philosophy. I can't see any technical difficulty into not having accounts on
> the server side, and I am very worried about this. "
>
> From this thread: "Why do I need a ubuntu one account to download apps"
> http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2265106

A lot of good points have already been made in that forum thread.
You need an account for several things:
- App purchases
- In-app purchases
- Recovering previously installed apps (free or paid)
- Remote installing from a web-based store
- Persisting data in the cloud (U1DB)
- Accepting per-user licenses (free or paid)
- Notifying users (via email) of malicious apps they have installed
that were discovered after they were in the store for a while
- Mitigating DDoS download attacks

Your argument is that you may not want any of those things, and if you
don't, you should be able to download an app without authenticating. I
agree with that from a pure technical point of view.
However, the default case for the majority of the users and developers
will be to want these features so thats what we focused on providing.
We could prioritize this work in the future, but it would involve
solving at least a few important issues:
- Developers will need to decide for each app if they want to make
their app available, a decision many developers unfamiliar with open
source won't understand
- The code everywhere has to be changed to support authenticating
optionally, in some cases, for some users, for some apps
- If the user doesn't have an account, can he browse all apps?  How do
we make sure they understand why sometimes we ask the to create an
account/log in, sometimes we don't?
- Developers want to target platforms they can make money off of. If
the process of your first purchase involves creating an account at the
same time as providing your payment details, you are chopping off a
significant portion of purchases for that developer as most people
will desist when faced with more processes
- We as a platform want to make money off of the store to pay for
infrastructure and development, same problem as above applies
- Apps might want to persist your data, for example, a save game. Its
a terrible time to have to create an account.

All in all, its been shown again and again that the right time to make
users log in or create an account is on device set up, where they are
expecting and willing to invest that extra bit of time which then pays
off for them, developers and us as a platform down the line.

So, it is possible and we might do it in the future. It is, however,
not easy nor currently more important than the many other challenges
we currently have.


-- 
Martin