What we have so far
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elementary builds a fast, easy, open-source replacement for Windows and macOS.
With millions of downloads, people love what we're doing. We've created a beautiful and usable platform that puts the user experience first. Plus it's open source, meaning anyone can contribute to make it even better and all of our code is available for public scrutiny or even re-use.
Wired - “elementary OS is different” “...a beautiful and powerful operating system that will run well even on old PCs”
MacLife - “a fast, low-maintenance platform that can be installed virtually anywhere”
MacWorld - “If I had to leave the Mac? I'd switch to elementary OS”
Lifehacker - “Lightweight and fast, not to mention customizable. Completely community-based, and has a real flair for design and appearances.”
But what about apps?
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To be a truly useful, productive, and fun platform elementary OS needs a great ecosystem of apps; while the web is getting better, web apps consistently let down in terms of speed and integration with your platform's design, features, and unique advantages. Not to mention business models are a huge mess on the web, often leading to annoying advertisements and questionable privacy policies.
We want to enable indie developers to easily distribute fast, native, Open Source apps.
With AppCenter, we want to enable indie developers to easily build and distribute fast, native, Open Source apps for elementary OS. But we also want to make sure that there is a clear, fair, ethical business model available that empowers people to build and enjoy great apps.
Built Around GitHub
Over 8 million developers know and love GitHub, the world's largest code host and collaboration platform. Instead of making them come to a new unfamiliar platform, we’re going to them. With AppCenter, developers simply:
- Sign in with GitHub,
- Choose their app's GitHub project, and
- Click Publish.
After a quick (mostly automated) review process, your app is now available in AppCenter. Want to push an update? Repeat steps 1 and 3. No lengthy setup. No giving users terminal commands. No waiting obscene amounts of time to publish your app. Done.
Pay What You Want
If the Humble Indie Bundle has shown us anything, it's that people place varying amounts of value on indie content and you can still be wildly successful while letting people vote with their wallets. We believe that pay-what-you-want both allows indie developers to get paid for their time and ensures that apps are available to the widest audience possible. We’ve built our company on pay-what-you-want by making every release of elementary OS available with this model. We’re excited to bring this unique model to our users and third party developers by making AppCenter 100% pay-what-you-want.
DRM-Free
We don't believe in dictating how people use the apps they purchase. elementary won’t add DRM to any apps published to AppCenter. That means you can download, re-download, backup, and copy apps without having to enter a username and password or license key. It’s your app. You own it.
Developers are already on board
We've shown some of our favorite indie developers our prototype of the AppCenter dashboard, and we’re proud to say that soon we’ll be publishing some great apps including:
Vocal
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A simple, powerful app that helps users discover and enjoy new and interesting audio and video shows. Featuring the full iTunes podcast directory, episode streaming and downloads, smart library management, and a uniquely pleasurable playback experience.
Birdie
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A beautiful, fully native Twitter experience, with built-in support for tons of content providers, such as YouTube, Instagram, Vine, and Imgur.
Spice-Up
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Spice-up is a modern and intuitive desktop presentations app built from the ground up for elementary OS. It gives you everything you need to create simple and beautiful presentation such as text, images, and shapes as well as beautiful background patterns and easy to make custom gradients.
And More
There is already a growing community of developers building apps for elementary OS and struggling to find a good way to get their apps into people’s hands. Apps like Agenda for tasks, Taxi the FTP client, Go For It!, Feedreader, Nutty, Webby, Footnote, NaSC the intelligent calculator, and the list goes on. Open Source Developers are here and ready for a solution.
We need your help.
Developing an entire app store and developer infrastructure takes a lot of time, money, and expertise. We're off to a good start and have assembled a team of experts, but still need your help to get off the ground. By backing AppCenter, you'll be helping us pay for our remote team to get together in person with developers from our community for a week long sprint in Denver, Colorado where we’ll be working on the following:
A Simple Pay-What-You-Want System
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We’re using Stripe Connect for a trusted and robust payment system. Our primary goal is to integrate a straightforward and secure pay-what-you-want model into AppCenter.
The AppCenter App
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Discovering apps should be a fun and engaging experience. We don’t just want to provide a graphical package manager, but a real app store. The current AppCenter app provides a way to browse apps by categories, search, install and remove apps, and perform updates. We want to build rich, engaging, dynamic layouts that help you discover the latest and best apps, learn more about them, and engage with other people through meaningful ratings and reviews.
The AppCenter Developer Dashboard
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Right now the dashboard is pretty spartan. It includes a way to link your GitHub projects, publishing actions, and a way to mark your app for monetization. We want to expand the dashboard to include useful analytics and improve its performance and mobile responsiveness.
Get rewarded:
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By backing AppCenter, you have the opportunity to get limited run swag and exclusive access to provide early feedback that will help shape the future of AppCenter—and to an extent, elementary OS as a whole, plus get your name immortalized in our Backers file so others can see you’ve been with us since the beginning.
Budget
The very first version of AppCenter is currently available in elementary OS and we’re already hard at work on the next version including the above features and goals. However if our crowdfunding campaign is a success, we’ll be able to secure the resources to deliver a much more complete solution in a more timely manner.
In order to finish AppCenter, we’re bringing a team of 8 together to work in person in Denver, Colorado for a week long sprint. We’ll need to pay for travel, lodging, and food for that time. Any unused or additional funds will be set aside specifically for working on AppCenter.
Travel: $2000
Lodging: $1400
Food: $2200
Total (Before taxes and fees): $5600
Taxes: 20%
Payment Processing: 4% (estimated)
IndieGoGo Fee: 5%
Backer Rewards: $800 (estimated)
Total (After taxes and fees): $8000 (Estimated)
AppCenter is a real passion project for the elementary team and we’ve all made financial sacrifices to get this far. We’ll finish the store at a smaller scale even if this crowdfunding campaign doesn’t succeed, but it will be bigger and better if it does!
Timeline
As soon as this campaign ends, we’ll begin processing rewards as quickly as possible. Names will go into backers.md right away and invites for early private beta access will be sent out within a week of the end of the campaign. Depending on your country, t-shirts may take up to a couple weeks to ship after the end of the campaign.
The sprint is tentatively scheduled to occur between March 15th and 20th. During this time we’ll be working as quickly as possible on the features outlined above. Depending on what roadblocks appear, we plan to start publishing apps with pay-what-you-want by late April, plus as many features as we can complete during the week.
Team
We've assembled a small team of expert contributors to meet up in Denver to work on AppCenter. Each will be focused on one or more of the Design, Web, and Desktop tracks planned for the sprint.
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FAQ
We've received a number of great question from backers and those interested in backing. Check them out.
