Re: Jolla User Experience Thread
 

Reminder: a Jolla account asks for just a username and password.

They don't ask for your address, name, social security, passport, mothers maiden name, first cat, name of your teacher, favourite breakfast cereal, inside leg measurement or how many lumps in your tea.

Re: Jolla User Experience Thread
 

Re: Jolla User Experience Thread
 

In their answer, one reason was performance. I do remember how painful it was to install apps to N900 because every single refresh took like forever - and it did so often! Such behavior would be completely unacceptable in consumer device today, especially if target audience is not strictly restricted to fraction of techies who don't mind such things. Additionally, if account consists of username (like MickeyMouse) and password, it hardly counts as "infringing privacy." So, IMO tradeoff for not having an account is not worth it. You of course have the liberty to make your own choices regarding devices, accounts and information you are ready to share in order to use certain services.

Re: Jolla User Experience Thread
 

Indeed. And, as Copernicus and I shown, that reason is complete BS.

I am not assuming anything nefarious on Jolla's side. What I am assuming is that Jolla also fell into the Apple trap and set up their "store" in exactly the same way, "because everyone does it". They did not stopp for 5 seconds to consider the reasons. Far from being "unlike", they were "very much like". Not deliberately, but simply because in the world indoctrinated by Apple no one questions the holy truth.

Now suddenly someone asks for the reason. They cannot just say oops, we were brainwashed by Apple and did not think it through. They have to justify it post-factum. So they make up arguments like "performance" that, when you look more closely, hold no better than a house of cards.

Re: Jolla User Experience Thread
 

:) I don't think so... I just went through your (+Copernicus') comments on TJC and if anything, it shows that you either did not fully get Jolla's answer, or you don't seem to understand how people use apps.

Reposting my answer here:
I, on the other hand, think that Jolla's answer pretty much ended all discussions whether the account is a good idea or a bad one. Having used the N900, I absolutely agree that refreshing all repositories was a PIA - not just having to wait every time, but also the data cap from my provider was usually ruined by this technique. That's why these tips exist and also why I completely stopped using the integrated app manager on Fremantle.
The idea of personal repositories is ingenious and also a good way to allow transferring apps between devices (just an automatic "install all apps from the repository" command) in the future. When posting my previous post, I was not really convinced that an account was needed, even though I could see how it simplifies the system development, but now I'm sold.

Re: Jolla User Experience Thread
 

Considering that your suggestion has caveats too, I wouldn't call it a BS.

I really hope that being unlike doesn't translate into being diffiecult, inefficient and stupid just to be different from Apple. But please tell me, how would you accomplish this without an account:

- let's say we have an app store with both free and paid apps
- let's assume that we do it your way, so that everything is bound to the device and not user (account) as you suggested earlier
- let's forget for a moment that by making any transaction you effectively bind your precious private data to the device
- let's assume I bought such device and then some paid 3rd party apps to get wanted functionality on my device

OK, so I bought this device and used it for something. Then there's a glitch which means that the device has to be replaced (as my first Jolla was replaced last spring). How will those apps be transferred to the new device if they have been bound to the original device and not to user account? There are couple of ways I can think of:

- apps would have to have their own way of associating themselves to the device and enabling that change (ie activation keys etc) or,
- Jolla would have to store the information based on IMEI, or
- Let's be "unlike" and just forget about such inconvenience

First part means that burden is placed on app developers. This might be "unlike" but also probably scared away great deal of developers. So not that good idea.

Second part means that apps you bought would be part of the device, which would in turn be annoyance when changing devices. Instead of logging on with some user account and installing your apps to a new device, you would have to do it all manually and then find a way to transfer your paid apps (which might be a bit difficult if ie. your old device died completely). And all that for what? To avoid simple user account (which doesn't necessarily have to identify you as a person at all) and being "not like apple"?

When I get my Jolla tablet, I would like it to go like this:

- Login with my user account
- Get a list of my installed apps (on my Jolla phone) to choose which of them I want to install on my new device
- Get it set up in less than 5 minutes with my preferred apps installed

Do it your way, it would be rather difficult to accomplish. But of course, what can't be sacrificed for just being "unlike apple" ;)

Re: Jolla User Experience Thread
 

I think this really sums it up.

Re: Jolla User Experience Thread
 

There is a difference between a solution that "has caveats" and one that does not work!

In the same order:
- Yes, let's imagine that hypothetical situation ;)
- I did not say everything. Do I need to repeat that ad infinitum? I said what is installed on the device. That is the property of the device, nothing else.
- You do? How? What data? Sorry, you've confused me.
- OK...

There is this mysterious process I've heard about somewhere. If only I could remember what it is called... Oh, wait, I know: "installation"!

For cases like replacing a broken device, there is this thing called a "backup". A decent OS can make a backup that, amongst other things, contains a list of installed applications. You "restore" this "backup" on your replacement device and hey presto, all the applications are installed anew.

You are suggesting nothing more than moving this backup out of your control and have it on some central server in Helsinki. Not that there is anything wrog with that per se, but it should not be compulsory.

Most of the rest of your post talks about things like:

• Making sure you have the same applications installed on two different devices.
  This is basically about the "centralized backup" as mentioned above. Well, I am the kind of a person who
  a) May want two devices with completely different application sets;
  b) Does not mind to install the same appliocation twice;
  c) Would be p!$$ed off if the device forced the same app sets on my two devices because I used the same account. As happened with Android: the same patch from Motorola was forced on another device in our household. Who cares that the other device was a Samsung? It used the same account.
• The transfer of intellectual property.
  This is the only case when "something" - not the application, but the right to install it - is associated with the person. An account does not entirely answer that if it can be shared but it is better than nothing. An account also does not help if the app developer wants you to buy a different license for each device, so the developers will just have to suck it and put up with Jolla's distribution scheme. Luckily (for Apple followers, that is) there is alraedy a precedence that people are used to.

Provided these are the arguments for having a user account, then I am willing to accept them. Not unconditionally since, as I explained above, it also has its caveats. It could work as a "convenience" for some but not for others. In that case, the account should be optional: if you want to use these features, sign in to your account. Just like on TMO: free to read anonymously, but if you want to vote, post and keep track of what you have read, you must sign in.

However, eric did not mention any of those things. He said,

My Jolla is a second-hand First One and I get updates along with other First Ones. Not with the plebes as a user account approach would indicate.

And this is the part I object to. What is installed on the device does not depend on the account. It depends on what is installed on the device. Using the account to speed up the metadata refresh is just not going to work. That is the typical "map versus terrain" problem. Only the terrain reflects reality accurately.

EDIT
Sorry to bang on about it, but it has just occurred to me: we have two Jollas in the family, both sharing the same account. The two have very different application sets. To the point that the only thing the two have in common is the preinstalled apps.

Now here is the crux: at no point in using either device has the option of synchronizing the application sets been offered by Store. In other words, JulmaHerra's idea of a central backup and an easy transfer from device 1 to device 2 is moot too.

Re: Jolla User Experience Thread
 

BTW
can anybody tell me where the data goes that you have to enter on first switch on, i.e. account, name, surname, telephone, birthday and so on?

I would to see that anywhere in settings or in a file or?
And would like to know if this data gets synchronized with jolla online account data?

Re: Jolla User Experience Thread
 

While you may be right, package management systems don't work that way (and probably shouldn't, because aside from being slightly inefficient, you've got an information leakage!)

Right now, when upgrading, your friendly package management system says: "please give me a list of all packages and their versions". Then it determines which versions are newer, of the packages you have installed, and it updates them appropriately.

This is the point that didn't scale: with extras, this meant downloading metadata for every third party package anyone had ever uploaded, no matter if you had it installed or not.

With this system, it says "please tell me what my private virtual repository contains", and it is sent metadata only for packages that have been installed over the store.

As far as I understand it, your proposal is: "I have these packages installed locally, please send me metadata for them". This is inefficient, at least on the Jolla device, because packages are split across multiple different repositories: you would be uploading metadata for every package on your device for n different repositories, and only a tiny subset of those would apply to each seperate repository.

The "information leakage" I mentioned is that you're now implicitly saying "hey, I have this installed, and it's at this version". This sounds harmless, except it now lets an adversary know more about your systems and how to attack you. This isn't much of a problem if you only ever install things from the store, but if you ever had software you wanted to keep to yourself (self-developed, or whatever), this leaks that information.