Having only used VSTs but never even looked into how they're actually built - what does this now mean in simple terms? Did you need a specific closed source framework to build them or something like that? What has changed now?
You had to accept some license terms before you could download the VST SDK. When linux audio started to get "serious" 20 years ago, it was a commonly discussed pain point.
Concretely, it made distributing OSS VST plugins a pain. Especially for Linux which generally will want to build their packages.
Note that his was the VST2 era. VST3 was commercial license or GPL 3, which was an improvement, but only slightly, because it excluded open-source software released under the GPL 2, and also MIT/BSD/whatever-licensed software couldn't use it (without effectively turning the whole software into GPL-licensed software).
Genuinely curious, which plugins do you mean for example when you say that many heavy features are leaning on them?
I could see the dataview plugin as an example (even though I don't use that one personally) but most other plugins seem like they just add more convenient ways to do something that would be still pretty simple to do manually. (Templates for example).
> Genuinely curious, which plugins do you mean for example when you say that many heavy features are leaning on them?
Depends on what you are doing. But the whole task & project-management-corner is constantly moving. Everything which modified the editor and preview was also regular breaking in the last years. For example, there were some plugins adding banners at the top of documents, or background-images or some icons. Or plugins modifying the yaml-area. They were all breaking multiple times when Obsidian was switching to the new live-preview-editor, then on changing frontmatter to properties, and on some other occasion IIRC. Usually after some months a new plugin appears, or someone forks the old one and fixes it. But as a user, it's pretty annoying to constantly have something breaking outside your control and getting stripped of features you want/need for various reasons.
Obsidian is useful, but far from being stable long-term yet. It's still very young.
> I could see the dataview plugin as an example
Yes, dataview was also very unstable the first 2 years or so, switching code and concepts, breaking old code along the line. It seems to be stable now, as the focus is on datacore.
> but most other plugins seem like they just add more convenient ways to do something that would be still pretty simple to do manually. (Templates for example).
Does it matter what a plugin is doing? If it breaks, it's a loss, whether it's crucial or just annoying.
It's the primary repo rather than a mirror, but yeah I agree it they don't get most of the benefits. Moving issues and PRs is probably an enormous effort so I get why they aren't doing it all at once.
It is totally fair to charge for work you've done - but then again, in my opinion, not everything needs to be built with some profit in mind (not talking about this app in particular now).
I think it's really refreshing to find an app that doesn't lock any features behind a paywall or makes using it more cumbersome unless you pay. I'm mostly okay with one-time payments though.
Just because you invested some time into making a project doesn't mean that you absolutely need to make some money to make it "worth" it. Hell, most open-source software is built on free/voluntary labor.
> not everything needs to be built with some profit in mind (not talking about this app in particular now).
I agree, and I make many projects for fun and find it rewarding when others use what I've built. But that is a decision that I make myself, for my own work. I never feel like I have the right to tell others whether they should build something with profit in mind or not.
I understand the sentiment from a user's perspective, I really do.
I have been totally burned out by having to maintain all my free apps in the Play Store though, lately. Even a simple non-internet-using app needs an update every year and needs to comply with new bullshit policies every few months. It has totally changed my opinion on free vs paid apps. I still despise subscription models, but I absolutely understand that there's just no free apps out there anymore. It just costs too much of my time to keep doing it for free.
Agree. I had a free app with 100000 downloads, no ads and 4.5 rating on Play store, it is no longer there because I got fed up with Google's nagging. If I will do free things going forward, I will do them outside closed ecosystems.
Interesting point. I think that the availability of good free apps on Play Store has a positive effect on the market for Android phones in general. I know it factors into people's decision of phone religion that apps are more likely to charge on Apple's store (even sometimes for an app which is free on Android).
All that said, F-droid is the only one I'll ever love.
Also agree, and would also include paid apps as well!
I had a paid app which was a one time payment and was not doing anything special regarding permissions (no internet, nothing like that), but since it wasn't was bringing much revenue (some 3$-4$ per year), I let the Play Store remove it automatically. I couldn't justify adding the absurd data policies (since I wasn't using any user data) and the cost of updating it regularly.
Sorry for my 100 users, that cannot reinstall the app anymore!
I've actually been talking about the developer's perspective as well - I have a couple of personal projects that I've invested quite a bit of time into but I still don't feel the need to try to find a way to monetize them.
I can definitely see your point though. Maybe an option would be open sourcing your app? (considering it's already free anyway) - that way you could maybe find some contributors to make it easier to keep up with everything.
As much as I'm dependent on many open source projects (shout-out to Home Assistant, Immich and more), I've been burned by open sourcing my apps in the past too often to consider this for serious projects.
Regardless of what license you use, people will find a way to abuse your stuff. One of the two apps I open sourced we're published on the play store with tons of ads, in many different flavours. The other was used as a base to scam people.
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