Nextcloud's new features - valuable innovations for /e/?

[ralxx]

I really hope /e/ is going to move soon to Nextcloud latest version.
Let me expain you why:

It is astonishing to see Nextcloud’s release cycles. With v.20.0 they already published their 3rd major release this year. Apart from the fact that some users complain on the lack of sufficient bug elimination prior to new releases, the new version integrates tons of new features – and a few that I would really really like to see being available within /e/OS.

Just a reminder: Nextcloud at its core is a cloud synchronisation service (a modified version is used within /e/ to synchronize files between the device and the cloud to backup data).

But with their latest release it seems Nextcloud is moving a huge step forward. They developed an interface permitting to connect Nextcloud to lots of other services (even a lot of proprietary ones) to allow channelling communication through Nextcloud - quite some connectors are already existing (like for Twitter and Mastodon, Matrix/Riot, Rocket-Chat, Discourse and Reddit, Github, Gitlab and Jira) and more are to come.

But with regards to /e/ there are in particular two features that I am really looking forward to:

• Connectors to (proprietary) cloud services such as Dropbox, Microsoft Onecloud or Google Drive. This could allow new users to use their PC go to /e/’s web back-end, connect their current cloud operators directly to their /e/cloud and move their data seamlessly to /e/s open source platform - without being obliged to install a proprietary app from Dropbox, GDrive et al on their /e/phone.
• Connecting to Google in order to migrate Google Calendar and Google Contacts. If that works as announced, new users will not be obliged to login with their Google credentials on their /e/phone to MicroG in order to move calendar and contacts to their open source phone. Although I trust the MicroG developers, it feels a bit weired for a new user of /e/ as a first measure to connect their phone again to Google Servers altough he/she was just aiming to cut this connection.

Both features could be a big step forward to allow new users much easier to have a smooth and comfortable start with an open source Android (aka /e/).

Nextcloud just held its annual conference in early October (all virtual this year) and all those things were explained during the opening keynote (from 1:32:33 onwards). If you want to dive a bit deeper, take your time to watch the full keynote speech - all speeches from the two-day event are online now - and/or have a look, there’s a more techy one from Arnau from the /e/-team, who talks about scaling-up eglobal and what challenges the team was facing when migrating the /e/ servers last summer.

Regain your privacy! Adopt /e/ the unGoogled mobile OS and online services

[tyxo]

Thats all true. It would be nice to have. Private users, NGOs and SMBs might benefit from this. However, I guess the main challenge is the server infrastructure in a wider sense (man power, computing power,…) Recently, /e/ folks conducted a survey (Add your votes to choose new apps for eCloud) about most wanted nextcloud plugins where this concerns was more or less raised.

[ralxx]

I agree with you. But please see as well who is active here on the forum - /e/ folks as you call them, early adopters, tech sawys, I suppose, people who know and use /e/ already. I’d say, people who probably have different needs as the users e.foundation is focusing on as well for the future : average users, who would probably never dare to flash their phone and for whom getting phone numbers of their contacts and calendar entries to a different system probably cause significant burden.

[tyxo]

Sure. Maybe I have to rephrase it a bit. I guess e would offer this, provided that the financial backing is there.

[xof.e]

Concerning Google calendar : for a transfer of calendar data you can simply go to the google calendar in your webbrowser, export calendar data to file, go to e-cloud calendarand import from file. No account-setting needed on the phone.