Cool apps are interoperable apps
Jim Nielsen in Some Love For Interoperable Apps - Jim Nielsen:
I love this way of digital life, where you can easily explore different experiences of your data.
In this post, Jim captures well the same principles I was talking about in Exiting big tech. Continuing from above, he writes:
I wish it was relevant to other areas of my digital life. I wish I could:
- Download a different app to view/experience my photos
- Download a different app to view/experience my music
- Download a different app to view/read my digital books
As I've discovered over the past year, you can!
For photos, apps like Immich and Photoprism can, by using a standard protocol like WebDAV, sit on top of your plain files photo library and act as an interface for interacting with them.
Replace Feedbin for feeds with Subsonic or Navidrome for music, and there's a whole host of apps readily available to browse and listen to your music. There are even apps that will let you interface with your plain files music collection through WebDAV or SMB, to make it easier.
As for digital books, use Calibre to manage your library and share to your reader of choice!
All of these options exist. I think Jim's complaint highlights that they aren't necessarily readily available. Moving from the default closed setup of the day to open and interoperable options is a niche pursuit, reserved for geeks and fanatics like yours truly.
The question is how to we make it the default?