> Curious what are you making?

A few things (You can find them all here: https://gitlab.com/kop316/ )

- A backend MMS client to enable use of MMS on the Pinephone

- I am helping to merge MMS front end support to Chatty (the default Phosh MMS/SMS Client): https://source.puri.sm/kop316/chatty/-/tree/wip/sadiq/mm-acc...

- A full stack Visual Voicemail Client.

> And why pursue Pinephone, is it the privacy aspect or potentially new fledging OS that may get a good market share... or just full linux being cool.

It's a mix of those. I am a big open source advocate, and a huge believer in the fact that hardware I buy is hardware I should be able to use as I see fit. I will never buy an iPhone (for myself, sadly I feel Android is in such a sad state that the only phone I feel confident getting for my family right now is an iPhone) for the above stated reasons (and the fact that they intentionally segment their market to force you to buy an iPhone/Apple products to use "their ecosystem", and make it very difficult to use services that compete with said ecosystem). Stock Android likewise intentionally cripples the Android experience unless one uses Google Play services (I am aware of MicroG....but it is difficult to install unless one rolls their own OS, which I don't want to do). This is to say nothing of the Branded Android devices which range from okay to outright malicous, and the practices of app developers to force you to install their apps to suck up as much info on you as possible.

I am also very tired of the forced obsolescence of Mobile Phones, and the Pinephone/Librem 5 is an honest effort to move past that. I have a stack of phones that are perfectly useable aside from the fact that they run something like Linux 3.10 or 3.18 (which the kernel itself is subject to a wide range of security issues, say nothing of using Android n-2 on it).

> How was the app deployment, I have been told there's different ways to go about it, the "apt install" way being harder since your app has to be vetted and what not, understandable.

I try to work within the distribution channels, but one can distribute through Flatpak (I don't presonally do that, so I have no idea how hard it is) which to my knowledge works on most distros. As far as distribution channels, someone will have to package/champion your app for a particular distribution, and depending on how popular/necessary it is, it will probably end up being you (that's the case for me on Mobian/Debian. I am the dev and package manager for my apps, but someone else has been packaging the MMS related stuff for pmOS, Pure OS, and Fedora).

Your app will be vetted yes...but it is not the Apple/Google "I alter the terms of your agreement, pray I do not alter further", it is more "Do you follow good practices in coding? Do you follow the packaging standards in our distribution? Will you be around in two months to keep maintaining this app". The only reason I would outright see them willfully not distribute your app is if you act maliciously. Honestly, after working with the Debian Maintainers to include mmsd-tng into Debian, I have a much higher confidence in the quality of packages included in Debian.

> It's just as far as "barrier to entry" for users that's one of the things that could be problematic if there isn't just an app store they go to.

I think the biggest barrier to entry is distro maintainers do not want to add an app to their distribution to have it abandoned, which is unfortunately a chicken and egg problem for a new dev (that is at least how I preceieved it when I was working on getting mmsd-tng included into Debian. I think I will have an easier time getting vvmd/vvmplayer included since I now have "street cred"). The distribution maintainers want to see you succeed (they actively helped me learn how to package my app in Debian), but they (and I) have seen plenty of instanses where someone wants to help, then disappear a week later (which is fine, it just makes it hard to judge who will stay and who will go).