Things missing to unleach the potential of FriendOS

[titlestad]

Friend OS (v1.2.8) is by now a high performing, scalable and feature rich environment for collaboration, communication, entertainment and productivity. It is manageable with easy to use administration tools. It is easy to maintain and upgrade. But to really reach users in a powerful way, we do need to improve some areas of the experience. Here is a list, with some comments. I hope passers-by may take some time to look through this list and comment.

Our mobile / tablet functionality needs to be polished in the Friend Workspace
Right now, FriendOS for mobile works. It could be much better, but it works. The real gap in UX here lays in the available apps. And this will be addressed over time. Where we do see an urgent need for improvements is in the tablet support. Right now, tablets come with single-touch, multi-touch as well as WIMP*/touch hybrids (*Windows, icons, mouse, pointer) - and right now, FriendOS behaves a bit buggy on those. With better tablet support, 80% more users may use FriendOS as effectively as it is being used on desktop.

Our mobile app needs to be improved (remove errors at start, improve device management, camera etc)
Our Android and iOS apps are bare bones. You can log in, and you can start apps. You can browse your files, upload and download to the cloud. And you can use Friend Chat. Of course there are other apps and games in there - especially on FriendSky.cloud (our public FriendOS service) - but we need the apps to be better. Friend Chat uses the Friend server (Friend Core) push notification system. So you can get a nice experience out of the apps, with notifications when something requires your attention. But the apps need to be further improved to attract "mainstream" users - and push beyond bare bones.

Friend Chat needs a speedup and more usability
Friend Chat has huge potential as a chat system. But right now it's a bit lacking on usability features, like emoticons, link previews, giphy's and moderation features. Friend Chat users need to be able to mute chatrooms, leave / enter chatrooms faster, create rooms easier. They need to be able to customize their chat rooms better. Invites need to be easier to send around. Alltogether, accessing Friend Chat for daily use needs to be improved.

We need islands based scaling for Friend Core
FriendOS v1.3.x (Helium) will use islands based scaling. This means that many servers connect to form a mesh that all know about a user account. It is not exactly the same as a round-robin solution, in that servers may have specific roles in the mesh. But what is important is that this version of FriendOS will be able to scale to serve thousands upon thousands of users. Users will be able to chat across servers and share files - as if the nodes all form one large service. With such a scaling architecture complete, we will be able to knit together each continent in a global network. It will be a great milestone for FriendOS. And it will open the door to private Friend servers hosted by users.

Documentation
We are lacking a bit in the documentation department to put it mildly. Right now we have an incomplete developer manual which covers the basics. We need to complete that and cover the range of developer APIs that is on offer in FriendOS. Then we need to complete user manuals, administrator manuals and tutorials. With this in place, we will have a nice runway for new devs to pop in and contribute to the platform.

All of the above is being worked on. But the pace could be improved. With more developers joining in, we could increase our development activity and bring FriendOS' true potential around quicker.