indiefail

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#Ind.ie - An Update

This is reposted after the original site (indie.fail) was miraculously removed or set to redirect to the ind.ie site.

On the 28th of November 2013 Aral Balkan announced ind.ie, a company that was going to build a privacy focussed phone (“Indiephoneâ€�), operating system (“indieOSâ€�) and cloud ("indieCloud"). indieCloud later succumbed to the idea of a peer-to-peer social network (“Heartbeatâ€�).¹ They crowdfunded more than $100.000², just to then announce that their initial roadmap was too ambitious and they were only going to build the social network (“Heartbeatâ€�) and only release it for OSX and iOS.³

While we agree with the fundamental vision behind ind.ie, we do not agree with Aral Balkan's ideas and execution.

Raising money for a cause and then completely changing the original plan is a bait and switch straight from the books, so it is no wonder that the community reacted with a huge backslash. They started offering refunds for users who were angry because they dropped Android from the roadmap a day after the announcement, which mitigated some of the damage.⁴

Making a phone from scratch is a very ambitious project. Designing everything from the transistor upwards takes a lot of expertise that is almost never found in a single person, and even if they used proprietary parts, getting all the patent rights and factories is a huge project. While Aral did hire an Industrial Designer, Victor Johansson, they split paths again after only two months of working full time.⁵

The same problem applies to making an Operating System. While you could of course use parts of open source systems, Operating Systems are very complex projects. Not without reason have companies like Microsoft, Apple and open source projects like Ubuntu iterated over their products for years. Making a delightful to use, privacy focussed Operating System in a few months is nearly impossible, especially with a team of two Designers and one Operations Director.⁶

The biggest problem, as it is the only product remaining, is the ill-conceived concept behind Heartbeat.

A secure, privacy focussed, “own-your-data� peer-to-peer network is an oxymoron. All your friends would have to have all your data, and could keep it even after you “un-friend� them. This is worse than storing all the information in a centralized place, because once the information is out there, you cannot delete it. It's out there, and everybody has it. Even if it's encrypted, there's no guarantee it can't be unencrypted.

Aral Balkan has deceived thousands of people with his great words and big ideas, but has not and will never be able to deliver on his promises. While his vision is a noble and very important one, his ideas are flawed.

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1. Source (Video), transcript available here.
2. Source
3. Source
4. Source
5. Source, secondary source
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