This this will be short. The apps that I think are the most important are transportation and accommodation apps. I typically use Uber, Taxify and Booking.com, as well as others. As a guy on-the-move, I’m always using these apps; and I almost can’t live without them. In particular, I use some kind of taxi app most frequently. These are indispensible to me, when they work properly and I can get a good signal. I’m often carrying luggage, so walking accross the street to “hail-a-cab” is a definite non-starter.
An issue I have with these types of apps is that they “track” you. They all do this; but Uber is the most notorious. Booking.com is guilty of this as well. So let’s get some good transportation and accommodation apps that aren’t used as tracking portals. I’m kind of out of my wheel-house here; so I’d love to here some informed ideas about how to circumvent this, for example using a taxi app or “portal” that doesn’t require registration and using virtualy credit cards or cash? Also, how about teaming-up with providers who agree not-to-track?
Getting my contacts to move onto new platforms is impossible.
I would pre-order a Librem 5 tomorrow but the apps that I use a lot that really seem to be missing to me that would be hard to function without:
Citbike
Uber
Signal
Co-star (just kidding!)
Slack would be a pain but I’d be fine
I’d miss Strava. Alas.
Honestly if a decent ridehailing service showed up on Librem plus Signal and I’d probably just order one immediately. Currently thinking I will wait till the Birch release and see what’s up, but it seems at least feasible that Signal might appear on there by then?
I have tried once to use the Uber webapp. It’s theoretically possible but I had several problem on my android phone and the interface was very laggy and almost unusable (it’s often the case with my LG G4 + LineageOS + Firefox).
I think it will not be usable on Librem 5 without hardware acceleration in web browser and a very good GNSS positioning integration.
They have this working on chromium right now actually. Unfortunately chromium is still not adaptive to phone screens but at least we now know that we are rather close to get a good browser experience.
This is probably the hard part, GNSS is not easy to get right from the first revision of a product (and I say this from personal experience). We also have yet to see any proof of it actually working at all.