【Community Conversation May 2024】Part 3 App Store Ecosystem - ZimaOS Technical Framework
Last week, our CEO Lauren and CTO Tiger had an engaging fireside chat with a community developer Axel. Throughout the conversation, we uncovered the innovative thinking that drives the ZimaOS team, from their visionary approach to hardware and software design to their meticulous selection of foundational technologies, and discussed the progress of AI development within our products. We explored a wide range of topics including immutable architecture, AI integration, containerization, virtualization, the app store ecosystem, and gained valuable insights from Axel’s firsthand experience with Zima hardware.
We divided this conversation into four distinct themes. In this episode, we’ll delve into the captivating topic of immutable architecture.
- Technical considerations about immutability
- Acceleration by Home Assistant
- Rebasing in ZimaOS
- Fallback and rollback strategies
Video version is at the end of this post
Axel
Since you mention so often open source and community, I would like to know, I’ve seen like for example, with the packages or applications developed for CasaOS, there are vibrant contributors. What’s the guy’s name? Something like bear.
Tiger
I know who you’re talking about. I think he’s called Big Bear, the App Store guy. Yeah, then hopefully you could have enough exception of this video. Can, you know, put that link? Actually.
Axel
Both are the people that are heavily influencing the future of your usage as well. And because they offer something on top of what you do as a community or as a company. So how do you see if in particular for ZimaOS, the future when it comes to community? And how could a community support your best?
Tiger
First of all, we super appreciate the concept of open source and, you know, whatever community behind it, one for we appreciate all the open source projects that we used to build our product. And then for the point 2, we super appreciate, you know, whoever participated in the open source stage of CasaOS, now ZimaOS. We super appreciate that.
And then people contributes not only the PR code directed project, they also contribute through our app store. And later on we actually have this mechanism called which is systemd-sysext based modularization. It’s in super early stage, but I figured if that become mature at some point in future, say, you know, 6 months down the road, I’ll be super happy to see third party extensions to ZimaOS without interacting with the 14 that you know, think of you building an app for your iPhone or for your Android.
Like think about it, you don’t have to talk to someone from Apple in order to build your app. Think about that, that is simply that fantastic for the vision here. And for that, we will have to firstly open source, you know, part of the system. Like I said, ZimaOS is built on top of CasaOS underneath the gateway, the message bus and certain components. They’re still open source today. And they, we accept PR and for future, we’re actually thinking about making the APIs available.
And we’re thinking about workshops, webinars to help to teach the community how to build extensions, apps for ZimaOS and likely we will build our own extension, but under open source terms. You know, decoupled from the core proprietary part of the ZimaOS. After all, it’s a management art, you know, between preparatory code and open source code. That’s all the commercial comments doing today. I like both. There’s a reason like you need to keep your part of your product preparatory. There’s a reason you need to keep certain other parts open source. It’s simply a balance, but definitely we won’t give up open source. It will be the core value of.
Axel
Got it. And also what you said about the system , I could imagine if you have an API in place, because right now I think the Zima Cubes are not necessarily, if you have a creator version or a regular version, we don’t differentiate as much from a software perspective. Besides, of course, yeah, that with a graphics card, you could more easily run like stable diffusion and the likes or like AI. But I could imagine that the API already puts a layer on top. So you have dedicated use cases where somebody offers you a package with an environment for developers or for gamers or for content creators and so on. So that sounds really interesting when you check with us. Thank you for doing that. Maybe it’s a last thing, because I think we covered quite a lot of topics, I would like to also turn around, is there something that I have forgotten that you would like to tell everybody else? And for the next person, probably in the future to pick up since you gave that chance for the first time? Actually, you do an interview like that, I suppose.
Tiger
I actually want to cover about App store, the at the app store of CaasaOS. I think we covered aa very little bit, but not a lot. The original app store from early CasaOS was using a format defined by ourself and a JSON format. And it simply the metadata around the Docker image and the metadata describe things like icon URL, like screenshots, like a title. But soon we found that in order for people to contribute an app to the first version of App Store, there’s a learning curve need, they need to learn about this format.
And then we started looking at Docker Compose. It’s an orchestration on top of Docker Engine, which is an orchestration of continuarization in Linux. And I find it’s a surprise that Docker compose format is super extensible so that we can embed all our App Store metadata into a Docker compose file, which means that you know, ten thousands of Docker compose around the world, around the Internet. There’s a little bit addition of metadata like title, like icon, like screenshot, like whatever parameter, whatever specific to CasaOS, then it can be quickly turned into a causal OS app. So we took that move. We, in the latest version, it’s simply only Docker compose based apps.
There was a guy… I’m really bad at remembering names…Wisdom Sky. I think his discord ID is Wisdom Sky. Before even we release the version that supports the DOC compose version of App Store. He was one of the. Early Cluster or adopter of CasaOS. One night, if I remember correctly, he went to Linux.Io which is the host for all kinds of image He quickly turned a hundred and fifty Docker images into as CasaOS apps because of Docker compose. We were surprised. I was expecting in the legacy app store, new apps came getting shelved probably one or two per month, like monthly, it was super slow. I was expecting getting new apps on the shelf can go up to like 10,5 to 10. But just one night a hundred and fifty apps went on app store of CasaOS. That was astonishing. It was simply amazing.
But that’s not the only amazing thing. We support 3rd party app store. I don’t know if you use Android or iPhone. Do you use Android?
Axel
I’m an iPhone user, as you can tell by both, right? It’s the remaining thing haha.
Tiger
If you use Android, you probably heard a third party app store besides Google Play. It’s a thing mostly for Android hackers. And because there’s just limited hands of the team, it’s hard for us to operate on our own app store. We can’t, you know, keep taking care of all the app request. But because this feature allows third party App store, people who are interested in, you know, getting new apps, they don’t necessarily need to go through our app store process. They can simply host their own app store. And with the link adding to ZimaOS/CasaOS, whatever apps in the third party app store can just all of a sudden show up. So Wisdom Sky apps, it actually didn’t go into our official app store. It went to his own app store. If you check out awesome.casaos.io, later the link will be provided here, You will see all that 3rd party app stores over there. And then all altogether, I think there’s more than, I don’t know, over two or three hundred apps over there.
Axel
It’s an amazing and impressive amount. And since you mentioned Linux server io, yeah, in highlighting here that those are very well maintained, right? It’s not like I see this outside of the Docker microcosm with flatpaks or so that you sometimes lack the maintenance and you have like very old binary packages at, yeah, at the end there. So, you know, server dot Io is definitely a rich source.
Tiger
Yeah.
Axel
I wasn’t aware that it was not based on Docker Compose so far. So that’s also a big news that I didn’t know.
Tiger
Thank you. I like to just, give me one minute to add that. So the philosophy behind all that is we reuse the factor or standards from the community. We try not to reinvent the wheel. Not only it saves our valuable resource, it’s a small group of team, but it embraces, encourage people from all of the Internet to, you know, to join our effort. So we embrace standards. That’s our core principle.
Axel
And it’s a fantastic principle. So thank you for giving the chance to do this Q&A. And I’m honestly can’t wait to have my Zima Cubes at hand to play with. Of course, I’m following videos and so on, but I can’t wait to have your product in my own hands. So thank you for doing that session today with me.
