Add a"Staff Choice" badge/filter to App Store apps

[marcusquinn]

As we all know, there's often multiple apps performing the same function.

From my experience, there's been just a handful of apps that actually ever gets used in daily work & personal life.

Eg, for my business and clients, that's Vaultwarden, Privatebin, Nextcloud, EspoCRM, Ghost, Wordpress, Gitea, Drone, Grafana. You can run almost any business size and type with those. Perhaps adding Joplin Server, Redash or Metabase, and some of the other private apps we use for monitoring etc.

I think a Staff Choice badge for the ones we find to be the best of the rest might help others in their evaluation priorities, and perhaps also help reduce the number of me-too apps for a function that are rarely used, but cost a disproportionate amount in maintenance time.

Maybe add a blue "verified" badge, since they are all the rage

[humptydumpty]

@marcusquinn Isn't this specific to each use-case? Maybe a "hot" or "popular" tag would be more fitting. For example, I was looking for the best way to sync my calenders and ended up using Nextcloud but many others recommended Radicale.

[marcusquinn]

@humptydumpty I think "Staff Choice" or "Editor's Pick" is a well understood concept. It only means what it says. I don't know anyone that would want 3 x webmail apps as an example, first question for a newbie: which one's best? Maybe I'll try the one the platform developers also use.

[humptydumpty]

@marcusquinn I agree with you there. I did exactly what you said until I settled on my current apps.

[LoudLemur]

@marcusquinn said in Add a"Staff Choice" badge/filter to App Store apps:

@humptydumpty I think "Staff Choice" or "Editor's Pick" is a well understood concept. It only means what it says. I don't know anyone that would want 3 x webmail apps as an example, first question for a newbie: which one's best? Maybe I'll try the one the platform developers also use.

It is a nice idea.

For email, I think I would pick SnappyMail. For forum software it is a bit more difficult, may be ... Discourse.

[luckow]

Instead of adding a "Staff Choice" badge, imho we need a five star module and maybe comments like in the other app stores. That shows the actual usage of the apps in the world, rather than staff usage. But not open to the world (the Cloudron app store is not a directory like alternativeto.net) - only for users with an account for the Cloudron app store.
But beware of the lifetime spent on moderation

[marcusquinn]

@luckow Interesting ideas! I guess it might help to keep track of some KPIs on their source-code, eg: number of Stars on GitHub, Last Updated, Activity Graph.

I suppose a link to the source origin will show all of that though. I've always thought it would be handy to add that to the documentation links on each app, as well as their website.

[jdaviescoates]

@luckow said in Add a"Staff Choice" badge/filter to App Store apps:

That shows the actual usage of the apps in the world, rather than staff usage

Yeah, do @Staff have data on which apps are actually most used by Cloudron users?

I struggle to believe that it is really these which are marked as popular?

But perhaps it is?

Also, I note that https://www.cloudron.io/store/index.html doesn't have a "Popular" section like the app store within Cloudron itself does.

We could also do this with polls or something to work out which app are most loved by Cloudron users (I guess this is what @luckow was getting at with five star rating stuff?)

[msbt]

well there's the api which shows ranking/installcount: https://api.cloudron.io/api/v1/apps - that could be used for some kind of popularity filter (which I'm doing on my site)

[jdaviescoates]

@msbt said in Add a"Staff Choice" badge/filter to App Store apps:

the api which shows ranking/installcount

Does that match up with the "popular" apps in the app store?

Care to share the ranking/ install count of the apps here? (I'm not familiar with the API). Thanks!

[jdaviescoates]

Just browsing through and expanding stuff on https://api.cloudron.io/api/v1/apps it looks like the most popular 5 apps are:

1. Nextcloud (seem right)
2. Guacamole (find that hard to believe, also not in Popular)
3. WordPress (seems right).
4. RocketChat (could be)
5. OpenVPN (could be, I guess)

Apart from Guacamole this seems like the same list a "Popular"

[LoudLemur]

@jdaviescoates said in Add a"Staff Choice" badge/filter to App Store apps:

Guacamole

Thanks for doing that. I had a look through the API @msbt kindly linked and it would have been more enjoyable if the name of the application were alongside the InstallCount.

Anyway, now we know Nexcloud is so popular, lets ask why people are using it. How does it help?

[jdaviescoates]

@LoudLemur said in Add a"Staff Choice" badge/filter to App Store apps:

Anyway, now we know Nexcloud is so popular, lets ask why people are using it. How does it help?

Well, if you looks at things like:

https://stackshare.io/collaboration
https://stackshare.io/business_tools

You'll see that some of the most widely collaboration and business tools use are:

Google Workspace (primarily Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs, but also Meet)
Slack
Trello

IMHO Nextcloud (with either OnlyOffice or Collabora Online for Docs, plus SnappyMail for email) is probably the best open source replacement for Google Workspace. Nextcloud Talk doesn't quite replace Meet, but it's great for small meetings, so almost does. See also Jitsi.

Also, Nextcloud Talk and Nextcloud Deck apps provide fairly decent replacements for Slack and Trello too (although see also Element, RocketChat, and Mattermost as other Slack replacements, and WeKan, Taiga, Vikunja and Kanboard as other Trello replacements).

(BTW, small thing @staff but I just noticed that is you search the app store for "tasks" WeKan doesn't come up, it should)