Purism is pleased to announce PureOS Store, a secure alternative to proprietary app stores that respects your privacy and freedom. While there is much to do before we go live, we are well into building the infrastructure and refining the policy. PureOS Store will be a vibrant hub for both mobile and desktop apps.

We envision PureOS Store as the primary community interface for app developers to contribute to the wider ecosystem, without having to understand the underlying technology like packaging or the mechanism of pushing apps upstream. We want to incentivize developers to create software that meets community values with the ultimate goal of incorporation into PureOS itself.

Apps in the PureOS Store will be evaluated on an ascending scale, with maturity ranging from development and beta levels to a fully-endorsed and default app in PureOS. Correlating “badges” will be utilized to quickly and clearly display the status of a given app, while also reflecting on the software’s freedom, privacy, security, and ethical design.

This will not only facilitate trust in the ecosystem, but will empower users to make informed choices about apps before installing them.

In this way, anyone using Librem hardware or PureOS can understand that the software they rely upon is developed, packaged, and distributed in a socially-conscious manner. The values of PureOS Store reflect the values at Purism and, in fact, those we all would like to see in society.

In addition, we believe PureOS Store can facilitate the distribution of software across Librem devices that run PureOS, from laptops to mobile. We hope to develop real convergence — apps that “just work” regardless of which device they’re running on. Distributions like Debian that run on multiple silicon architectures have always held the promise of convergence, but most efforts at achieving this goal have fallen short. Purism is in the unique position of producing a Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS) laptop and smartphone, enabling an entire ecosystem based upon PureOS and our social values.

Stay tuned for more announcements as we get closer to launch.