this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2023
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But why do that?
You're... Confused why software can require server side features?
Yeah. Not talking about providing a service, that's a different animal (my e-mail provider does it as a hobby on donations). But if you have control over the software and you make it open source anyway, why not make it selfhostable instead? An app bound to a service out of the users control is something with a short live...
For one, lots of software just flat out isn't open source. And plenty of it is far from short lived
Right, i was in a os thread before, my bad. But even then, why have the software run on your server if you can have it in the app? Only reason i see is to bind customers, which you do when you have a business model/income anyway.
For one, things like cloud storage are obviously not particularly viable to have the customer host themselves, on premise.
Secondly, some things can be extremely intensive to process, and thus performed on specialized, high end hardware rather than over hours on whatever shit phone the customer is using
Downvote instead of answer, nice.
I think people don't understand your question, or think it might be sarcastic. So to answer your question: server storage and computation power costs money. Depending on how your app's backend works, this can be cheap or very, very expensive, paid monthly or yearly. It also needs to scale with the number of your clients actively using the backend. Some of us just sit on the costs to give its users a free and ad-less experience with more functions without taking any money (by the thought "I pay for this server anyways, so why not share it"). But it costs me more, if I have more active users and I have to actively compensate this.
But there are also some greedy bastards, taking much more thinking to get rich with a single app (actually met one of this devs)