The conference has started with our hackweek and slowly the rooms are filling up. Today, we have a still growing audience for our Friday program, where we have already well over 100 attendees to listen to a series of talks about Nextcloud in the enterprise like migrations from ownCloud, security, super scalability and more. There will be some announcements but today we already have some good news for you! Going forward, our iOS client will be a fully free download in the app store! As a company, we focus on enterprise users so monetizing home users makes little sense for us from a strategic point of view and we’d rather lower the barrier to using Nextcloud!
Nextcloud aims to empower community to take back control over their data, not monetize them. Making the iOS app free, like the Android and desktop apps, fits in our strategy to focus on providing excellent enterprise support.
— Frank Karlitschek, managing director at Nextcloud GmbH.
As a company, Nextcloud relies on support contracts the main driver for our profitability, while we pursue a fully-open-source strategy. You might remember that at the end of 2016 we open sourced the IOS app, putting the full code under the GPL license with an App Store exception in github. We made a lot of progress on the iOS client, which has great user ratings and by removing the price tag we hope to get our client to even more users. We also welcome contributions to the code base, you can have a look in github and sent patches!
The Nextcloud iOS client has progressed tremendously in the last year. Removing the price tag means even more people have access to our private cloud solution!
Marino Faggiana, iOS engineer at Nextcloud.
See our formal press announcement here or just grab the client from the app store right now! Fun fact: we already put the price on zero yesterday and got a nice 600% increase in downloads, with over 8000 new people getting our client!
If you plan to be at the Nextcloud Conference, be sure to check out our conference page for the program and practical information. We will live-stream the event on this page. See you in Berlin or online!
Amazing news, well done folks