Comment by onetwothreefour | Hacker News Reader

Comment by onetwothreefour | Hacker News Reader

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onetwothreefour

This is definitely a cool and interesting service, sure, but how exactly do you "own your data"?

It's sitting in Simperium's database and you're locked into their platform once you decide to use it. Maybe there's an export, but that's irrelevant because all your apps in the wild and all your users are relying on this service to move data around.

If Simperium gets hacked, you get hacked. If Simperium goes down, you go down. If AWS goes down, Simperium goes down, and then you go down.

Say your app gets huge, and Simperium can't scale (and really, "half a million users" is nothing for a free service; that's not any meaningful scale and not a number that can really be cited as a signifier of ability to scale) -- what happens then?

Say you outgrow Simperium, and it's now costing you too much. What happens then?

The above isn't really about Simperium, but really about all backend-as-a-service services. They're great for starting out, but if you actually have a successful product you're going to need to be running your own backend at some point.

If you get too big/successful/etc and things start dying and you end up like Friendster before Facebook decides to buy your company, you're going to look back and wish you built your own backend and knew what was going on behind the scenes.

The code gets open sourced, and you allow "syncing" to a local database, where everything is accessible.

I went through all of these business decisions for HubSync in late 2009, and came to the conclusion that you had to do the following to make "owning your own data" a reality:

1. Cannot charge developers or earn money on the actual data itself in any way. (Google will not be competing in this space.)

2. MUST, MUST, MUST allow removing any data from the cloud AND reloading it later, without losing any features/abilities.

3. USERS need to pay for cloud sync storage/service, NOT app developers.

4. Code must be open source, visible, and peer reviewed, just like a crypto algorithm.

If Simperium will do all of these, IMO they can raise money, and achieve a Dropbox-style exit. There's no doubt the potential is there.

2 is the most important. If you cannot remove your data from Simperium's backend and then reload it again later, either to their own backend, or a competitor, you have vendor lock in of the data, and you don't own your data.

3 means you have to have to do something like Dropbox, where you give away a certain amount of storage/sync for free. Ultimately, this is why I didn't pursue HubSync further, even though the products are nearly identical (even down to syncing CoreData on iOS with a web app running in the browser).

(In a nutshell, I didn't want to get funding and devote years of my life to data sync, when I'm in the middle of working on building a live action Pixar. But it's a great idea, and I really hope Simperium or someone else makes it happen.)

You own your data in the sense that, unlike services like iCloud, you can mirror all your user accounts and data to your own backend database that you control.

This extra degree of control, though not absolute, lets you develop your own solution (or integrate someone else's) in parallel should you stop using Simperium.

Our libraries are designed to have a small footprint; they're easy to both add and remove. And we plan to open source them in the future.

Beyond that, you cite valid concerns for any service.

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