Purism Announces "PureOS Store" As Software Store For Their Smartphone & Laptops

Adding to the platter of tasks for Purism as they prepare to ship their Librem 5 Linux smartphone in just a few months, they announced their plans to introduce the PureOS Store for not only their mobile initiative but also their laptops running the Debian-based PureOS operating system.

Purism announced their plans for PureOS today as a "secure alternative to proprietary app stores that respects your privacy and freedom...PureOS Store will be a vibrant hub for both mobile and desktop apps."

They will take their own approach to sorting and featuring apps in the store, "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."

They also hope this will be a successful convergence app store, "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 acheiving 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."

The PureOS Store isn't available today but still under development. Those wishing to learn more about the details revealed today can do so via the Purism site.