And I feel fine.
Ind.ie, Project Prometheus, or IndiePhone (referred to as I.i/PP/IP for the rest of this article), or one of the many names for the same project has reached the point where it cannot continue any longer.
For a long time it was hyped at events to save us all from the evils of Google and Facebook (although not Apple, as they have absolute competitive advantage, or basically Aral’s excuse for using Macs). Microsoft seem to have got off fairly easily in comparison, although perhaps as they’re more a software company that sells products rather than a data mining one, his focus has not been on them.
There’s a good summary of the realities of Google/Facebook written by Phil Stringfellow without all the hyperbole.
The average person isn’t aware of what happens to their data when you use these services, which was what Aral was trying to get across, although he has sensationalised it, using the exact methods he often tweets angrily about. Anyone who already knew this found it a bit over the top, but for those that didn’t it was a revelation. So believing what Aral had to say about anything is what people did. Quite often people would say on Twitter “I wonder what Aral thinks”, without actually thinking for themselves.
There’s a documentary called Terms and Conditions May Apply, which is great for those not fully aware.
He’s not the expert in this field*, he’s just trying to build up enough hype to get people interested in his product which is trying to solve too many problems at once, while not solving any of them sufficiently, or at this present moment in time, at all.
* the field referred to here is privacy/security, not coding, as referred to in his tweet here:
I’ve been coding since age 7, developing Heartbeat in Swift/Cocoa + Node.js but apparently “not an expert in the field”. Fuck right off!
The real problem began when he set out to build a phone that did the lot — services, cloud storage, privacy and design-led. This is a great vision, except it’s taken billion dollar companies to achieve this in a closed way, and others who’ve tried differently have failed.
The first round was “bootstrapped” off the back of the sale of his parents home (this is what one would describe as privilege — easy money that’s not yours, to enable you to work on your pet project). It’s not technically bootstrapping. It’s a grant from the Bank of Mum & Dad.
It seems the only outcome of this was a computer generated photo of a phone. It wasn’t clear whether this was ever made as a prototype or just an image. Either way it got people excited.
The next phase was fundraising for this roadmap.
This implies Heartbeat was almost ready, so code must have been written before fundraising to achieve those timelines, and that the funds would be used to take it to the next level so it could become a self-sustaining project.
It was clearly stated that Heartbeat, a social networking application, would be made available to a private pre-alpha group as soon as funding was completed.
This was the only solid promise in his campaign. He didn’t promise a phone, or anything else, other than the pre-alpha. He was careful to not use a platform like Kickstarter, as by doing it himself he only had to play by his rules. They were donations after all.
At Ind.ie, we appreciate your support but we will never pander to it.
During the campaign he made some rather strong demands to change and control Syncthing, which back then resulted in strong responses from people not believing it would work. Requiring them to change their licence to GPL from MIT so no big companies could re-sell it. However he soon learnt that you couldn’t sell apps via the iTunes store that were GPL licenced. Oh dear, so in the middle of his crowdfunding campaign he had to fork a previous version of Syncthing so he had a MIT version of Pulse, trying to place the blame on the Syncthing creators in the process.
This possibly explains why he couldn’t release Heartbeat on the day the funding ended. He then said it would be released on 26th January.
No explanation when this wasn’t then achieved.
Then suddenly he dropped all but support for the Mac. For a group trying to wean people off the services he hates most, you’d think his best focus would be Android users and Windows, as Apple was OK in his mind.
Months and months have passed. He’s continued talking at many events, went to WWDC in person, something he could’ve watched remotely.
These are not the actions of someone who is living off very little money to try and get a project off the ground. They are the actions of the privileged.
Developing apps for Mac/iOS shouldn’t be his number 1 priority since he proclaimed he was no longer doing this, during the rise of Indie Tech.
When the Tories won the election, whether you agreed or not, Aral announced in a split second they were leaving as a pre-emptive strike against laws they may introduce.
(And yes, if you voted Tory, we do hold you responsible and yes, you should feel ashamed of yourself, and no, we don’t want to hear your excuses.)
- Aral Balkan 11th May 2015
Some other companies announced they were moving their servers, or headquarters. One in particular, John O’Nolan became quite annoyed of being included with I.i/PP/IP as shown here, accusing them of vapourware. Aral, as usual accused him of slander (however never followed up legal proceedings, probably because he would be taken to court over the many slanderous things he says about others himself).
There’s one simple way to prove you’re not peddling vapourware. Ship.
John also pointed out the similarities between I.i/PP/IP’s logo and Banksy.
NOTE: I.i/PP/IP have trademarked the “Ind.ie Balloon Logo”, in addition to “ind.ie” and “Designing Hope”.
Those who publicly complain about I.i/PP/IP get blocked, called slanderous, or even worse, Aral uses his 30k+ followers to gain sympathy for him and attack his critics, putting many people through a horrible experience. Quite often they were picking him out for things like comparing Google to child abuse, which is really trivialising what those who’ve experienced child abuse went through.
If you belong to one of the groups below, you have most likely been attacked personally, or because you belong to such groups/beliefs:
- Islam (for him it’s OK because he was a Muslim so this makes him an expert just like Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church is an expert on Christianity). He’s attacking an ideology, so that makes it OK for him. So it’s ok to attack what is sacrilege to someone as long as you don’t attack them personally (apparently). Many have critiqued I.i/PP/IP only to be attacked in return, with Aral not separating the idealogy of I.i/PP/IP to himself. Proving to many that I.i/PP/IP is just an extension of his own ego. It is impossible to critique I.i/PP/IP without critiquing Aral in the same way you can’t critique the Conservatives without critiquing David Cameron.
- Conservatives — all of you who voted Tory are evil and it’s your fault.
- Proponents of open source / FOSS
- Google/Facebook employees.
- Anyone from privilege (except himself, he doesn’t see his own privilege)
- Anyone who’s taken VC money, regardless of the motivations behind the VC. For instance, those behind Ello.
It’s time that he admitted that there’s no excuse for a pre-alpha to be so late when it was due in 3 weeks, other than of course no code was written before the fundraising.
He thinks it’s cowardly to write anonymously, but slanderous to write under your own name. However many people don’t want to be attacked by him for disagreeing, they just want the facts out there and have no reason to attach their ego to them.
On launching I.i/PP/IP Aral gave no reason as to why his solution would work when others have failed. Others with bigger teams, more resources.
The only thing was “design led”. Designing is one part, creating is another.
Just admit, you bit off more than you could chew. Go back to what you were good at. Designing apps. You create too many enemies on your own team to be an activist. You’ve alienated many who would’ve supported your cause.
There was never going to be an IndiePhone, an IndieCloud, or an IndieNet, or even a product that will require being “backdoored” requiring you to leave the UK. Moving country wasn’t a solution, it was a way to generate PR for an issue that will never eventuate. But it made people still believe the illusion of I.i/PP/IP.
The fact I.i/PP/IP haven’t moved out of the UK yet or even figured out where yet shows they never research before making big announcements & decisions with other peoples money.
Parody accounts were set up by various people as a way of dealing with the BS. But they don’t help people understand, they only help those that already get the BS behind I.i/PP/IP. A site called indie.fail was set up but quickly taken down as the creator was fearful of being found out, even though all he did was list issues. It has been put up here.
Some have been happy to publicly complain. Good on them, and please keep at it. Others are scared of being attacked. And they wonder why they get compared to Scientology.
But at the end of the day I.i/PP/IP never will deliver their pipe dream because they didn’t actually know what they were doing before they set out. All they did were the two things they were good at. Aral doing slick presentations that distort the truth, and creating nice designs to make it seem real.
That’s not how life works. Build, then market the product (£80k would have been enough to make a beta of Heartbeat he could’ve sold on app stores to begin the movement). Don’t market the product first, only to later find out you can’t build it.
Oh, and of course, don’t send a DMCA when you’re all about privacy and building a platform that would be impossible to have data removed from through these means.
UPDATE (27/07/2015):
Despite some believing this is about “haters gonna hate”, this is about actually getting the truth out. If you want an example of hate there’s plenty on @aral’s Twitter timeline.
- August 10th, 2015 is the new date that Heartbeat will be available. Delays happen, but Aral has not really explained how in Nov 14 it was going to be released in Dec 14. What exactly was going to be released then?
- This is still an alpha stage. I.i/PP/IP still has to gain traction amongst users to become self -sustaining. What is the business model after this point? If further funds are raised via public means, what guarantees will be in place that he’ll even come close to his deadlines?
- Sam Hutchings on Twitter gave Aral some very good advice — “ever thought of taking a break from Twitter and the Internet? I feel it could be good for the soul at this point…” This would be good for yourself, both in helping completing what you started, and every rant you make on Twitter just creates more enemies from you. You will need to win over all these people if you want I.i/PP/IP to not fail.
- And yes — the best way you can win over your critics is by succeeding. Prove us all wrong, we would love & welcome that!
There are also been some confusion from Aral over the use of comparing Google in schools to “child abuse”.
Aral still firmly stands behind this claim as mentioned again here. By his definition “To hurt or injure by maltreatment”, requires further clartification of maltreatment which can be described here. This, along with the “creepy uncle” video, shows an ongoing pattern of sensationalising the issue, while being offensive to victims of genuine abuse.
In order to win supporters back, Aral needs to cut back on the anger, and sensationalist comparisons. If he really wants to make I.i/PP/IP, he’s got to start making friends, not blocking anyone who criticises anything he says.
UPDATE (11/08/2015):
I.i/PP/IP just managed to release their pre-alpha on the 10th August as promised which is great news. We’re not “haters” as he likes to call all his critics.
This still only addresses one issue here, the pre-alpha launch, they still needs to address the following:
- when will the beta be released? It took 9 months to release a pre-alpha that was scheduled to take 3 weeks (roughly 13x longer). So at that rate, i will take 4 years to get to beta.
- where’s the next lot of money going to come from? Especially now that Aral has created many more critics than he had when he began.
There are plenty more, but he won’t address the questions anyway, but instead just block people.
