And why again is there even a need for community stores like these?
The Jolla Store (harbour) has certain restrictions on what applications available there can do.
Both Storeman and Chum GUI use functions which are not allowed there.
The same reason is the reason these third party repositories/stores exist - because there are virtually zero restrictions on Openrepos, and little restrictions on OBS/Chum.
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That is a really good question, or actually two questions. The first one @nephros already answered. The answer to the seconds question lies in the history and objectives of the three:
The Jolla store, also known as “Harbour”, provides Sailfish OS users with vetted application packages. The users who install these packages can do so without having to fear that the packages break their system. Also, Sailfish OS maintainers go to great lengths to make sure future OS versions don’t break existing applications in Harbour.
Openrepos actually predates Sailfish OS, and its main objective is just to provide application developers a place to publish their software. There is no quality control on the packages.
In addition to just publishing software packages, Chum provides application developers build service - each package is built by Sailfish OS OBS. This works well for open source applications, not so well for closed source ones.
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I guess you mean applications available from these app stores not the app stores themselves…
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Well no and partially yes.
I meant the applications that are usually used to access the application stores OpenRepos and Chum (a.k.a OBS).
These applications are Storeman and Chum GUI, respectively.
The applications Storeman and Chum GUI use functions which are not allowed in Jolla Store, which is why I wrote:
Whether applications available from OpenRepos or Chum are harbour-compliant or not does not have any bearing on the possibility of their UI applications, Storeman and Chum GUI, being made available in Jolla Store.
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Even when considering to only offer Storeman-Installer and the SailfishOS:Chum GUI Installer by the Jolla Store (because it is trivial what these Installers do: download and install the correct version of Storeman / SailfishOS:Chum GUI app for the installed SailfishOS version and CPU architecture), this is not allowed due to Jolla Store’s (harbour) restrictions: The Installers must use a %post or %posttrans scriptlet in the RPM spec file which is not allowed by Jolla’s rule-set.
BTW, Jolla Store’s (harbour’s) restrictions are the primary reason why so little software is available there. But as Jolla principally does only care about SailfishOS proper, the SailfishOS software ecosystem apparently is mostly irrelevant for them.
P.S.: @vige's statement sounds as if Jolla’s restrictive rule-set would constitute some kind of quality-assurance or would generally prohibit malicious apps to be successfully submitted to the Jolla Store: This is not the case; though the rule-set prevents a few classes of mishaps, a multitude of other ways to cause mishaps or act maliciously exist.
Mind that Jolla never stated that “quality assurance” covers anything else than checking that the restrictions are obeyed, and I doubt that they have the resources to perform more then a “smoke-test” beyond that, i.e. launching an app and tapping a bit around in it (as everybody would when installing an unknown app for the first time).
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I already saw some pre/post scripts in openrepo packages that are really dangerous (not far away from malicious). So, in our (community) own interests - some rule sets are mandatory. Not sure if Chum has some policies but I would vote to establish some. This can be done with the community and transparently.
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