Sailfish is really great, but given that Sailfish is a tiny fraction of a percentage of smartphone installs, is it a good idea to split ourselves up into multiple app stores?
Why not come together as a community and have THE Jolla / SailfishOS app store?
See my other question for context:
There are differences between the 3 stores that are not so obvious to the end user.
Jolla Store is the official store based on highest security level and therefore has some restrictions that on the other hand limits functionality.
Storeman has less limitations for coder, therefore more apps.
Chum is the more experimental store also for coders, devs and experimenters, but also good for users as long as they know what they do.
The difference is the security rules, means, what a dev is allowed to upload and publish.
Ask Jolla to be more relaxed to what goes in the official store. Thats the main issue.
Thanks for the breakdown; it must be confusing to newbies.
Is this true though? Chum Testing certainly is experimental and only for users who know what they do, but not the main repo.
Yes, exactly. But it is possible to switch to ātestingā while on the other stores it is not. Only this is what I meant: if the switches are set wrong, there may come unmatured or crashing apps.
From user point of view the very need is not actually having a unique store, but a Packages Manager GUI.
I have many repositories enabled, some from openrepos, others from chum, and others from elsewhere, so the question is not applicable to a system that is not āsupplier basedā like IOS.
We may think about expanding CHUm with openrepos repos, to not create a fourth standard to cover all standards
Iām sure this is what we all thought, when we read your messageā¦
But yeah, I wouldnāt oppose interoperability between CHUM and openrepos.
Not exactly sure what you mean by this.
One - if not the main - reason CHUM was created is that it is much more responsive by design, as opposed to Openrepos, which provides a separate repository for each contributor and can become very unwieldy, slow, esp. when the network isnāt super fast.
CHUM is one central repository for all contributors. Snappy. So if you integrate Openrepos functionality back into CHUM - you lose the point of CHUM.
Anyway: behind the scenes both are part of one and the same package management, so in a way they do āinteroperateā already.
edit: phrasing
If I understood correctly the previous message I quoted, the intention is to add possibility to add other repos (from openrepos) than CHUM to the CHUM Gui. For people who are not familiar with the command line, this reduces the need to open different store fronts and adds convenience when updating apps.
What? Sounds interesting! Is this possible? Can I update or install some apps from Storeman/Openrepos using the Chum GUI app, adding some repos into Chum app?
I was referring to this
and read it as they are thinking about such possibility, but it is still strongly in the āthinking hatā-stage.
Edit: I just now thought about the fact that Iām not sure if @philter is connected in anyway to the people behind CHUM and this is what they are planning behind the scenes, or if this was just some wishful thinking from user who wants some consolidation in the app updating process.
Thanks for explaining. I was curious to learn more about Chumās options. But itās not really important. It is absolutely NO problem to have 3 Sailfish and 2 Android appstores on the phone: shift them one over the other on the app grid and a folder occurs where they all are inside at the end. So no more mess at the app grid at the end.
More app stores is good: Also a woman doesnāt visit only one boutique, but more. 
Chum is basically just building apps on obs so that they automatically get rebuilt against newest sfos and you only have one repo instead of one repo per user as in openrepos which is annoying and takes a long time to refresh everything.
But you cannot have secrets in the app so thats the payoff and it has to be opensource
Yes, i would also say, merge is not really required, but interoperability would be really nice! 
nothing is stopping you from making storeman manage chum as well
Forgive me for having given this impression. It was not my intention.
@Seven.of.nine Currently we already can search for an app and retrieve results from all the repositories we have installed no matter if they were from openrepos or chum or Jolla store or elsewhere: what we miss is a GUI for doing this, as underlined by @avhakola, for people who are not familiar with the command line.
Practically, as CHUM is based on some premises, it could be easier to add CHUM repository to openrepos: this would allow to find packages that are in CHUM.
Can I ask @Basil to help us understanding if itās feasible?
Many thanks
Hey @philter, what kind of input do you need from me?
PSA:
There is an issue open at the chum github org about this:
There is also some discussion about integrations in the initial chum announcement on this forum.
What you describe is a GUI frontend to zypper/libzypp and/or packagekit, i.e. the local package management.
This is not actually related to chum, openrepos or other repo sources, although their respective GUIs implement parts of that.
In the Qt/KDE desktop world, this has been tried in the form of KPackageKit, Apper, and Discover, which could serve as reference apps should someone want to try this.
Would it be possible to port Discover via the Qt 5.15 Framework, seeing that it is a Kirigami app, and would it provide the desired functionality?
