Hi Umbrel CTO and cofounder here, appreciate the thoughtful feedback.

> how do I keep using this thing in 5–10 years without your cloud, your app store, your updates?

The code is publicly available with a non-commercial restriction. If Umbrel the company disappears it's possible for a community maintained fork to live on. Someone else in this discussion mentioned that the NC clause hurts maintainability due to no future company being able to profit from taking over maintenance. They suggested we add a clause revoking the NC restriction if Umbrel goes out of business. It's a good suggestion and something we'll definitely consider, I think it should be possible.

Regarding apps specifically, we have the concept of "community app stores". Anyone can host their own app store which is just a public git repo that any other user can use by pasting it's url into their web ui once. Community app stores completely bypass our main app store, they don't rely on our infrastructure and will continue working if we disappear. There are already hundreds of community app stores in use:

- https://github.com/getumbrel/umbrel-community-app-store/fork... - https://github.com/search?q=in%3Areadme+sort%3Aupdated+-user...

> automatic off-site backup that isn’t tied to one vendor, painless replacement/restore if the hardware dies

We recently shipped backups baked directly into umbrelOS. You can backup to a local NAS, USB device, or another Umbrel (local or remote). You can restore individual files from hourly/weekly/monthly snapshots, or restore the entire state of your Umbrel onto a fresh device from your backups.

https://x.com/umbrel/status/1970508327479320862

> portable across generic hardware

We currently support running on Raspberry Pi, all amd64 devices, virtual machines and there is unofficial support for running in Docker.

> The interesting opportunity here isn’t selling a fancy N100 box, it’s turning “self-hosted everything” into something your non-technical friend could actually live with.

I completely agree, that's the plan.