Edit: I've read the article and Mozilla even mentions reskinning/basing off of OpenWRT. Which only puzzles me even more given you write "the beginning of apps for routers" as if OpenWRT/pfSense/etc doesn't exist.

NAS apps sound interesting, but not what I'm looking for. Router apps have untapped potential because routers are relatively inexpensive, always on, and have a real Internet address, unlike the rest of the home/office network.

What kind of apps would developers create? All kinds! Some would succeed and some would fail, just like phone apps. The point is to unleash developer creativity. Today, nearly all Internet traffic is routed to Netflix, Google, Amazon, and Facebook. Over the next few years, consumers will buy millions upon millions of upgraded routers. I think they would like to buy routers that do more for them than send all their traffic to a tiny number of huge companies.

I've also run several generations of OpenWRT and I've decided it doesn't make sense for me to spend time maintaining it. For example, I'm interested in installing something like Zulip (an open source team chat service) on my router, but I know from experience that anything special I install in OpenWRT requires custom configuration and will need regular manual maintenance and upgrades. It's a big time commitment and I have to be careful with my time.

In a better world, I would tap to install Zulip on my router, automatic upgrades would be enabled by default, and I would be prompted to also sign up for a Zulip-oriented encrypted backup subscription service. Having spent only a minute or two to install Zulip, I would gladly pay for the backup service since the developers proved that they respect my time. I would no longer feel the need to sign up for another cloud service. Privacy would win!

What kind of apps would developers create? All kinds!”

Give what we know of applications on smartphones, I fear “all kinds” will include many, many that claim to be anti-virus/anti-hacking/pro-security, but steal data instead, and that grandma, grandpa and zillions of others will happily install them, possibly even pay for them.

Using https prevents your router from reading most of what you send, but that also prevents software in your router from doing much, so I fear the router’s software would have to MITM your https connections to do anything useful.

Does grandma even _want_ to install packages on their router (which is likely a modem combo provided by the cable company), let alone know what a router is? Grandma wouldn't even be able to get her shows if she messed with the MoCa for FiOS, for example.

Likewise, uninstalling via a package manager handles orphaned dependencies automatically for you.

> How often do you want to go messing with your router

That's the thing when you're running what is essentially Linux (in the case of OpenWRT): it's not a router, it's an OS and you can manage just like you do any other OS. Your description of "apps" as containers seems to abstract away the OS level and leave you with just some frontend (which is probably running Linux/*BSD underneath) and no control.

Yes, and fairies are real, and so is Santa. I wish things were this way, but the reality is that most package managers aren't 100% perfect when it comes to install/uninstall and cleaning up of stuff. opkg is especially bad at it. If you look at how it actually works, the core files of the package are handled by the package manager, which usually (though not always works). But most packages aren't just binary blobs to be moved around. Take something like mysql-server for example. Not only will it install the MySQL binaries, it will also create /var/lib/mysql for all the data, and a few cache dirs as well. It'll also add files to /etc/, /etc/defaults/ and so on. Oh, and after it is installed, it will start the mysqld process. When you try to uninstall this stuff, but default the /var/lib/mysql directory won't be removed. Who knows, you might want the data that's there. Oh and that config file? That's staying too. So if you uninstall and reinstall mysql-server because something went bad, you'll just get the same config and data. Is that what you really wanted? You can of course do something like `apt autoremove --purge mysql-server` and that'll mostly work, assuming that mysqld isn't frozen, at which point the pre-remove script fails to kill it and you suddenly are left with a system with an inconsistent state. Last I checked, opkg didn't even have a purge option. And it doesn't stop there. The pre/post install/uninstall scripts can do whatever they want, and if they error out, you again are left with a mess you will be cleaning up by hand. I have done this on many distros many times and it is always a mess. apt/dpkg are one of the better systems out there. The rest? They will make you want to nuke whatever device you are working on from orbit.

I am not on the "containers for everything" bandwagon, but the idea that opkg is somehow comparable in this case is laughable.

Synology's ARM line is generally underpowered compared to their Intel offerings, in terms of clock speed, memory capacity, and core count. They also tend to gate additional features (e.g. hardware-accelerated encryption) behind their Intel offerings.

edit: We're mostly talking Atoms / Celerons here, so not exactly screaming performance either way.

There are third-party package managers for the ARM devices but there are a lot of broken packages so I wouldn't recommend using it.