I’d like to add my observation that for consumer apps, open-sourced applications are most often sub-par compared to close-sourced ones.
The most popular, well designed, well tested, and well supported consumer applications are almost always close sourced:
- Microsoft Office and Google Docs are universally used, and stuff like Notion is becoming increasingly popular, as opposed to LibreOffice.
- Outlook and Google Calendar. I haven’t heard of any popular open sourced alternatives.
- Adobe Photoshop, the gold standard of photo editing, as opposed to something like GIMP.
- Sketch and Figma. I haven’t heard of any popular open sourced alternatives.
- Windows and macOS, both having huge market share for consumer desktops, as opposed to Linux.
- Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, Box, takes up pretty much most of the market. There are great open sourced alternatives but none of them are popular, and most you have to setup your own hosting.
The rare good open-sourced consumer apps usually have huge corporate backing, and are often ad-supported or makes the company a lot of money in other ways. I’m talking about things like Google Chrome/Android (Google makes billions of ad money form those indirectly), and Facebook’s family of products (also ads).