Control

A while back I created a company in France on the side of my day job in hope to make a little cash on the side. I created GAWST. My first idea was to make some programs for iOS and OS X as people to pay more for softwares there. I had various projects lined up. The more advanced one was a replacement for the crap Finder, something more in tune with Windows Explorer. Then Apple introduced the App Store and plenty of rules and restrictions. It not possible anymore to sell a file explorer there. The App Store being the easiest and most obvious way to sell content there, I decided it wasn't worth the efforts (working on OS X was never my cup of tea).

So I switch to Android. I wanted something like Ghostery for Android, a way to see the kind of traffic goes to sites I don't want and a way to block it. So I started working on a proxy written from scratch in java. Something lightweight and fast. It took me a while to get it right but now it's pretty stable. I can see and block all the traffic just like I wanted. And I can do a lot more with this little tool. But then last week Google removed all the ad blockers from the Play Store. I planned to sell a restriction unlocker via the Play Store (while basic functionalities would be available to everyone). And once again all the time I spent on this project is wasted because a large company wants to have more control with what we can do with our machine.

I don't know yet what I will do with the code of gawsttp (my proxy). I use it every day on all my devices and it's useful, even a debug tool (or to test Twitter's API blocking). But what is pretty clear is that I won't try again to make a commercial project of my own anytime soon. I'm tired of all the rules that are only good for the big players, despite real user demand.