NextCloud — Brief Thoughts on Core and Apps
I have been using some parts of NextCloud for years, on my own set-up at home. My general feelings about Nextcloud, first the good bits: the core of NextCloud makes a very useful framework for connecting teams and their data. It's a good base to build on. The most basic parts, the files storage and sharing, are pretty solid.
On the other hand, the NextCloud-provided or built-in “apps” are of mixed quality. “NextCloud Talk” is I think one of the better ones. I find many of the rest are poor quality or too simple to be recommended. I'll give some examples.
The “contacts” and “calendar” user apps are too simple and clunky, and I found the contacts app unreliable and now avoid using it. I've experienced accidental data loss or damage with it, for example mangling the punctuation in address fields. (Technically, I think that issue was related to poorly handling different versions of CardDAV.) By contrast, the core CardDAV/CalDAV server components behind them seem to be solid and work fine (I have been using them for shared access from my phones/computers for years on my home setup).
The “Maps” app has some potentially great features like showing contacts addresses on it, except it's not really well finished and often shows wrong or silly addresses such as matching a town that's on another continent instead of the one with the same name that's nearby, not just occasionally but often.
As another example, I have been looking for a self-hosted photo solution and been hearing the built-in “NextCloud Photos” is not great on its own, it's best used in combination with the third-party “Memories” app, the two together making a much better photo system. That combination, as far as I can tell, now comes up as one of the top three options, alongside the newer stand-alone projects PhotoPrism and Immich. Presently I am running PhotoPrism but I am interested in exploring the others. The solution based on NextCloud of course has the advantage of integration with the NextCloud's file management and user management.
For most “apps” that we might use in a team settings, like shared wiki, project management, and so on, I feel the team would get the best outcome by selecting the best available open-source system of that kind, hosting it alongside, and tying it into NextCloud's user management (single-sign-on and permissions) and file access, etc., instead of using one of NextCloud's built-in or “app store” apps.
Those are some of my general thoughts about NextCloud.
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