Show HN: I made an app that consolidated 18 apps (doc, sheet, form, site, chat…)

# Tactical Feedback

On iOS, my password manager doesn’t recognize the Nino app with the Nino.app domain, so autofill doesn’t work at login. Not a problem, just a little friction.

Breaking problem on iOS: I cannot type the letter “m”. It appears to trigger a keyboard shortcut that toggles a reorder paragraph block mode. I had to abandon Nino and finish this write up in Notes.

In iOS Nino Doc, it’s not obvious how to “Select All —> Copy”. Moving from Nino to Notes I had to copy each paragraph block individually.

Concur that it would be good to have some templates or something to orient on first app open. I tried “Notebook” first because I assumed it was like “Notepad”, a very light text editor. Seems to be more like a Jupyter notebook?

Maybe an easy way to address this would be to add a tag line for each document type. Just a couple words to orient folks beyond the name. Perhaps add a “compare to X” as well.

# Strategic Feedback

First, the “too many tools” problem is real. Lotus Notes was good. There is appetite for consolidation in some large enterprises.

It’s impossible to get a big organization to switch over to this directly. You need to target smallish teams (10s of people) that can make their own decisions.

Security is everything. Recommend you review Sandstorm’s capability security model. That was the most promising productivity revolution I’ve seen in a while. It failed in part because they expected other people to write applications to their security model. If you can deliver the fine grained security AND a broad swath of functionality, you have something really special.

End to end encryption is excellent. Let me bring my own keys.

Some more specifics on security:

Block level security would be a killer feature. Especially if it goes beyond RBAC to ABAC. In my world, you frequently want to share a document with someone who is only authorized to view part of it. Automatically redacting the parts they aren’t supposed to see would be amazing. Then allow those blocks to be reused, with the same security labels, in many different contexts and app paradigms?

Honestly it would be amazing and I could sell it.

Next thing on security is data sovereignty. Absolutely respect going single region GCP to start. However, self-hosting will be an immediate ask in my world. Several tiers of this, all of which you can absolutely up charge for.

First, single tenet instances. Give me assurance that when bugs show up, they won’t leak my data to other customers.

Second, enterprises will want to run it within their VPC/Tenet that they already use / trust / audit. The major cloud vendors have regions focused on different industries, you need to be able to run there without calling home to your central instance.

Third, direct self hosting. Especially for smaller teams with poor connectivity back to the cloud. Can I run this on a NUC out of a trailer to help coordinate disaster recovery efforts? Can I host it in a VM on dedicated hardware where I understand the cost, capacity and backup story? Google and Microsoft can’t do this, so you can differentiate. See Next Cloud for a good approach to this.

Finally, interoperability. You have many different app views into the core block abstraction, but there will always be other tools and databases in play. Make it super easy for those external things to read and write blocks. Don’t write the integrations - just expose the API.

Good luck!

Most elements of Nano have widely accepted standards, presumably easy to integrate, so that guarantee should be doable.

Disagree, with the caveat that I understand how it can feel overrated if you're not using the new ways of remote collaboration that it enables.

The fully-live remote-collaboration UX in tools like Google Docs [1] and Figma is magical because you can get on a video call with people [2] and co-create, in the moment, without having to fumble with all the nonsense of figuring out who's "driving" and who's "navigating."

Since you're all looking at and editing the same doc, everyone can arrange their windows to have a line of faces along the side and the doc in the center. It's actually better than in-person collaboration. There's no haggling over who's got the whiteboard marker, no one sneezing on everyone else, no crowding around to make sure everyone can see the board...

All the extra nonsense drops away, and you get to be just a group of people making something together.

[1]: Notably, Google Sheets uses a much more ham-handed idea of "realtime." A cell appears "locked" while someone else is editing it, and you don't see their work until they hit Enter. So you end up having to sit there like a buffoon while they type, their work invisible to you, and that friction destroys the magic of live collaboration.

[2]: If you don't do much remote work/collaboration with others around the world, then none of this matters — and it's easy to miss the world of possibilities that this feature unlocks.

Either way I am getting strong https://zombo.com/ vibes from the description here and your landing page.

Instead of a clear problem statement and user use cases, you have this word salad of “consolidation” (of what?), “superapp” (that does what?), “unmatched privacy” (to do privately what?) and “offline mode” (I still have no idea what I can do with the app, but apparently I can do this something offline?).

That said, I am double surprised with all the praise comments here on HN. Can someone explain in one sentence what this app is supposed to do?

Like a desktop folder!