Thanks for sharing your opinion.
I think the best reply to all the concerns about data and privacy is full transparency. So I prepared the most comprehensive explanation I could, which will be dynamically updated and will serve as centralized point of discussion for that matters:
Then, regarding your complaints you have, I think what you are seeing are 2 products which have the same goal, but two different approaches.
I can only speak for our approach, and provide you an answer on that.
Not all the plugins have been ported to Volumio 3
This is because we want to step up in plugins quality. In the past year we observed too many times that poorly written plugins were breaking Volumio, resulting in a bad experience.
We designed plugins to be flexible, but this resulted in poor care in making them resilient.
So we decided to validate each one of them and define new guidelines for safety and code quality for each of them.
Believe me, this will take time (and we are slower than we want on this) but it’s definetely worth.
This is because we value usability and stability a lot. We also care that non computer savvy users can benefit from an high quality player like Volumio.
Doing something easy to use, where you have sane defaults without too many overwhelming choices is harder, and takes more time.
Thanks for your feedback and hope this explaination will provide more insigths.