I went with the BYOC route for my current side project: https://inter.tube https://inter.tube It’s a music locker service with a custom web client. Instead of

I went with the BYOC route for my current side project: https://inter.tube https://inter.tube It’s a music locker service with a custom web client. Instead of writing my own native app I implemented the Subsonic protocol: http://www.subsonic.org/pages/api.jsp http://www.subsonic.org/pages/api.jsp It’s awesome to have a polished native app for “free” (eg. play:Sub on iOS is really nice) but it’s such an underspecified and loose spec that implementing it was a huge pain in the ass. For example, clients will choke on results missing values that are specified to be optional in the spec. The spec imposes integer offsets for pagination but my database wants string continuation tokens. It’s specified as XML but there’s an option to make it JSON with zero information on how to deal with discrepancies. Some clients use GET, some POST, some mangle the URL or capitalize random paths. I just had to reverse engineer pre-existing servers to figure out what clients can handle and there’s still a few clients that are mysteriously broken. I’m going to have to test as many as possible and create a list of recommended ones. I’m happy I went with BYOC but I highly recommend to plan for it from the start so you can deal with the protocol’s weaknesses sooner than later.