We don't own our own technology: the devices and data that we think of as "ours" are actually trapped by the applications that act as gatekeepers over them.

Apps wrap and trap our data items and can make it hard to access them. And you don't even know if they're safe: opaque files on your device may indicate your stuff is there somewhere, but you always need this app for this data, that app for that data. And there's no way to tie your stuff across apps.

Take the smartwatch. You may have an app for to-do lists, an alarm app, one for logging fitness data, maybe a calendar or notes app. You can only achieve anything on your watch if you have the corresponding app. And there's no way to connect an alarm to the event you're getting up for, or a to-do list for tracking your workout schedule to the fitness data it generates. You can't book a gym appointment with your trainer that has a link to the workout schedule. All your data is jealously guarded by its wrap'n'trap app.

OnexOS is a start towards giving us back sovereignty over our own technology. It's currently at the early prototype or proof-of-concept stage.

The first step in breaking free of the Apple and Google "walled garden" app-trap ecosystems is to simply buy a lower cost smartwatch without their operating system on-board. For the price of a week's coffees, you can buy a perfectly good example such as this:

Which has a large, bright colourful touch screen. It's actually possible to type on a smartwatch at reasonable speeds with a screen that size (don't forget how we used to type SMS on a 0-9 phone keyboard!) There are also Open Hardware devices like this, with more open operating systems.

The next step in freeing you from the app trap is to simply dump the apps! OnexOS is "A smartwatch OS with no Apps".

You can't have an app-wrap-trap if there are no apps! So OnexOS starts there. Without apps, there is only your data - like a directory and file viewer in Windows, etc. But instead of "files" and "directories", all data in OnexOS are called "objects".

So a todo list is an object, as is each individual todo. A list of notes and each note are all objects. Same with event objects inside a list called a calendar object, or a list of alarm objects.

As you navigate through these lists of objects in the OnexOS interface, things will look and feel familiar. To see your todo list, first go to the "home" object, which is itself a list of everything else, and select the todo list object, then select an individual todo object. Hit "home" or the back button to go back up again.

Whether it's a list of todos or a calendar list of events, all lists look and interact in the same way: you can add new items, move items, edit items and delete them.

But it doesn't stop there, because a key innovation in OnexOS is the link. Every object can be referred to by a "handle" called a link. In fact, every list object is simply a sequence of links to its members. This gives you endless flexibility in how you manage your stuff.

You can grab a link to any object and put it in any other. You can even grab the link of a todo and drop it into your notes list, or drop that todo directly into a single calendar event that needs a list of jobs. Make your own work list of a todo item, a note, an event and a relevant message. Put that at the top of your home list for quick access. You can even have a message pointing to a note that points back to the message, why not? Try doing that between a chat app and a notes app!

All your objects in OnexOS are always visible to you and hosted on your own device. You own your own stuff. You decide what links to what, even have lists and links across quite different types. You no longer have to do what the todo list programmer lets you do, or the calendar programmer. Just mash everything up any way you like - it's your data after all!

But, if there are no apps, just data, how do you get the same functionality that apps used to provide? Normally our inert data is "animated" by its corresponding app. And how does a clock, stopwatch, calculator or alarm work at all?

OnexOS objects are "live" or internally-animated - they can have internally-driven autonomous behaviours and can interact with us and with each other.

So your watch object shows the current time and date, but its internal behaviour updates it every second. You would probably drop a link to the watch object at the top of the "home" list as you want it up on the screen most of the time. You can have as many watch objects as you like, actually, perhaps for different timezones or presentation styles.

An alarm object lets you set the time and day and has a behaviour to alert you when the time is passed. Similarly, a calendar event "knows internally" when it's due.

A calculator object knows internally that when you type "2+3*4" into it, it should set its "result" property to "14". Again, create a new calculator object in a new list for every calculation you want, so they are all to hand - you don't need to clear the current calculation to do another.

Maybe a todo list may keep track of the number of remaining jobs not marked done, with an internal behaviour that sets this number as its listed todos are updated.

We don't need the concept of an "app": links between live objects with internal behaviours get us all we need and much more.

So, with this innovation of an app-free smartwatch operating system, we can regain full control and sovereignty over both our devices and our data. No apps, just all of our own live objects, linked together how we like. The vision of this OnexOS proof-of-concept is of a world without app traps, giving us freedom from Big Tech and empowerment over our own tech.

The next two innovations of OnexOS towards tech sovereignty are described here: private networking and programming your own functions.

Go here for a list of many more broader and deeper articles and presentations.

Duncan Cragg, 2023. Contact me