Just wanted to provide a quick update to the community, in case you missed this last week: We have now launched “Open Fleet” functionality in balenaHub, which means that:
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As a developer, you can publish an Application, and end-users can quickly and easily provision their device and join your fleet. You can then continue to iterate and deploy updates, and those users will benefit from your continual developement!
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As a user, you can quickly flash an SD Card and power up your device, and run an Application. There is no need to sign up for a balenaCloud account, clone any GitHub repos, or push any containers yourself.
You can read more about this feature here: Introducing open fleets, and self-submitted apps and blocks on balenaHub
Have fun!
Very interesting and certainly something I should be looking to utilise by the looks of it.
The blog post is worded a little around things like the Fold where groups of devices perform collective tasks. From what I have read though this is perfectly viable for providing users access to a Balena OS image file that users can then flash to their local device (like a raspberry pi), use the software I provide locally and then benefit from auto updates? Mine is an EdTech project that users can use to access their educational resources offline (non-commercial, open source). Have I got the gist?
Really great concept, and if I have understood correctly potential to migrate from Open Balena to the Cloud.
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@maggie0002 You definitely got it right. 
We are still working on more features of course, and coming soon will the ability to set Fleets as private, disable Fleets and just provide an image file that users can flash locally, and more. But, for the moment, you place your application on Hub, users flash the image, and their devices join your App…making you a Fleet owner and giving you the ability to push updates to those devices!
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All sounds great.
What is “just provide an image file that users can flash locally”? Isn’t that what it does already?
Good point, you are correct. That is exactly what they do already. I suppose a better clarification is to simply say that the user could not join your Fleet, and just run the application…you’d have no visibility that they are running it, and, they would not receive updates if you pushed new releases, as they are not a part of your Fleet in that scenario.
Thanks for the clarification.
I suspect this means there will be a preload feature on the cards at some point too? If people can download a local copy to use offline presumably it would need to be preloaded. Hoping such a feature will make it into the fleets on the hub, as at the moment it appears the user needs to have internet access to download the app on first load.
Yep - there is some work planned for that, as well.
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