I just found this link because of the post
very useful thanks
What I like about Nextcloud is the enthusiasm for the software, lots of communication and small information updates for releases and events with inspirational music in the background. This has a big affect on general mindshare and awareness. This creates attraction from potential end users and business owners looking for alternatives for service Hyperscalers, which is good.
However the simplicity presented by these communications hides the complexity and fragility of running and maintaining Nextcloud installations. It is not as simple as the shiny demos indicate.
Running a NextCloud installation is non trival.
If you don’t want to undertake these operational tasks, there are providers which will do it for you
https://www.ionos.de/office-loesungen/nextcloud-workspace
The docs are quite comprehensive Introduction — Nextcloud latest Administration Manual latest documentation
My only gripe is that they don’t include some important information which you discover during operation, or often just out of date.
Application Development
I’m not a web developer by profession, but I have created a number of applications based on the symfony framework.
Nextcloud seems to be an attractive platform to migrate some of my applications due to the “batteries included” features for user management, LDAP, mail, etc
However developing applications in NextCloud is like trying to climb a greased wall, the documentation and tutorials of the structure of application are shallow in depth.
I also saw this post some time back regarding the implementation of vue.js in nextcloud , I encourage you to read it.
What @jan stated in his reply to this post is practically prophetic
Speaking for myself, I find the application development environment nuanced and hard to grasp whilst it continues to evolve.
So here we at the close of 2025 still using Vue 2 which went EOL at the end of 2023 and a migration to Vue 3 is still underway.
This is a constraint and the added layer of abstraction causes complexity and now technical debt.
I know Javascript frontends are Hyper fashionable at the moment, but in my opinion they create bloat, complexity , increased security exploit surface area
All this makes application development a major challenge