It's definitely good news, but... I think it says a lot that the most interesting/useful apps are not permitted in the store and can only be found on openrepos! I can see why this has happened, but it's a shame Jolla doesn't have the resources to vet a few of these apps and add permit them in the store. A lot of the usefulness of having a pocket linux device is negated by having such restrictions.

Allowing apps to start a user service would be a nice change, Jolla could write a settings module to control them all from one place, or do some trickery so that running user services have an always visible cover etc to make it more obvious. If they did this, you'd instantly get a bunch more useful apps like Rockpool in the official store, and some other apps like Hangish could run a background service instead of needing to be started manually/always open (really annoying with OOM killer on Jolla 1).