I’ve been thinking, what software do you use daily you wish you had a better privacy respecting version of it? Could be one that doesn’t exist, could be one that exists but you wish it had XYZ.
For me it would probably be media in general. I do self host Jellyfin and the likes, but I’m sad there isn’t an easier alternative for people who don’t self host. I honestly end up using paid services like Spotify and Netflix still due to it just being easier in some circumstances.
Just games. I wish my favorite games weren’t so full of crapware launchers and DRM.
And Linux as a first class citizen in development, not half working through Proton!
I wish basic OS features were implemented privately in AOSP rather than through Google’s invasive Play Services.
If they care about their users:
Some of these features could literally be life saving, but as long as Google profits with GMS I guess.
At the risk of being offtopic, as i think that there is a crucial need for it: open source hardware cpus and motherboards, it’s completely lacking in the industry currently, and there is a need for it for privacy purposes, i want open-source risc-V development to dethrone the intel and amd giants, so we can get rid of their widespread cpu backdoors.
Not entirely off topic. The only site I know supporting something related to that is here: https://opencores.org/
However, FPGA cores are different than ICs.
I wish there were privacy-respecting front-ends (or alternatives with traction) for the apps many of my family and friends are obsessed with like Insta, FB, Marco Polo, Tiktok, Twitch, Venmo, Paypal, all of the Micro$oft apps. These surveillance and psychological manipulation apps have incredible penetration into the general population to our future detriment and decline. I’m sad for the children of today because current adults aren’t doing the right thing and taking a stand. Builders of these services have blood on their hands.
Social media is definitely tough. A lot of social media is cultural buy-in. If all your friends use it, you do not want to be the one left out. Worse yet, the privacy invasion algorithms are exactly what hook people into these services, sorting everyone into their echo chambers with extremely high precision.
Payment processing is even harder. Anything non-Crypto definitely makes money off of you. It eventually is a centralized process, and somebody is going to know what you bought. I work with payment processing and it all depresses me for privacy reasons.
Cloned Microsoft Office(MSO) for Linux.
What’s MSO?
It’s possibly that MSO is MicroSoft Office?
Microsoft Office
Most important : alternative to privacy.com in Europe.
Alternatives to : Spotify, Netflix, social medias (Instagram), private alternatives to phone number based apps to send money, to apps to rent bikes and cars, and order taxis (Uber, …)
Better alternatives to Gboard and Gmapw
Privacy as the norm in all software. Would be nice. 
NotebookLM by Google.
I tend to read quite a bit (and definitely love hoarding links), and of late, I find my self increasingly relying on YouTube (over other web/text sources), for which NotebookLM (and Gemini) works super nicely. Open source replacements (which, I haphazardly presume, are more private) aren’t yet up to the mark, though they do exist.
Copilot for Code by Microsoft.
Some self-hostable, open-weight models (like Qwen, DeepSeek, DeepCoder, Llama) are quite good, but I’m unable to shake GPT4o off (mostly due to lack of speed and compute on my local computer). Unsure if there exists a more private hosted alternative to Copilot, which is as good or better (as it the case for Claude Sonnet).
Early days.
I wish there was a decent, commercially released/supported TV streaming set-top box that wasn’t essentially spy/ad-ware. The closest we have to that right now is the Apple TV, but obviously that’s tied into the Apple ecosystem. It’s also much less popular than Roku, FireTV, and Android boxes which are all universally terrible from a privacy perspective.
Actually, most software compromises on privacy… Except for a few programs designed for very specific purposes (Signal, for instance, for encrypted communication; Notesnook for secure note-taking…), I am not aware of any mainstream software that truly respects user privacy. This gap highlights the urgent need for widely accessible privacy-focused solutions that can protect users without sacrificing functionality or ease of use.
I was actually thinking that it would be great if there was an online way to browse inventory for local shops. It doesn’t mean they need to offer shipping, but being able to know what inventory is around your area can prevent needing to purchase from a mega corp.
I think a way to achieve this is to have small “indie” FOSS web applications that do one thing and one thing really well. I’m imagining how Unix has a bunch of tiny utilities that when glued together make a full system, something like that can be done for a swathe of the missing web applications we see. They could be glued together to form a FOSS ecosystem to combat the likes of mega corps. There are endless FOSS solutions for developer problems, but maybe more investment is needed for application problems. But maybe this is all a pipe dream.
Absolutely, that’s a compelling vision. However, for such an ecosystem to thrive, there would need to be some form of assurance from the developers. Projects like these can face challenges with long-term stability, especially if they’re maintained by individual developers. Without proper support and sustainability plans, there’s a risk that these applications could become abandoned, undermining the entire ecosystem.