Comment by skeledrew

I am a little wary how many of the newer apps on F-Droid seem fully vibe-coded. there's only so many 'brain training' games and 'fully offline notes' that one really needs

I wish there was a 'ranking' feature that periodically (maybe daily?) pulled down star/contributor numbers so you could at least look at projects that are more likely to receive continuing support and have basic hygiene like Dependabot alerts

that said, migrating off so many of the Google-native or phone manufacturer apps has been such a liberatory feeling. I do some community organizing in my free-time and am a huge FOSS evangelist in those spaces. there's so many similar values, namely anti-surveillance, and but for resistance to change and preference for hyperpalatable UX, it's such a natural fit

F-Droid was a blow of fresh air. Nice apps that help me do something, instead of exploding ads in my face. It's my first stop of new apps.

Thats the only reason for at least me to use f droid and I have for the last decade I think.

It "just works".

As opposed to play store apps requiring "play store services" meaning having to sign into play store. It refuses to do so on a FOSS principle so I am literally cut off from a lot of apps.

Aurora store helps but apps that "require play store services" don't work.

This. I was looking for a quick Dart board score tracker app to keep scores for family games.

The play store results were ATROCIOUS and user hostile, forcing account creation, full screen video ads and other BS.

I remembered I had f-droid and I found a perfect, no bullshit app that does exactly what I needed and no ads.

I use the Droid-ify client and rarely get issues: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.looker.droidify/

I get the F-Droid toasts once every few weeks or so. To me, it's worth it. Finding a tolerable weather app on the Play Store is impossible nowadays. Finding one on F-Droid is easy.

Same problem here, but only for a few apps (e.g. signal)

I have never seen this error, and auto updates do work for me.

They are a blessing when auto updates were finally possible with the official F-Droid app.

You might consider one of the alternative front ends. Won't fix the repos being unavailable, but will fix notifications about it.

On Youtube just now I got hit with an ad whose first 5 unskippable seconds were an AI person saying "Did you know the cure for dimentia is in the Bible!?!?" - considering who that ad is targetting, Google can F off with any stance about protecting people from scams.

> Technology can be sandboxed, permissioned, signed, fingerprinted, attested, scanned, and blacklisted.

Many of the things you're listing are the exact things the platforms would have to be banned from doing by the regulation you're proposing because they're the mechanisms used to exclude competitors.

If you put all apps in a sandbox then they can't perform certain operations (e.g. install other apps) which inherently means they can't compete in the market for doing those things. If apps have to be signed by the platform then the signing fee becomes the vig they charge to everyone even if they're using a competing store, and both that and scanning/fingerprinting provide a mechanism to revoke competing apps under arbitrary pretexts and otherwise grief their developers and users.

Attestation is the thing you would have to ban the most because it's not just subject to abuse, its very mechanism of operation is to prevent existing apps that use it from running on a competing new system at the point in time when the new system has too few users for all the apps to explicitly add support for it, thereby preventing the competitor from getting enough users for that to ever happen.

But attestation doesn't prevent grandma from getting scammed anyway. When the scammer calls pretending to be the grandchild who needs money for an emergency, they use the official signed bank app on the attestation-passing device to transfer money to the scammer. When the scammer is using a fake bank app to steal the user's credentials, the fake app doesn't require attestation.

The actual problem here is that you want to have someone vetting apps for grandma, but you don't want the platforms to be able to insist it be them rather than F-Droid or Aurora etc. Which the platforms will try to claim is chicken and egg (how do you know you can trust F-Droid?) while hoping you don't notice that they don't actually get you out of it -- how do you know you can trust Google?

Android is Google's billboard/surveillance tool they've invested deeply in.

Why on earth would they let anyone else participate?

The government is not going to regulate them, any more than they are going to fix the countless other cartels that operate with impunity.

> F-Droid is not the answer. Regulation is.

> Regulate Google. Regulate Apple. Make our phones free.

Result: F-Droid regulated out of existence by government agencies captured by Google and Apple.

Google already allows web installs on Android, no regulation required. But yes, iOS allowing that would be excellent.

You can also publish your own f-droid repository, like Threema did. (And ask users to buy a license.)

Better framing in their lawsuits- being a ‘market’ is less a thing in a monoculture- i.e. the market for Apple phones vs the market for all Android phones from a variety of makers.

Also in the worldwide market it most definitely isn’t a monopoly in phones at all- which is exactly why the EU had to reform their laws (DMA ect)to get regulatory powers over them.

I never understood the argument that Apple's hostility to developers was unfair. The business proposition is simple: "Buy our overpriced hardware with our famously inflexible and invasive software and sign this massive, legally-binding contract agreeing that you understand all of the above to extract further value out of the Apple ecosystem."

The "App Store" is just a natural extension of the club. As far as I'm concerned, they can gatekeep and sloppify as much as they want. Apple users agree to this.

I've never felt slighted that I couldn't hack apart my iPad - though I will absolutely do it once somebody cracks the code and gets a proper Linux kernel running.

Of the last 10 Presidential terms spanning 40 years, Republicans have held the office for 5 and Democrats for 5. Each party has likewise held around half the seats in the House and Senate. This has nothing to do with the voters, it's the structural outcome of a FPTP voting system. You get two parties and they each get around half the votes/seats.

The US federal government has also played a major role in causing this by passing laws like DMCA 1201 and the CFAA which incumbents use to threaten competitors who attempt adversarial interoperability.

Moreover, the DoJ budget is ~$33B whereas e.g. the military budget is ~$1T, so arguing that the only way to allocate more resources to antitrust enforcement or similar is to raise taxes would imply that all of the existing spending is critically necessary and Congress never e.g. buys tanks the Army doesn't want or otherwise poorly allocates existing funds.

The US Government spends a preposterous amount of money, and the number only ever goes up. It doesn't need to be bigger, it needs to be less inefficient.

> Anki and Ankidroid are not the same entity

So... why is one soliciting donations on behalf of the other?! My Fraud Meter is rising, not falling here.

> It's also just some nerd programmers who ported Anki to run on Android. It's not some org with a revenue stream and attorneys.

"Just Some Nerd Programmers" don't, very obviously, have standing to solicit tax exempt donations. Rising further still...

I think a lot of people here are operating on the assumption that apps have the inherent right to ask for money on a proprietary platform that gives them a monetization path. They don't, on any such platform, and never have. There are specific carveouts allowed by the platform vendors for cases we all agree are valuable, like charitable donations. It's just really clear that Anki is playing games here and frankly I really doubt they qualify.

Do LF and Rust solicit individual donations via phone apps (or at all, really)?

Indeed, those are structured as corporate-funded consortiums of exactly the type you'd be very suspicious of if, say, your kernel or compiler logs started stuffing a donation link into the stream!

Note that GNU software does historically mention donations (not in the logs AFAIK), and indeed the FSF is a 501(c)(3).

Since you seem to have done the research, can you link some other iOS or Android apps that have been allowed to solicit donations for the Open Source Collective? Thanks.

I mean, come on. Just read their page. They're not a charity, at all. They're a "fiscal host" (which is a weird term right out of the gate) designed to solicit donations on behalf of other projects. They're literally a payment processor in competition with Google and Apple, and taking a cut of their own.

I mean, fine. They can do that. But that's not charity.