Comment by renegat0x0
5 days ago
I think there are more and more apps on f-droid.
On my end the experience was more pleasant on f-droid than on Google. On f-droid I had to manually push some things, in repositories. That I solved in a week or so.
On Google end I had to verify my account. Which was not easy feat.
- had to provide my ID several times, because it got rejected multiple times
- I uploaded driving license
- the verification process was stuck
- only after help ticket google employee pushed it forward
- I had to provide many more details, also had to use banking to pay substantial amount of money
- I currently trying to create app, but it requires 14 testers, and it can still be rejected, if their involvement was too poor
I am wondering what more things Google will invent to make my life worse.
By the way my app: https://github.com/rumca-js/OfflineWebSearch
From a user perspective I think F-Droid is really good too, mainly because it only allows FOSS apps by default, which cuts out a lot of the BS you see in Play Store apps.
You can go download a random, no-name app from F-Droid and be very confident it does what it says on the tin and won't be riddled with ads or spam you with notifications.
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.
> "play store services" meaning having to sign into play store
Not necessarily. Most apps that require Play Services should work fine even if you’re not logged into Google. You do, however, have to have the “gapps” installed. (Some apps would also actually check whether you’ve installed them from the Google Play store and not, say, Aurora, but from my experience most don’t bother.)
Also, perhaps look into microG? It reimplements the Play Services APIs, but is FOSS and only connects to Google servers when it’s necessary for some functionality (e.g. if you enable push notifications): https://microg.org/
3 replies →
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.
On the user side my experience with F-Droid is auto updates dont work and I constantly get a "repository not reachable" f-droid error every now and then popping up on my phone (that little small middle-of-screen toast) when im doing something else completely unrelated. Might be a regional thing.
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.
There are downsides to F-Droid too: https://www.privacyguides.org/en/android/obtaining-apps/?h=f...
F-Droid is a nerd solution and will be used by 0.00001% of the total market. There are more people that will use Linux on desktop than will use F-Droid.
We need governments to mandate both Apple and Google to allow web installs of apps. No requirement for Apple/Google pay, Apple/Google login, or Apple/Google services.
Total freedom for users, for developers, and for competitors.
This duopoly has fucked over America and the EU by training us to think only these two companies have the right to decide what gets to be on your phone that you pay for.
They've created a moat so strong that it's impossible to compete with Android/iPhone, so the market cannot even have healthy competition.
F-Droid is not the answer. Regulation is.
And I'll have none of this fangirl/fanboy "but my grandma will fall for scams" nonsense.
Google and Amazon and all the platforms have scammy ads on their platforms. Nobody's doing anything about that.
Technology can be sandboxed, permissioned, signed, fingerprinted, attested, scanned, and blacklisted. It's easy to make this safe in the year of our lord 2026. Don't pretend we don't have a million ways to make this safe for your meemaw. She's more likely to fall down the stairs or get a scam call.
Regulate Google. Regulate Apple. Make our phones free.
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.
Use NewPipe and you won't see an add ever again.
3 replies →
> 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?
> 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.
And they should still be banned from forcing apps to do it under their arbitrary judgements in order to participate on their platform. That isn't the same thing as preventing them from doing it. Some people honestly think they love walled gardens (they don't), but some people honestly need walled gardens. There should even be competing walled gardens. Let me install the best kids app store for my kids, and the best grandmas app store for my grandma.
I'm also not sure that attestation should be banned at the app store or platform level; it's a service. I'd ban it at the bank and merchant level. Attestation should be a tool for the user of the device (just like everything else on the phone they own.) They should be able to get it to attest to whatever they want to get it to attest to - if I'm a company and I issue my employees phones, I might want to make sure those phones haven't been tampered with. If I'm a parent and I issue my children phones, I might want to make sure those phones haven't been tampered with. The problem comes when arbitrary people are using it to make sure that the user hasn't tampered with their own phone since it came from some official list of blessed companies.
Let me install the best kids app store for my kids, and the best grandmas app store for my grandma. Let me be able to use attestation to make sure their phones haven't been altered since the last time I checked.
> If apps have to be signed by the platform
I'd like to get back to apps being signed by upstream, so we know they actually come from the author. I couldn't care less if the platform offers a service which verifies those signatures, and if almost everyone uses that service. That's just DNS. If your platforms service becomes hostile, there will be cheap/free competitors, just like DNS.
Just agreeing loudly. But the problem with F-Droid is that it is to be a store that has been blessed by Google in order to avoid legal questions. I know that this is not their fault, and that they hate it. I exclusively use F-Droid and don't even have a Google Play account, but if they started making decisions that I couldn't stand (they haven't, ever) I wouldn't have any alternative.
I remember the bullshit settlement of Microsoft antitrust is that they had to place a modal popup do select a default browser (that I never saw, once, in any context.) No reason why the platform's store can't be demoted to one of a number of stores other than that it is a profit spinner.
1 reply →
Android is Google's billboard/surveillance tool they've invested deeply in.
Why on earth would they let anyone else participate?
Exactly. Thus regulation and enforcement.
The government is not going to regulate them, any more than they are going to fix the countless other cartels that operate with impunity.
Lina Kahn had the mandate but took too long. She did not appreciate the urgency or limited time with which she had to put together the cases.
Both the Democratic and Republican parties have lots of members who are fed up with big tech.
American labor unions are fed up with big tech and both parties are trying to court them.
2 replies →
Defeatism is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
2 replies →
> 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.
Behind eight menu settings, a scare wall, and unfriendly UX with additional constant scares.
Oh, and also they're rolling it back by adding additional hurdles. Directionally, they're starting to remove it.