For example, if you search it for "browser", Firefox will not show up because

A) It's called Fennec

B) The F-Droid search seems to be exact infix search, and Fennec's title is "Fennec F-Droid -- Browse the web", in which "Browser" does not appear, only "browse". So it doesn't find it.

In general, the search has no clue what a "browser" is, and cannot use it for ranking, so in practice you need to scroll a lot in F-Droid until you find what you seek.

[1]: https://f-droid.org/en/docs/Inclusion_Policy/

The fact there's no freedom respecting bank applications is a problem on its own, though. I will continue avoiding them until there is...

If F-Droid wants to compete, they need to be better than Good Enough(tm) and that requires being on par with what Google Play Store has to offer which includes programs that vendors will happily refuse to open the source code to.

Usually, I start with f-droid (to avoid spy/adware), then go straight to ddg or kagi.

If you are already using the F-Droid version, it should be reported. The list of anti-features is kept accurate by user reports like yours.

https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/-/issues

I suppose you're right and I think it's worrying that precisely these kinds of organizations still seem to rely on security through obscurity (to some extent, not solely).

As well as not require, under any circumstances, an account holder to install a proprietary application in order to use the bank.

I miss the time of totp dongles.

As-is, F-Droid will not be an _alternative_, it can, at most, be an extension to the Play Store.

I know I will sound extreme (although I think it shouldn't be the case in among developers) and no offense, but this sounds like a happy outcome to me. I believe proprietary software to be unethical. I'm not interested in being proposed non free software. The software industry should figure it out and start respecting its users.

However software funding is a real concern and I do believe there's room for some set of builtin solutions allowing free software funding beyond a donate link.

There are many ways to fund free software. I'm not saying it's easy but there are many open source businesses now and as a developer I decided to join one of them.

Support, consulting and paid (but still open source) paid features are some options. I don't think anybody would remove a license check in an app sent to f-droid if it's free software.

Now, I genuinely thank you for having considered an alternative to Google for distributing your software.

I know it's hard to build stuff and bootstrap it. I'm with you on this.

In f-droid, you can still add third party repositories and I heard it's getting easier for users. Not sure it is easy enough.

Now I'm totally aware only free software doesn't cut it for most people yet, and fdroid will not suffice. Most people will do with the play store, but some will use fdroid as a store of "trusty" apps and resort to the play store if really needed. I know people doing this.

I think the main issue may be how much up-front investment games need that would never be recouped with an open source license, but I'd love to be shown an example to the contrary.

Maybe you could license the data for a fee and have the code as open source?

Of course this is low effort and you know way better than me.

Re only code: Game engines often tie code and data together and the code without the data won't even compile in many cases, or you won't be able to produce a new dataset because documenting the required settings is a monumental task.

Finally, there is no real benefit to open sourcing a game if you want to make money. There is no complementary product or service you can sell with it. Reviewing and incorporating community fixes requires work and potentially legal review as not everyone in the modding community is also necessarily well versed in IP law. All these things need funding which is not a given if the game is open source in any meaningful way. If a game is truly open source, a less than ethical company with a bunch of cheap labor can go and undercut you, so there is an incentive to make creating an alternative build as hard as possible, defeating the entire idea of open source.

I would like to be able to release on an alternative storefront so people who want to degoogle their phones, but F-Droid's policies (most known alternative) make that impossible. (To be clear, it's a perfectly legit choice, I just wish there was a meaningful alternative to Google.)

> Finally, there is no real benefit to open sourcing a game if you want to make money.

the same thing can be said for pretty much all software (although it's not always actually true, sometimes open source is a selling point and/or have specific strengths beyond ethics)

> a less than ethical company with a bunch of cheap labor can go and undercut you

Isn't the data which is the most costly part in developing a game? Of course I realize you stated that separating the data is not practical.

> I would like to be able to release on an alternative storefront so people who want to degoogle their phones

Still 100% with you on this. Also degoogled with some proprietary software is still a step in the right direction

Regarding the development costs, I'm not exactly an expert and I have never worked in a game studio (apart from the company my wife and I are running), but let's take StarCraft 2 for example. If you were to have the engine, but not the art, you could likely easily develop a very capable multiplayer RTS game. Heroes of the Storm was developed out of a StarCraft 2 mod[1]. As another example, Stormgate[2], made by ex Blizzard devs, is getting a whole lot of press coverage for their netcode. It stands to reason that a good engine and netcode are very real competitive advantages in the RTS space. Other game types, such as a walking sim or an adventure game will have a lot less "secret sauce" in the code and more in the art, voice acting, etc. (The Invincible[3] is great in this area) so the code/data split would likely heavily depend on the type of game. (Games can also become very messy between art, visual scripting, engine settings and code, which is what makes releasing the code separately tricky.)

My wife and I are (slowly, next to the day job) working on a Python programming/learning game and hopefully we'll manage to make a clean split between the engine and the art because it would be important for modding. However, I wouldn't feel comfortable releasing it under an open source license because it would cut off a potential source of revenue to license it to educators wanting to make their own challenges and courses. Maybe later we'll figure out that the base game makes enough money and it doesn't matter anymore, but it's really hard to predict success. As a game dev I would really like to make it possible, for example, for game archivists to do their work legally, for people to legally backup and rebuild their games for newer operating systems, or for their kids to be able to inherit their games[4], but carving out specific exceptions, especially for unknown future use cases 10-20 years down the line is exceptionally hard and I'm also not a lawyer, so for desktop the Steam Subscriber Agreement is governing our PC releases for now.

[1]: https://starcraft.fandom.com/wiki/Heroes_of_the_Storm

[2]: https://www.pcgamer.com/an-upcoming-rts-will-incorporate-the...

[3]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/731040/The_Invincible/

[4]: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/05/after-you-die-your-st...

You do realize that many apps on F-Droid are developed by businesses? OSMAnd, Fennec, Jitsi Meet, Element, Telegram being big examples. We also had the Simple family of apps for a while.

Meanwhile, lots of non-mobile free software includes tracking (telemetry) these days. The cynic in me has had to switch to

I won't trust no tracking if it's not enforced by a security boundary.

But yes, free software is not a guarantee against tracking. It only allows auditing and be modified.

That's why the difference between Codium and VSCode matters. Actually, IIRC the code from the ms repo does not do telemetry, they add it to the binary they distribute.

The client doesn't support any form of purchases and I don't think it ever will. I think you'd be best served using any of the other stores that support this or hosting it on your own website.

Of course it could be hard to set up in practice.

It's also worth mentioning that since everything on the store would still remain free software, making it legal to share purchased copies, people seeking to use it as a business model (like the parent post) would generally be ill-served.

Graphene was easy for me but like you pointed out, many will not use it because it doesn't have exactly what they use/need. To some degree this inflexibility reminds me of people not switching to the Windows Phone platform for the same reason - which is sad considering we only have two choices now because people wouldn't take the chance and Microsoft abandoned the OS before really giving it a good opportunity to thrive.

Kind of a sad state of affairs when people are totally comfortable handing over all their personal information to the likes of Apple, Samsung and Google.

Full disclosure: Yes, I'm a totally disgruntled former Windows phone user. Yes, there were a lot of factors that led to its demise, but I felt at the time we finally had an alternative to what we were being spoon fed in Apple and Google.

GrapheneOS didn’t work as a daily driver for me because I couldn’t reliably use it for uber, lyft, parking or ev charging. The camera support was missing some features.

Most of that is fixable by adding back the google services, but then you lose most of the privacy advantages of having a de-googled phone.

You can get a little hardware thing to generate their OTP codes, as an alternative to apps.

for anything EU or eu commission, you must either have an app in stock OS smartphone, or receive a sms on a network they can validate sim is attached to a tax id, or nothing else is allowed. totp et al is legally verboten.

More specifically, because Mozilla won’t allow you to do that and still call it Firefox. (Except if you’re Debian, apparently Debian now gets an unwritten free pass after they demonstrated their willingness to protest that with Iceweasel. And either F-Droid is not big enough for that, Mozilla is not the same as it was back then, or both.)

so, if firefox build builds as fenec by default, fennec it is.

I do think that droidify is an unfortunate naming choice though.

What is all of this, care to elaborate?

A lot of actually uncommon knowledge is being assumed here.

Mobifree is a grant from the EU to any open source maker. This means existing applications can do the changes everyone complains about all the time while its developers see some of their pressure relieved. New software, infrastructure can pop up for the benefit of everyone, hardware projects can iterat a few more times to make something right. Anyone can actually apply for some it through https://nlnet.nl/mobifree : NLNet is an NGO that has repeatedly helped and supported the floss ecosystem, but this time with a focus on mobile. You can see their sub-grant here: https://nlnet.nl/mobifree/

F-droid is the expected partner for this given they only distribute floss software by default.

The grant page has maybe more information: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101135795

That is to say you cannot even connect to IP addresses unless you’re already part of the global whitelist for APs

Try yourself. Get a VPN and then connect from certain regions and to won’t get very far and you’ll be slooooow

You’ll say, oh, that’s because bad actors and are therefore blacklisted - and now you’re back to the same problem: their resource is being limited by some social structure that is by definition constrained

You cannot differentiate the broader system from the access point, so long as the system controls which access point access then it doesn’t matter what you do

The only solution is to build an entirely new Internet from scratch, not controlled by the people currently google, amazon, cloud flare, respective ISPs, Netflix, etc…

The Internet is 99% controlled by a small set of corporations that most people haven’t heard of

Just try launching a competitive DNS service and see how far you get

I would love to know more if you have time to elaborate.

Not sure about people never hearing about them, but the internet is no longer a network of sparsely distributed connected machines hosting and consuming content as it was originally designed. The content is all hosted on very small set of networks controlled by just a few companies -- Amazon AWS, Google, MS Azure, etc. The consumers access the internet through clients that are also controlled by these companies, and so it's easy for them to exclude other networks and hosts even though the network specification is technically "open".

There do not exist open HTTPS gateways for all of the major internet services such that anyone can connect - They’re *all* mediated by some access control gatekeeper, it’s like one of the core functions of the current Internet routing system is to not allow for infinite anonymous peers like you would see in TOR or other anonymized routing services

You can say that this should be the case or not but it’s just the facts

It’s precisely the same argument as: “We have plenty of water fountains, As long as you look white then you can use them all you want.”

There are very few organisations capable of identifying the human user behind a Mullvad connection with a VM.

If you're worried about local law enforcement or advertisers it's probably enough.

We're currently relying on AS' who 'play ball' with anonymous users, but that's not a requirement for AS operators by any means.

> Try yourself. Get a VPN and then connect from certain regions and to won’t get very far and you’ll be slooooow

Connecting to a far away VPN doesn’t prove anything about a “global whitelist”

VPN addresses are commonly rate limited and block listed because they’re sources of abusive traffic and therefore trigger all of the common defense mechanisms.

Anyone who has run a forum or other service long enough knows that the spammers and the people trying to evade bans love their VPNs.

VPN services are also oversubscribed, leading to poor performance. Connecting to far away locations also causes throughput problems, especially if the country has poor internet infrastructure. Your connection has to round trip into and back out of that country to get to many services, meaning performance can be very poor.

> Just try launching a competitive DNS service and see how far you get

You’ll probably get as far as realizing that it’s an extraordinarily expensive venture to operate with no possibility of income, at which point you’d shut it down unless your hobby is lighting money on fire. There isn’t a conspiracy in this.

No, this is not how these terms work. Blacklist and whitelist are not just words for opposite sides of a partitioned set. Both blacklists and whitelists are explicitly enumerated lists. If I blacklist a single thing, I have not implicitly created a whitelist containing everything else in the universe. Establishing that VPNs are often blacklisted is not - at all! - the same thing as establishing the existence of a "global whitelist".

I hope it becomes a bit more mainstream now. Some custom roms like lineage are very hostile to it because they're afraid Google will do more against them if they include it. You can't even mention it in their community or you will get kicked. It's nothing nasty though, it's just a bare minimum implementation of google play services remade in open source, withholding as much information as possible and giving you the ability to fake things like device model and attestation "safetynet". Luckily there's a fork from the microg team https://lineage.microg.org/ . So this is what I normally use.

But it's a great middle-ground, you can still use google push and you replace all the other parts like the location DB with privacy-conscious alternatives (though with the abolition of mozilla's wifi location database this has become harder).

I'm not a fan of /e/ though, especially because of the name that makes it impossible to google anything. And they are often years behind in android versions.

Afaik Lineage for microG is independent of the microG project.

But for me voice is no longer a big deal. I do all my calls on WhatsApp anyway.

It looks like a website from 2007 for a custom fork of a Ubuntu distribution.

Again, I think the initiative, the funding, the rollout of technologies is the important thing and I'm perfectly fine with there being an aspect of public communication that gives it the kind of visibility that bureaucrats need so that it matches their own personal mental model of what a project is. So I at the end of the day those things, rather than the website, are what's important, but I could have hoped for a better first impression for sure.

Marketing isn’t automatically evil. If you’re starting an open source project you want people to contribute to you’re going to want to market it.

I think this is a new funding initiative though, and I wish them luck.

Then there's a lot of mission statement and vision statement type things that appear to be directed at a broad audience, But then specifically they say this:

>F-Droid will play a major role in this project, tasked with creating a decentralized distribution system for developers to deliver apps to Android users.

It feels like that's kind of what F-droid does already (sans decentralization, unless we regard the capability of custom repos as adequate to the task).

So I get the vision, I get the idea of it being under the umbrella of some broader project that's about other aspects of the mobile ecosystem such as operating systems, cloud services, and so on. I'm not sure what's different but I welcome the spirit of the initiative and I suppose that's the important thing.

For my part I feel perfectly clear on what the "it" is but I'm a little unclear on how it's in a different from what F-Droid already does.

Some examples available on F-Droid I've been using for a long time:

- Fossify Gallery

- Fossify Calendar

- Fossify File Manager

- Binary Eye supports reading/creating QR/bar codes and other formats

- Aegis Authenticator

- Fossify Audio Recorder

- Material Files supports SMB, FTP, WebDAV

Fossify is the continuation of Simple Mobile Tools, which sold out out [1]. They also have Phone, SMS, Clock, Audio Recorder apps, and more but I prefer the default GrapheneOS apps.

[1] https://github.com/SimpleMobileTools/General-Discussion/issu...

This could be fixed pretty easily if Google took fraudulent reviews more seriously and their handling of reports were less automated and opaque, but they haven’t shown much interest in either.

2. They/somebody needs to make a good quality android/iOS alternative that is NOT based on android and is stupid simple to install on any android and/or develop good quality affordable (< $200) smartphones to run it (some should have 4 inch diagonal screens).

I tried kaios devices, I’ve got pine phone, i cannot afford anymore things like fair phone and the likes. If banks/parking meters/washing machines expect us to use smartphones somebody needs to provide us with a small, simple device that can do those things without spying on us, tracking us, selling our data, etc.

Why can't Quicksy's contact finding feature be added to Conversations instead of being a whole fork?

Delta chat I kind of get why it's a separate thing since it works differently, but it still seems counter productive to have so many chat apps.

As far as answering your actual question, you'd probably need to ask the project devs for Quicksy and Conversations?

Quickly is designed to have easy phone number registration and contact discovery like the currently popular walled garden chat apps. Conversations works with any XMPP address and you need to ask people for their chat address (like email).

I actually use both Lineage and E/OS.

In my experience of installing E/OS on non tech savvy users phones, it takes just a short while for them to get the hang of it.

They of course still want some of the non private data collectors on their phones and thats OK.

I for one am convinvced that the more users we can encourage to move over to alternative android OS's the quicker the word will spread.

We must not forget that these poor people have been brainwashed into thinking there is only one way to access what they like to use and engage with online.

I usually set the E/OS app store to not use open source apps and install droidify to manage those.

It is of course very easy for us who have the knowledge, experience and the confidence to install new OS's on android, but we were once beginners, everyone is.

Its easy for us to know the difference between Fennec and Firefox.

However, Its like me asking you to tell me the difference between the Freudian psychoanalysis and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Its easy for me but not for you.

Even the most tech savvy are difficult to convince:

One of my friends, who used to work for IBM as an engineer back in the day wants to get a new laptop with windows 11. I said "what are you doing you muppet install linux"

He is under the impression that linux has changed very little over 25 years and its all terminal, no GUI or support for things like 3D printers even though I tell him otherwise.

I personally dont use F-droid anymore

I use Droidify which is simpler to use especially adding repositories.

It is a pain adding repo's to F-droid.

NGI is different, they seem to focus more on funding individuals and open source projects with relatively small grants. This has good and bad sides of course - a more level playing field, but makes it still difficult for projects that require long term work.

Personally, I think someone should have bought Jolla and open-sourced Sailfish and their Android VM. Perhaps turn it into a foundation, like Signal.

So AOSP is a lot better than the alternatives, I would say.

I have a different feeling about Chromium: it is open source, but through it Google gets to control the future of the Web. But Android is not a standard, it's "just" one OS, so changes made by Google in AOSP don't really impact, say, iOS.

That's interesting because I personally do believe that Android is kind of the mobile standard, it has everything to be one, from the wide variety of devices to the certifications of conformity.

It would not surprise me if Disney lawyers simply have never heard of F-Droid. Given that they were willing to go after the image of Spider-man on some deceased boy's grave stone, it would not surprise me if they at least demanded some disambiguating language from F-Droid, that is if they don't outright ask them to cease and desist. Hopefully they realize it isn't worth their time.

(it’s also taking funding from the EU, doesn’t necessarily mean they’re forced to cater only to EU citizens but the combination of these two factors means it makes sense to)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Compliance_with_all_compl...

Much of the blog post focuses on the DMA and its impact on Europe. I think the phrase you keyed in on, and really the bulk of the post, is just a marketing push for the European market and a bit of SEO trying to get keywords and phrases in there.

   "project works to give European citizens and organizations more choice"

   "project works to give *the world* more choice"

- we can't have privacy on mobile PERIOD. Mobile platforms are not "open" like PCs (witch are less and less open, more and more stuffed of proprietary fw, but still far less closed than mobile SoC);

- we can't win Big Tech at it's game BUT we can win, and relatively easy, at OUR game, witch means self-hosted services, decentralized protocols, the hard issue it's not on sw per se but on humans who do not know nor understand that, fortunately a scam at a time people start to understand that the commercial model turned to subscription is not a good idea for them, so there is a bit of hope anyway.

Trade one gate keeper for another.

Something tells me you don’t know what decentralized means.

I get it that you have to choose one or the other, and it does make sense since f-droid has a bunch of open-source apps available already.

They just need to work on the hardware and operating system now