This is f*** up. I have no issues donating to my favorite apps. However what they are talking about it pure enshitification plus proprietary software
pretty sure the venn diagram of f-droid users and adblocking users is such a huge overlap that this may not pay off too well.
This is about them offering the developers of ads they deploy in fdroid options for revenue. Not ads in fdroid itself.
I might uninstall F-droid today…
If they added ads I probably wouldn’t even notice because of ad blocker lol.
Apparently they don’t understand that the F in F-Droid is for FOSS.
I’m 100% all for adding a repository with paid apps, but it’s not and shouldn’t be marketed as F-Droid.
Which part of the acronym “FOSS” stands for “no advertisement” again? Remind me.
It stands for freedom as in protecting the 4 free software freedoms.
Paid and FOSS are not mutually exclusive. You can always build packages yourself if you don’t want to pay. A well executed implementation might allow some projects to drop or reduce their play store efforts.
I will download APKs off a website before I use anything with ads.
You did not really read the post then.
I don’t see ads in apps. You don’t have to either.
FOSS stands for Free Open Source Software.
It’s perfectly fine to have paid open source software. But then it’s no longer FOSS
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open-source_software
Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software that is available under a license that grants the right to use, modify, and distribute the software, modified or not, to everyone free of charge.
Free does not mean “no payment, ever”. If the source code and build toolchain are openly and completely available, but prebuilt binaries are paid-only, it still satisfies the “free as in gratis” criterion.
Unless the payment method involves proprietary software. Also online payments are service as a software substitute (SaaS)
And the “free” means “freedom”, it doesn’t mean “no price”
Paid and FOSS are mutually exclusive. Open source and FOSS aren’t.
But how, you ask? Free means having the right to do whatever you want with your copy including make copies and redistribute. Thus, how can it be free while demanding a payment before allowing usage?
That’s why I said, FOSS Droid? Nah! Open Source Droid? Knock yourself out. I’m actually looking forward to supporting some of the developers of apps I love.
One of the things you’re free to do is pay for a copy of the binary. Therefore you haven’t shown that FOSS and paid are mutually exclusive. 😁
You’re right.
The F stands for “free” as in “freedom”, not “free beer”.
Stripe is not free software nor is any online payment system these days.
Not to mention online payments come at the cost of privacy
Neither of your statements are antithetical to mine.
Paid apps: no problem. If it’s good, I’ll pay.
Subscription: maybe, if it’s worth it.
Ads: F-Droid can fuck right off. If they do that, they’d be a miserable bunch of sellouts.
If they were talking about Privacy-Preserving Attribution like Firefox is experimenting with supporting on MDN, that would be one thing, but it doesn’t sound like that’s what F-Droid is talking about.
If someone wants to gain access to an app, but does not have the financial means to purchase it, they can use it at a different kind of price - their user data.
F-Droid is also considering ads that contain no tracking, which removes that moral dillema, IMO:
It should be mentioned that it is possible to include in-app advertising without user tracking. However the lead conversion ratio drops dramatically, so the efficacy of this approach is not nearly as high.
That’s basically what PPA is, advertising without tracking. If advertisers want to pay for it, then great.
F-Droid is also considering ads that contain no tracking, which removes that moral dillema, IMO:
You assume everybody is okay with ads.
I’m not. My brainspace has been highjacked since I was a little kid by stupid advertisers. To this day, I remember ads for products that have disappeared decades ago and that I never gave a shit about at any point in my life.
Why are advertisers allowed to force their shit into my head?
I hate ads. I’m utterly intolerant of advertising. I hate the tracking and the malware that come with ads, but I hate ads even more. There are no moral ads. The advertisement industry is a despicable leech that needs to die.
If F-Droid springs this shit on me, I swear to god I’m gonna start having murderous thoughts…
Would you pay a monthly fee for everything? YouTube Facebook Reddit random site you visit. We would need like a found in our browser and every site you visited took there chunk out or something like that. People seem to forget this stuff costs money to run.
If the service is worth it and subscribing isn’t yet another opportunity to put me under surveillance - which is the main reason why, although I consume a lot of YouTube videos and I would genuinely pay Google for the service, I won’t - yes.
Hint: Facebook and Reddit aren’t worth it. If they want to exit the ad-supported business model and disappear behind a paywall, I won’t miss anything in my life.
Because ads in Firefox went so well…
ads in Firefox
That’s a common misconception. For users like myself who use uBlock Origin, Firefox supporting PPA changes nothing at all (as pointed out by the Firefox CTO). The only users who would see an ad that uses PPA are users who would otherwise see ads that use tracking.
That is why the EFF supports it.
That is just dancing around the issue. The problem is them turning on baked in browser advertising by default.
Again, it’s not advertising, it’s a form of privacy protection. There are no ads in Firefox, and they did not add any mechanism for tracking users, so calling it browser advertising is advertising your own technology illiteracy.
No, weeks later you still have fuck all clue about the thing but keep raging about it. 🤦
The first quote is taken out of context:
Not only are privacy and data protection founding principles for both Mobifree and F-Droid, the use of tracking-based in-app advertising poses a moral dilemma as well. If someone wants to gain access to an app, but does not have the financial means to purchase it, they can use it at a different kind of price - their user data.
For me this reads as them explaining and condemning that dilemma, instead of considering it as an option for F-Droid.
Sorry, I was trying to save space, but I can see how only starting the quote in the middle of the paragraph is misleading. I edited the quote to include the context.
For me this reads as them explaining and condemning that dilemma, instead of considering it as an option for F-Droid.
IMO, it read more like acknowledging concerns around ads but not explicitly condemning it. But I’m not going to form an opinion about it until they do something, or at least make their intentions clearer.
Yeah, as long as the payment method is FOSS, secure, and works as intended, I have no serious issue with pay-once software being introduced. There are apps from F-Droid I would pay a few dollars to use if required, and I’d be happy if it meant more and higher-quality software.
I feel like the freemium model they mention with subscriptions is just begging for F-Droid to be enshittified. F-Droid would really, really need to prove themselves with pay-once applications first for my liking before moving onto something so much more drastic.
And then ads are just a non-starter. Ads only exist to be psychologically manipulative, they’re obnoxious as fuck in the present day, they’re a privacy nightmare, and they’re a vector for malware. I would see it as a betrayal of what F-Droid does for me, and I would actively see F-Droid as being sellouts who are only marginally better than using Aurora at that point.
There are no FOSS payment methods. In fact, you’re probably lucky to find a payment processor that will handle FOSS stuff at all.
https://github.com/monero-project/monero/blob/master/LICENSE
Monero is MIT style license, so it’s FOSS
Gnu taler?
Did you read the linked article?
No thank you. This is a slippery slope.
If you want devs to make apps without any monetization you’re limiting the number of devs that will develop for your platform.
Free only means you only allow passion projects that people work on as a side project or only the developers rich enough to have retired already.
Nobody who is struggling to get by can spend all their time developing a free app that has 0 monetization.
So they monetize on Google Play.
If you care about breaking Google’s control of Android you should cheer on another paid marketplace, especially one out of the clutches of Amazon.
Free means freedom not cost.
The problem with online payments is that they compromise privacy and require use of proprietary software and centralized servers
F-Droid is literally just a repository. Linux manages it just fine to have repo driven “store” apps.
Cryptomator is available on F-Droid but you still have to purchase a license to use it, although the dev has to maintain all the licensing and payment infrastructure which can be a roadblock for some.
If you want devs to make apps without any monetization you’re limiting the number of devs that will develop for your platform.
So?
The point of fdroid is not to have evil pieces of shit injecting their apps with spyware and ads.
Developers deserve to be paid for their time though…
Sure for many it’s nothing but a hobby and they’re happy to create something for free. But that doesn’t mean every developer needs to do the same.
And yes ads are a privacy nightmare and putting them into your app is bad. So either you only use apps from hobbyists or you pay for access (whether that be a set price for a finished product or a subscription for a service).
Paid apps are fine. I’m generally not OK with in-app purchases, because the overwhelmingly majority of them are abusive microtransactions.
Allowing ads is not OK. Privacy is a massive issue, but even without privacy concerns all ads are malicious.
Most F-droid apps are side projects people do for fun
Yep, fuck that noise.
We need a way to support foundational open source projects like browsers, a open source subscription platform might be the way.
Start off with apps that are already subscription like vpns.
Can I just make a donation? Seriously though I don’t see why F-droid needs to offer more than a donation link. If an app wants to put a donate pop up on first launch that’s fine but don’t turn it into anticonsumer bullshit.
Nothing they said was anti-consumer. They’re giving options. Software needs sustainable revenue especially if you want to break Free from Google
So if you want to do a one-time donation go for it. If you want to do a recurring donation they would enable that. You don’t have to do it
What purpose does ads serve to the end user? Also I don’t see any reason why F-droid should be a payment system. They should just allow donation links.
Okay, it’s open source, you don’t have to use their platform. If they want to introduce some monetization stream for people you don’t have to participate. You also don’t have to be angry it exists.
For VPNs, though, you’re generally paying through the VPN provider, not through the app store to have access to the app itself.
It wouldn’t be too much work for a open source friendly provider to accept subscriptions via f-droid, if they wanted to do it.
That’ll be a big nope, thanks.
Edit: 20 years from now, FDroid will be worse than the Play store and we’ll have a “new” store that functions like FDroid does currently.
Don’t wait, install Droid-ify now.
That sounds kind of ify to me.
That’s F-droid
No, but it uses those repositories.
Imagine they start blocking access to their repos for other clients… 🫠
Yeah they might become as important as Yahoo is to internet searches today.
If anything this would just give me suggestions on apks of paid apps to sideload for free
It should uphold free software and user freedom. If an app developer chooses to abuse user freedom the app should be pulled (and possibly forked) like Simple model tools.
i am good with the subscription and pay once approaches they mentioned.
the iffy portion is the in-app payment sdk. i hope f-droid will be the one providing those to have it standardized.
in-app ads are kinda okay. i won’t use said app, but if f-droid labels apps like those as how it labels apps with non-foss/features-you-may-not-like, it should be okay.
In app ads are very much not ok as they are often targeted and serve no benefit to the user. I have no issue with a donate button popup with a link but we already have Google play for spyware.
What the fuck? Did F-Droid change ownership (sell out to a hedge fund or something)? Or did I somehow time-travel to April 1, or what?
I really hope this is a poorly timed joke
Well, some members of F-Droid’s central board resigned nearly a year ago, citing issues that had been ongoing for a long time prior. Statement posted to Gitlab.
I’ve been slowly moving my app installations over to Obtainium ever since, and have been using NeoStore for the remaining F-Droid/Izzy installations.
i’m fine with it as long as the privacy labels remain front and centre when downloading; especially if they clearly mark which apps are ad supported, subscription based, etc and don’t prioritize them over foss/ad free
otoh, i use neo store so it probably won’t matter
I’m not sure I can be as pliant as others here. Being less of an activist and more of a user of convenience, if I am making PayPal payments somebody better give me a reason why I’m not just using the same store that came in by default with my phone.
How much convenience do you really gain from using the Play Store instead of F-Droid? And is that convenience worth the developers of your applications receiving a smaller cut of your payment or being charged additional fees by Google? Is it worth contributing to Google’s monopoly over the Android app landscape?
Those are all advantages for developers and activists. End users don’t care or need to care. As an end user the only reason for keeping two stores in my phone is that one does a thing the other one doesn’t, functionally. That’s why Samsung can keep putting their dumb store on their phones forever but people just don’t engage with it.
Now, unlike the Samsung store when I was on a Samsung phone, F-Droid is something I do use, because there is a clear use case there: Play for all the commercial apps, F-Droid for non-commercial alternatives and a stuff that Google doesn’t allow on Play for whatever reason.
If F-Droid wants to make a push for being my only store, they better provide all the functionality, support, variety and convenience Play does, because Play comes pre-installed. If I can’t go to F-Droid to be guaranteed to not have to deal with payments or MTX, then it better have every single thing I need. I’m talking every game, every app, every legacy piece of software. It better have the same one-click payment convenience I get from Google Pay. And it better still have a default option to search for completely free apps, or I’ll have to go find a F-Droid alternative that does that for when I want to be sure I’m not getting any hidden fees with my app.
I suppose that’s true, if you consider anything outside of your personal and immediate financial gain as “activism”. I would like to think there are more people out there who actually care about ethical consumerism and contributing to small and independent business.
If F-Droid wants to make a push for being my only store
I didn’t read anything in the post that suggests this is their strategy. F-Droid wants to support small developers and challenge Google’s monopoly in the app store space. Nowhere does it suggest they are expecting every application on the Play Store to also be available on F-Droid, so I’m not sure why you would assume that their goal here is to completely replace the Play Store. This is about competition, not market domination.
To clarify, I’m making a two step argument: One, I will only install a second store on my phone if that store serves a specific use case I don’t get from the first one (which is Play by default, since it comes preinstalled). Two, if F-Droid is going to sacrifice the clear message that it’s the place for noncommercial apps, then it must carry the same apps Play does, it needs to carry ALL of them so I can make it my default store.
So I understand what you’re saying, my point is that this is not a viable value proposition for me. F-Droid is positioned as the safe place for noncommercial software. If it’s no longer going to be that, then it’s picking the same fight with Google Play that the Samsung or Amazon stores do, and it’s just as likely to lose that fight. The reason it isn’t doing that at the moment isn’t its moral high ground, it’s that it has a clear position that doesn’t overlap with Play’s: noncommercial software.
I’m not sure why you think F-Droid is moving away from supporting FOSS software, though. The post made it pretty clear this is about allowing greater freedom for those developers who want to sell or monetise their work. Nowhere does it state or suggest that F-Droid will only feature paid or proprietary apps going forward. As I said in another comment, if there are filters within the F-Droid app store then there is no reason to be concerned by this news. This isn’t an all-or-nothing situation where F-Droid has to sacrifice all of the things that make it great to become a direct competitor to the Play Store.
I think this train of thought fundamentally misunderstands how usability works and how positioning works. But hey, I don’t own this, I don’t have a stake on this and I already have F-Droid installed. At a glance it seems like a bad move that makes a thing I use less useful and more like a bunch of things I don’t use. We’ll see where it goes.
I think this train of thought fundamentally misunderstands how usability works and how positioning works.
How so? You seem to be making a lot of assumptions about the intentions of the project without citing anything from the post itself.
I’m a bit of a fence sitter on the actual issue, I love F-Droid as is and fear change, but I’ll say as someone who thinks they’ll release on Google Play in the general future, the thing that pisses me off most about Google Play is they have a “repetitive content policy” which disincentivizes you from releasing a full paid app and a demo app. The main issue is, I don’t want my app to categorize as “in-app purchases” if the only purchase is the “unlock full version”, because that doesn’t distinguish my app from any unethical whale-hunting casino-for-children microtransaction apps, and I don’t want my app to claim to be free if it’s just a demo.
At least, from a pro-user, communicate everything clearly, perspective, I feel that Google is compelling devs to dark-pattern-by-default on this subject.
LMK if I’m wrong about any of that.
If it is a pay what you want model I am all for it. This would be similar to how elementary OS st
The problem with a fixed price is you have to always calibrate it according to the economy of the user’s geolocation. What is cheap for a person from a developed world may be unaffordable for a third world county.
I would be totally down with a pay what you want model with most proceeds going to devs.
Basically a prompt to donate to the devs with 5-10% going to the package manager.
Some apps I’ve used are totally worth $1-$5
Maybe it should be a pay what you want but it doesn’t charge you for a week. So you can use the app and then decide whether to up the price if it’s useful or cancel the payment if it doesn’t work for you.
I like the delayed charge since you can’t return a donation.
Something like a default of 14 days adjustable to 0-30 or reoccurring (default annual).
This is all turning into a nice idea into an alt android package manager you can sub to repos.
Ads, no, are not ok. F-droid can fuck right off if an ad appears, I’ll just get apks from github
This is a good right to mention Obtanium, which is an app that basically streamlines that
Those same apks would also include ads. What makes you think if the developer has ads on fdroid, he won’t on github?
