API version Survey

Apps
1

Hello,
I’m the developer and maintainer of one f-droid app.
I want to figure whether I can drop my compatibility to pre v21 API Android phones to get rid of some hard limitations and problems. To do this I intend to add a survey to my app: You get a dialog, asking whether you want to take part and if you accept you send your android-version to the server. If not nothing happens. In both cases you’re not shown the dialog afterwards.
The result can be seen live under a link I’ll add to the dialog. I’m in full control of the server and thus can assert that nothing fishy happens and I only store IP addresses in the web-logs for security reasons for 30 days, which are used by fail2ban. Making it the same as linking to your own Wiki or Repo on github.

Now to my question: I know that f-droid is pretty strong against any analytics etc and I’m glad for that, still, as f-droid doesn’t collect anonymized information by their own I need to do this by myself. How does the f-droid community see this? Is this already too much or okay ? I tried to minimize the data footprint as much as possible.

If you’re keen to know I’m talking about the vocabletrainer-app.

P.S.:
Offtopic, I know, but while trying to navigate to “home” I got a “server not found”. And I can assert that my connection is not a problem, is F-Droid having capacity problems ? I’d like to help.

2 Likes
2

There’s this: Troubleshooting f-droid.org slowness periods
And this: Why is fdroid down all the time?

1 Like
3

If data collection is opt-in (disabled by default, requires deliberate and informed user action to send it) and there’s a clear explanation of what and why is collected, it’s OK.

1 Like
4

Opt-in as you get a dialogue once when starting after doing an update, telling you what will be send.

1 Like
5

I’ve implemented backend & frontend, let’s see how it’ll turn out. Whether an angry mob will wipe me, or I’ll end up with 3 votes :wink:

2 Likes
6

Ok so the update is live, if you want to have a look: https://vct.proctet.net

Currently 8% < 21, doesn’t look good for me :smiley:

7

image

3 Likes
8

I think it is interesting you have 0 users on API 21. My own app, Privacy Browser supports API >= 19. 19 adds a lot of hard limitations to the app, and at some point I will need to drop it. As described at 2018 Financial Report – Stoutner I have 3.4% of users on API 19 and 2.2% on API 21 for the flavor that is also released on F-Droid. For the free flavor I have 11.5% on API 19 and 5.5% on API 21.

1 Like
9

Yeah I’ve also noticed that I have zero v21 users.
The survey is still going. As of now 2.26% < v21. Though I’m wondering how one can run this on v18, which is below the minimum configured for the application.

1 Like
11

not sure what you mean with data file
it’s just a mariadb sql doing the report

13

Something’s fishy with that quote.
It’s a link. A link to a spam-site, instead of the original post of mine.

1 Like
14

This topic was automatically closed 60 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.