In the F-Droid OsmAnd~ page, the Website link goes to https://osmand.net/. On the official website, however, there is no link to F-Droid version. So I contacted the Osmand team and I asked about OsmAnd~.
They told me that OsmAnd~ is an unofficial version compiled by enthusiasts.
I am surprised that this is not mentioned on the f-droid page and now I would like to know who are the enthusiasts who compile it and if they are reliable. Is it the F-Droid team that compiles the sources?
Yes. If I understand correctly, it is built from source by F-Droid team but, given that OsmAnd team uses the generic word “enthusiast”, I got the doubt.
So, do you confirm that it’s built from the original source code by F-Droid team?
Yes and no, we host a separate repo to clean up the source.
f-droid.org - search for osmand and look at build metadata
1 Like
Anyway, the enthusiasts mentioned by the OsmAnd team are the members of F-Droid team, right? There are no thirdy parties between the original source code and the .apk on F-Droid, right?
Any news about OsmAnd~?
What kind of news?
The people in the F-Droid community working on OsmAnd~ are not members of the OsmAnd development community. However, they have on multiple occasions confirmed that the build done by F-droid is okay by them. Some of these confirmations were done via email.
The ~ after the app name implies that it is an altered version from the upstream. If you want to know if the build is reliable, you can review the changes F-Droid makes and you can see that this app has been supported by F-Droid for over a long time already. Hopes this answers your questions.
5 Likes
Actually, that is false. At the bottom of the official home page there is a link “OsmAnd Source code” to the same github. Also, https://osmand.net/help-online#can_i_code talks about licensing and how to help with coding, and points to the same github.
You’re right. There is the link to the source code (obviously, I would say, since it is open source) but not to the F-Droid repository as it happens, for example, with Tasks (https://tasks.org/)
Hi,
I personally translate OsmAnd in french and run it from “F-Droid” repo for more than 2 years without any issue.
Best regards,
Different projects use different strategies. This is an interesting cripple-ware strategy by Tasks:
"In order to support development some features require a subscription
- 7-day free trial
- Choose your subscription price, starting at $1 per year"
@Licaon_Kter How does this not get an Ads or other anti-feature tag for Tasks?
Why would it?
Feel free to fork and remove limitations, right? Don’t forget to maintain regularly, and answer user support, and fix bugs, you know…open source.
I see similar has been discussed at length already (TL;DR all of it, yet), in “paid-features-in-opensource-apps”…
But, because it feels like it (auto-cripple, or forced-payment to keep running or keep all features) violates freedom zero. They are a feature that stops the user from making it run, or a feature that requires a user to communicate with a payment entity, and seem to violate freedom zero:
"The freedom to run the program as you wish
The freedom to run the program means the freedom for any kind of person or organization to use it on any kind of computer system, for any kind of overall job and purpose, without being required to communicate about it with the developer or any other specific entity. In this freedom, it is the user’s purpose that matters, not the developer’s purpose; you as a user are free to run the program for your purposes, and if you distribute it to someone else, she is then free to run it for her purposes, but you are not entitled to impose your purposes on her.
The freedom to run the program as you wish means that you are not forbidden or stopped from making it run. This has nothing to do with what functionality the program has, whether it is technically capable of functioning in any given environment, or whether it is useful for any particular computing activity."
Edit: Maybe the next paragraph I didn’t quote could be a “loophole” for forcing communication with a payment entity, but nah.
Mmmmnope, so, F-Droid builds an app, you get the APK, an artifact let’s say, right?
The source code is open, you have the freedom to run the code, compile, modify, etc, right?
The APK is not the code, it’s the result of… a lot of things.
Am I making a point of sorts? 
For example, if the code arbitrarily rejects certain meaningful inputs—or even fails unconditionally—that may make the program less useful, perhaps even totally useless, but it does not deny users the freedom to run the program, so it does not conflict with freedom 0. If the program is free, the users can overcome the loss of usefulness, because freedoms 1 and 3 permit users and communities to make and distribute modified versions without the arbitrary nuisance code.
Did you skip this part?
1 Like
For the record, my Edit above appeared before your responses. So, no. 
1 Like
It’s not about the paying entity at all, like I said, the open source code has all the freedoms, please exercise them by building yourself.
1 Like