Discussion about F-Droid contribution to Mobifree

Deleted the post contents on OPs demand.

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I read and reread the F-droid news article about Mobifree and do not see anywhere that it states that any changes are coming to F-droid itself. The article discusses the features needed in a tool to submit Android software to multiple app stores. In order for such a tool to be useful to most developers, it needs to be able to accommodate the feature set of each app store. This needs to include the features of those app stores that accommodate various payment and advertising methods.

Nowhere in the article does it state that F-droid itself is planning on adopting those features. Although, it would be good if the article stated that explicitly.

The main question to F-Droid developers is why are they willing to waste so much effort on something that benefits the big tech first of all. Let’s be honest, majority of developers deploy non-libre software, they are not going to publish anything to F-Droid. In addition to that, small app stores won’t benefit much from this effort either, as they lack the marketing budget and are not pre-installed on devices as Google Play Store and App Store are. I believe that most F-Droid users wouldn’t want to have F-Droid’s brand and image to be associated in any way with this shady initiative, as well as the misuse of F-Droid grants and collective funds.

It is possible I misunderstood but it sounds like F-droid wants to add more tooling that doesn’t necessary benefit F-droid directly. I personally think that is a little out of scope. If they want to have unofficial support for some automation and external that is fine but I personally don’t think it is wise to assume all developers want a iOS app or a Google play app. Some do and some don’t. We don’t need to complicate the tooling.

From a payment method perspective there is plenty of evidence to support my assumption. For instance,

we need to consider how to streamline the payment processes as well

a solution that includes a pay-to-download option for developers who are uploading their apps to multiple app stores simultaneously, integrating with payment gateways like PayPal or Stripe can provide a straightforward approach to handle transactions externally

to streamline the payment and licensing key distribution process, developers can leverage providers that offer unified APIs

in-app payments include an SDK which is built into the APK file

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If they want to actually raise money for development they should create a separate project with separate funds. That way if things go south due mismanagement or disagreements it is not part of core F-droid. I think having bug bounties or similar could help the community quite a bit.

Also I think they could grow the forms and create a support network for foss android development. They also could make some tutorials on how to create a libre Hello World app with more modern tools such as VScodium and containers (For reproducible builds that are easy to setup)

While I personally do not care for a tool that can submit to multiple app stores, there clearly are those that do (including many open source projects that are on Play only and not on F-droid - owing to the effort of submitting to multiple stores). All the quotes fit more easily into the idea of creating such a tool than modifying F-droid itself.

fake news

lies

Wow, so much written… you are really lost in translation. :crying_cat_face:

TL;DR of the post is: F-Droid being a “DIY app store” allows everyone the freedom to make their own, as they see fit, and to include the apps that the want, funded as they need. The F-Droid repo continues to be FLOSS-only as we want.

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I probably read into it a bit much. However, the blog post kinda scared me as there really isn’t any alternatives to F-droid.

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An alternative to F-Droid is Obtanium, however it offeres none of the assurances that the main F-Droid repo does on the provinance of the software.

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