We have been invited to be invited on TWiT.tv’s FLOSS Weekly. Its a podcast that I’ve listened to on and off, so I think it would be worth doing. I don’t want to do it alone though, since there are so many others that make up F-Droid. @contributors who wants to join? It would be a live interview on a Wednesday at 9:30-11am Pacific Standard Time.
5 Likes
What happened? Which episode was this?
Should be April 1st (no fooling).
3 Likes
I really should have joined the forum before to apologise for putting you forward 
The info at the end of the episode, about the weird versions of f-droid that have been made to solve a few countries issues, were especially fascinating.
I missed the live show which is a shame as I wanted a couple of other points brought up.
The ability to add custom repos to the existing app for example.can allow people to provide their own secure downloads.
If you can use a password system, commercial authors may have a trustable avenue for delivery and updates.
When Epic were in the news because of their vulnerable Fortnite client not updating due to not being in the app store, I sent Tim Sweeny a tweet suggesting they could make an open source updater and let F-Droid handle the updates.
Watching the show, it seems maybe they’d be better off just maintaining a branch of the actual client anyway.
Also it occurred to me that the change that google are making with further restricting non-trusted app sources may become a problem for wide use.
Some discussion on the implications here will have to do.
Could this mean we see F-Droid as a DL in the playstore at some point ?
The show host feedback was useful, and hopefully will get a few discussions going.
The suggestion about nagging for donations during updates or after a set time is very good in my opinion.
I am used to it with various shareware tools on my desktop, and it has been a standard model since I first started using Amiga shareware.
There is no shame in it, and I think it can be a useful point to remind the user how long they have been a user.
Modern devs seem to have mostly forgotten the old ways of gentle encouragement, so often offer lite version with adverts, and a full featured paid version (with just tracking to power the adverts of the free version).
Classic shareware is in the middle of that, often offering 1 version that works in full mode for a while then locking away pro features.
Separating out basic home users and people who may use your app to aid them making money can be done with some apps such as WinRAR.
WinRAR still follows this style and for many casual users the limits of the free version are no limit at all, so have no need to pay, but if you want some of the more useful self extracting features because you are a developer, then it is reasonable to expect payment.
Not all apps can follow this but many can.
Many years ago, I like many others paid my money so I could go further than 100 levels in Galaga Deluxe, and get the bonus extras.
I paid up and got a nag-free version of Scalos desktop replacement.
Both free programs were just fine as they were, but a value judgement made me pay.
The reminders were just reminders and I never felt forced.
1 Like
Nice talk. Some curly questions were handled well too. Towards the end especially there are some really great moments.
Was nice to put a face to the name. You are not related to Keanu Reeves are you, Hans.
I hope that you folks can have that meeting and sort out what’s needed. Its more obvious why we’ve been working on focusing attention on donations lately. The paperwork side of things, although dry, can be expensive 
but it’s good to know that open-source solutions exist that might save money in this area.
Hello @Dr-Flay welcome to the forum!
This is a pretty good idea.
This is highly unlikely as that would probably violate their terms of service. AFAIK, the Play Store doesn’t allow apps that install other apps (e.g. F-Droid).
thanks for the feedback! I tried to represent all of our work,
hopefully that came across. It was actually cool to go through how we
use free software for everything: gitlab, weblate, Debian, Liberapay, etc.
1 Like
This topic was automatically closed 60 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.