First of all, can I just say how impressive this site is? The large number of volunteers creating and maintaining this is amazing, and it’s full of nice touches like the discobot here on the forum.
I run a little site called switching.social which is meant to give non-technical people privacy-aware ethical alternatives to Facebook, Google, Microsoft etc.
There are already similar sites for technically-minded (such as degoogleify, prism break etc), so the aim of switching.social is to be for people who aren’t technically-minded.
A lot of people gave feedback saying I should include f-droid on switching.social, and I would love to give it its own section as an alternative to Google Play, but the f-droid.org site still seems slightly techy, and people have to go through the site to install f-droid. For example clicking on “browse” brings up a long uncategorised list, which is odd as the app itself has categories. There are also references to weird things like FOSS, repos etc.
Is there any chance that there could be a version of the f-droid site which is skinned for technophobes? i.e. fewer tech references and more consumer-oriented presentation?
tl/dr: Is there any chance of making a version of the f-droid site that looks and works in a similar manner to Google Play? (I think a while ago someone did do that but they didn’t include a download link for the f-droid app, so it wasn’t clear how people could actually use it?)
In order to use f-droid your must enable “allow install apps from unknown sources” on your android which means that you loose protection of “accidentally” installing malware.
a technophile can do this because he knows what he is doing.
for technophobes the f-droid clientapp needs a kind of wizzard that guides him
download the apps
allow install apps from unknown sources
install the downloaded apps
disable install apps from unknown sources again
Is this procedure to complicated for a technophobe?
many technophobes i know will not take the “risk” of enabling “unknown sources” so i have to do this for them.
Hmm… that does kind of put a dampener on F-droid for ordinary people
You shouldn’t download apps from untrusted sources, but you need technical knowledge to know what a trusted source is, so non-technical people really should just stick to the app store that comes with their phone.
I’m not aware of any devices with this OS preinstalled, but there is Lineage OS microg.
And of course there is replicant, but that doesn’t run on any current devices afaik.
Devices sold by/with Copperhead OS have F-Droid preinstalled.
And on the Fairphone you can switch to the Fairphone Open OS (I think with a click of a button) which comes without google services and with F-Droid instead.
Android 8 (suprisingly) makes that a lot better though!
On an Android 8 device the System will ask you specifically to allow the F-Droid app for installing other apps. Thus you need to allow this once and can leave it enabled as it’s only specific to that particular app.
Ideally you’d just download it from Google Play. But Google doesn’t like competition, and is very strict about its rule of “No Alternative App Stores”.
So the problem is Google, and there’s not much we can do about it from here. Options are:
Give up.
Try as best as possible to explain and guide people through the processs, technical as it may be.
(Because although I said that thing about the Play Store, the ideal solution to this problem is for every Android phone in the world to come preinstalled with F-Droid.)
Obviously EFF wouldn’t be able to do much about Google, but thought they (or some similar group) might be able to lobby governments e.g. the European Union.
I don’t mean to sound naive but once upon a time the EU forced Microsoft to include rival browsers in Windows, and GDPR came into force recently, so they do have at least some capacity and will to take on tech giants.
To a lay person this just seems like such a blatant anti-trust situation: Google controls about 90% of the world’s smartphones and they are refusing to carry any rival app stores. I was thinking maybe someone in government might want to take action.
