as some of you know: the alternative client G-Droid has added a feature to leave comments for F-Droid apps. They are in the fediverse, you can read them here: https://mastodon.technology/tags/fdroid_app_comments or by using the G-Droid app.
As it could have been expected, users tend to leave bug-reports and feature requests there. They do that in the Google play store too, it seems to be unavoidable.
Does anyone have a good strategy to make app developers aware of these comments? I’m sure most of them don’t use G-Droid or Mastodon to check the latest comments on their own app.
All app-developers have agreed that their app goes into the F-Droid repo and also left an email address. Would it be reasonable to send a spam email to all of them saying something like:
Hey your app in in the F-Droid repo. So it is also visible in alternative clients like G-Droid, MDroid etc. Some clients provide a feedback mechanism for apps. As you might not know, people are actively leaving feedback, bugreports, feature requests and general thanks-yous there for you. You have made the app with the packagename org.fdroid.fdroid , so you can read you app’s comments here: https://mastodon.technology/tags/org_fdroid_fdroid .
(this is an example how the developer of the F-Droid app could be informed)
Well authors of apps that were added more then 3 years ago or something are not necessarily aware of F-Droid or their app being present here. The rule about informing/asking upstreams wasn’t in place before that.
Also we don’t have email addresses of most app authors. The majority of app inclusions is done through gitlab/github interaction.
I wouldn’t worry about it too much. F-Droid already has an issues link for all apps, if users don’t want to report hteir problems their but in the comments, we can’t really help them I fear. It’s also not something that F-Droid does but an alternative client, so I don’t feel F-Droid is responsible for making anyone aware of anything here.
It’s of course totally fine to make individual developers aware of the comments with bugs for their apps or forward them to the proper place. But I don’t really expect many to actually care if somewhere on the internet someone mentions something broken in their app. They’ll probably get more than enough bug reports through the proper channels already.
Ah, didn’t knew about this. Should look up my stuff
But I’ve to agree with @Bubu that people really should use the issue tracker and we shouldn’t spam upstream for every possible interaction system that got added by 3rd party clients.
A solution is to educate users about the purpose of comments, specifically that the audience is other users who are considering the app, and not the developer (who may never read them). These folks need to be directed to the appropriate channels before commenting.
I don’t think this is F-Droid’s responsibility, nor do I think we should spam developers, or encourage them to monitor a social network they don’t use just to engage with users who refuse to use the project’s tracker.
@thingy This seems like a G-Droid feature so this suggestion is probably better left on the G-Droid tracker; G-Droid might consider showing a one time message the first time a user leaves a comment.
People are lazy, even on repo and not giving proper logs too, if an issue occur. Why would a developer want to actually work that issue, or rather how? Understandable on dev end at least.
