You are 1. cherry picking and 2. hiding behind the same “for the good of the children” clause which is driving the CIA’s effort to rifle through everyone’s device (the EU are just following a hidden US lead with on-device monitoring, it’s not an independent policy).
Your position looks like it comes from either hardline atheist propaganda (also a religious belief) or it’s disingenuous, just looking for wriggle room to do the will of the state (create a world where the only ties between people are commercial, where the corporations and the state replace replace faith and brotherhood).
The hypocrisy is absurd. As another commentator noted violence and sex are promoted in:
Reddit and every other social media
Most news apps
Many games and even game stores
Wikipedia and most history apps
This heavy-handed attack on religion is an awful policy which looks like something out of Animal Farm or literal Bolshevik censorship.
F-Droid will lose a lot of friends this way. Both among those who favour free speech and those whose faith are under attack.
It’s an own goal.
PS. I hesitate to post these thoughts as this is a new account. I’m new to the F-Droid forum but not new to open source. I came here from the SD Maid developer’s comments on maintaining the integrity of open source in the F-Droid version of SD Maid. Imagine my astonishment to find that the F-Droid maintainers actively strive to eliminate freedom of religion. Welcome to the Brave New FOSS!
I think this interpretation misunderstands the nature of religious texts. Describing historical events — even violent or immoral ones — is not the same as promoting them. The Bible, for example, does not glorify violence or wrongdoing; it records such events to illustrate moral lessons or consequences.Equating that with propaganda or moral endorsement is a serious misreading of what these texts represent.
Another major issue is the way this flag affects search and visibility. No one would normally consider Bible or other religious text apps as “unsafe” content — not even companies like Google or Apple, which apply far stricter filtering policies.
Marking them under a neutral label such as “contains religious content that some users may find sensitive” might be acceptable if it didn’t impact visibility.
But the current NSFW flag hides these apps by default, which is completely inappropriate for religious or cultural texts. If it worked like other technical anti-features — for example, “does not use open network access” or “contains some non-free components” — where the flag doesn’t affect search results, I doubt this discussion would have even started.
What felt most offensive, though, was that a commit specifically added this flag only to Bible apps, instead of applying it consistently across other religious or historical ones. Even if such a policy were debatable, applying it equally would at least appear fair. Singling out one group of apps, however, made the action seem biased and disrespectful — which is what caused the strongest negative reaction.
Sure, did you reach out to them last month to tell them about the effects of the Google developer verification decree and its impact on F-Droid and FOSS apps on Android?
I already provided several examples — such as Quran apps, Wikipedia, and the game I linked above — which could all be treated the same way if the policy were applied consistently.
The reason this situation feels especially problematic is that the merge request seemed to focus only on Bible apps, as if one maintainer suddenly decided these should now be flagged because of a few passages taken out of context. That selective approach risks giving the impression that other religious texts are being avoided out of fear of offending certain groups or provoking backlash, while Christian apps are seen as a “safe” target. Regardless of intent, moderation decisions should be based purely on neutral and objective criteria, not on perceived cultural or political sensitivities.
The real issue isn’t the flag itself, but that this specific flag hides apps from search results by default. A truly neutral label, like “contains religious content that some users may find sensitive,” would be far more appropriate if there’s a strong desire to flag such apps at all. But the flag should not affect search results at all. — though personally, I wouldn’t flag them in any case.
The concern is not about acknowledging sensitivity, but about fairness and visibility. Selectively hiding certain apps undermines neutrality and creates an unnecessary sense of bias.
Andbible for one does not contain a bible edition by default, but provides access to a list of repositories from which to download bibles (or other texts)
To be honest, I don’t think it makes much sense to make this distinction tho
I’ll think about it and propose something
This sounds like a descriptive, specific, and clear label to me
If you really want to flag such apps, use a different flag category that behaves like the other anti-features — meaning it doesn’t affect search results or visibility. Otherwise, the system remains inconsistent.
This is my main Issue with the current flag. It hides such app by default.
For example, by the same logic, Wikipedia also displays sensitive or violent historical content, yet no one would consider hiding it by default. Creating exceptions for some apps but not for others undermines the idea of a fair and neutral policy.
we keep seeing this rhetoric and sounds like some mafioso speech, akin to “You’ve got a nice (noun) here. It’d be a shame if anything were to… happen to it.”
Welcome to public funding. You don’t get to run things however you want, ask for donos and then don’t expecting public scrutiny.
You @Licaon_Kter and @linsui , as core contributors, are clearly pushing an agenda to gatekeep and literally hide religious texts from public view (Francoist Spain-esc style) in the name of protecting children without even factoring in public discourse.
This is literally an authoritarian effort to suppress religion and enforce ideological conformity.
NSFW
This Anti-Feature is applied to an app that contains content that the user may not want to be publicized or visible everywhere. The marked app may contain nudity, profanity, slurs, violence, intense sexuality, political incorrectness, or other potentially disturbing subject matter. This is especially relevant in environments like workplaces, schools, religious and family settings. The name comes from the Internet term “Not safe for work”.
Here’s the list of apps…
Yup, Let’s hide religious apps from religious environments. The absurdity of this decision is right in your own docs. If the genuine fear (whether personal or collectively as the F-DROID team) is proselytization or to push an Atheist rhetoric, please make it clear. It is more respectable to come clean that you don’t like religion and don’t want to see the apps listed openly. Don’t beat about the bush by cherry picking Biblical or Koranic text taken out of context to suite your agenda.
Yeah but onls NSFW is defaulted to not shown. Other can’t be filteref if requested. That one of the issue i have apart i find it unnecessary to be flagged at all.
“In this moment, I am euphoric. Not because of any phony god’s blessing. But because, I am enlightened by my intelligence. tips fedora ”
If it remains like this I will not recommend F-Droid to anyone any more. Obtainium isn’t too bad I guess. This is just really unprofessional behaviour, if you want to be taken seriously you should avoid having these reddit moments.
Renaming the label still doesn’t fix the main issue: the NSFW category is hidden by default in the F-Droid app, unlike other anti-features which don’t affect visibility by default.
Please consider using an anti-feature that is not filtered by default — that would make a big difference.
The real problem has never been the wording, but the fact that apps under this flag become effectively invisible to most users. While that may make sense for some truly sensitive apps, it’s completely inappropriate for those that simply contain religious texts.
Yes, I agree the real problem is the search not showing Bible texts by default (since they are lumped in with NSFW).
I would propose the creation a new, anti-feature called “religious texts” that is enabled by default, that users can disable if they don’t want showing up in their search. The Google App Store actually has a tag for religious texts on Bibles already:
CIA’s effort is driven by many different reasons and this doesn’t mean that all these reasons are bad.
I flagged Bible and Quran because there is NSFW content in them. They heppen to be religious content but that’s not why they are flagged.
And it’s not an attack to just point out the truth. The content is literally ask the believers to kill their families and friends if they ask them to believe other gods.
Well, we don’t flag them because they contain religious content. We flag them because they contaion ■■■■ and violence content.
I don’t care about the religion content. I only care about the NSFW content. If the apps don’t have NSFW content or disable them by default, they won’t be flagged.