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F-Droid still has some big tasks in order to be useable for the general public, when comparing it with e.g. Google Play Store.
For example, if you search it fo
F-Droid still has some big tasks in order to be useable for the general public, when comparing it with e.g. Google Play Store.
For example, if you search it for "browser", Firefox will not show up because
A) It's called Fennec
B) The F-Droid search seems to be exact infix search, and Fennec's title is "Fennec F-Droid -- Browse the web", in which "Browser" does not appear, only "browse". So it doesn't find it.
In general, the search has no clue what a "browser" is, and cannot use it for ranking, so in practice you need to scroll a lot in F-Droid until you find what you seek.
That sounds like they don't even deploy something as basic as Solr to drive the search :/
Use droidify a alternative fork of fdroid
Droidify is so vastly superior it’s not even close. Fdroid still has the privileged extension whereas droidify and Neodroid can use Shizuku and other options.
I do think that droidify is an unfortunate naming choice though.
This still doesn't bring up Fennec if searched for 'browser'. Neo Store does.
F-Droid Basic, a cut down version of the official F-Droid client, supports the Android 12+ unattended app updates [1]. This allows for a store to update apps without user confirmation (if it was the store which installed (or updated?) the app originally) [2].
[1] https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroidclient/-/merge_requests/1216 https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroidclient/-/merge_requests/1216
[2] https://www.xda-developers.com/android-12-alternative-app-stores-update-apps-background/ https://www.xda-developers.com/android-12-alternative-app-st...
> Fdroid still has the privileged extension
Not on modern versions of Android.
>Fdroid still has the privileged extension whereas droidify and Neodroid can use Shizuku and other options.
What is all of this, care to elaborate?
A lot of actually uncommon knowledge is being assumed here.
> droidify
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.looker.droidify/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.looker.droidify/
https://github.com/Droid-ify/client https://github.com/Droid-ify/client
Fennec is missing out if it didn't write its store description to include these keywords.
I think policies[1] are blocking F-Droid more than anything from being a viable alternative. A bank will likely never release their app as open source, nor will any of the big authentication vendors. This means that you cannot completely replace the Google Play Store with F-Droid if you have to use any of these, you can only use it as an additional store, at which point many won't be bothered.
[1]: https://f-droid.org/en/docs/Inclusion_Policy/ https://f-droid.org/en/docs/Inclusion_Policy/
The search for "browser" should have returned Mull, which is a privacy oriented deblobbed fork of Fennec.
It's called Fennec because it is not from Mozilla and includes patches to removs propietary bits (which are not allowed on F-Droid).
https://gitlab.com/relan/fennecbuild https://gitlab.com/relan/fennecbuild
And fennec was the 'internal' name for firefox on android from mozilla.
EDIT: I replied to the wrong message, sorry
> because it is not from Mozilla and includes patches to remove propietary bits
More specifically, because Mozilla won’t allow you to do that and still call it Firefox. (Except if you’re Debian, apparently Debian now gets an unwritten free pass after they demonstrated their willingness to protest that with Iceweasel. And either F-Droid is not big enough for that, Mozilla is not the same as it was back then, or both.)
fdroid have a non political policy. arch is the same. they won't even patch things nobody like (just document on the wiki and keep building upstream with the least amount of changes from the code repo. even if the upstream maintainers themselves dont build like that)
so, if firefox build builds as fenec by default, fennec it is.
It's been brought up for some time, and kind of looks like one of those open-source situations where any progress that falls short of perfection is deemed not worth implementing. Just my interpretation though.
https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroidclient/-/issues/336 https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroidclient/-/issues/336
I won't trust no tracking if it's non free.
I know I will sound extreme (although I think it shouldn't be the case in among developers) and no offense, but this sounds like a happy outcome to me. I believe proprietary software to be unethical. I'm not interested in being proposed non free software. The software industry should figure it out and start respecting its users.
However software funding is a real concern and I do believe there's room for some set of builtin solutions allowing free software funding beyond a donate link.
There are many ways to fund free software. I'm not saying it's easy but there are many open source businesses now and as a developer I decided to join one of them.
Support, consulting and paid (but still open source) paid features are some options. I don't think anybody would remove a license check in an app sent to f-droid if it's free software.
Now, I genuinely thank you for having considered an alternative to Google for distributing your software.
I know it's hard to build stuff and bootstrap it. I'm with you on this.
In f-droid, you can still add third party repositories and I heard it's getting easier for users. Not sure it is easy enough.
Now I'm totally aware only free software doesn't cut it for most people yet, and fdroid will not suffice. Most people will do with the play store, but some will use fdroid as a store of "trusty" apps and resort to the play store if really needed. I know people doing this.
In this case the software in question was a game. I have not seen any visble business models for truly open source games under the acceptable licenses for F-Droid. There are source-available games, but that would not be enough in this case.
I think the main issue may be how much up-front investment games need that would never be recouped with an open source license, but I'd love to be shown an example to the contrary.
Game is its own thing indeed and I'll admit that first, I don't play much, and second, never even started thinking about business models for open source games.
Maybe you could license the data for a fee and have the code as open source?
Of course this is low effort and you know way better than me.
I've done a fair bit of open source work, but the best I could come up with for games is "source available" where you can get the code to recompile for yourself or mod it. (My wife and I put up the source code of our first game as a DLC on Steam as an experiment.)
Re only code: Game engines often tie code and data together and the code without the data won't even compile in many cases, or you won't be able to produce a new dataset because documenting the required settings is a monumental task.
Finally, there is no real benefit to open sourcing a game if you want to make money. There is no complementary product or service you can sell with it. Reviewing and incorporating community fixes requires work and potentially legal review as not everyone in the modding community is also necessarily well versed in IP law. All these things need funding which is not a given if the game is open source in any meaningful way. If a game is truly open source, a less than ethical company with a bunch of cheap labor can go and undercut you, so there is an incentive to make creating an alternative build as hard as possible, defeating the entire idea of open source.
I would like to be able to release on an alternative storefront so people who want to degoogle their phones, but F-Droid's policies (most known alternative) make that impossible. (To be clear, it's a perfectly legit choice, I just wish there was a meaningful alternative to Google.)
(Not commenting most of your comment, I assumed a clear data and code separation because that's typically what doom does, but that's very old and I'm utterly incompetent in this domain)
> Finally, there is no real benefit to open sourcing a game if you want to make money.
the same thing can be said for pretty much all software (although it's not always actually true, sometimes open source is a selling point and/or have specific strengths beyond ethics)
> a less than ethical company with a bunch of cheap labor can go and undercut you
Isn't the data which is the most costly part in developing a game? Of course I realize you stated that separating the data is not practical.
> I would like to be able to release on an alternative storefront so people who want to degoogle their phones
Still 100% with you on this. Also degoogled with some proprietary software is still a step in the right direction
Why would a game need to be a business?
Shattered Pixels is one example of a game with a commercial side that is published on f-droid.
> I won't trust no tracking if it's non free.
Meanwhile, lots of non-mobile free software includes tracking (telemetry) these days. The cynic in me has had to switch to
I won't trust no tracking if it's not enforced by a security boundary.
I used Graphene OS on a Pixel 4 for a few years and loved it. I feel like I'm a total minority user who doesn't attach themselves to specific apps so not having Firefox available wasn't really a huge thing for me. There were several apps I did have to have, but they were all available through the F-Droid store.
Graphene was easy for me but like you pointed out, many will not use it because it doesn't have exactly what they use/need. To some degree this inflexibility reminds me of people not switching to the Windows Phone platform for the same reason - which is sad considering we only have two choices now because people wouldn't take the chance and Microsoft abandoned the OS before really giving it a good opportunity to thrive.
Kind of a sad state of affairs when people are totally comfortable handing over all their personal information to the likes of Apple, Samsung and Google.
Full disclosure: Yes, I'm a totally disgruntled former Windows phone user. Yes, there were a lot of factors that led to its demise, but I felt at the time we finally had an alternative to what we were being spoon fed in Apple and Google.
Windows Phone 8.0 was great, partially because of the OS, and partially because MS paid for ports of the top-N apps to it.
GrapheneOS didn’t work as a daily driver for me because I couldn’t reliably use it for uber, lyft, parking or ev charging. The camera support was missing some features.
Most of that is fixable by adding back the google services, but then you lose most of the privacy advantages of having a de-googled phone.
A note regarding your last point:
- Google Play is sandboxed [1], you have (important) privacy advantages
- with a second account for banking apps (or in your example) uber, lyft, one can nicely separate "google-play-apps" from free apps, account switching is fast
[1]: https://grapheneos.org/usage#sandboxed-google-play https://grapheneos.org/usage#sandboxed-google-play
I wish that transparency and security were a selling point in gaming, but to me it doesn't seem like it. People will install all kinds of stuff and give them administrator permissions without a second thought. Anti-cheat eating itself into the kernel seems to be perfectly normal for most people. It's an entertainment product and people don't want to be inconvenienced for the most part.
Regarding the development costs, I'm not exactly an expert and I have never worked in a game studio (apart from the company my wife and I are running), but let's take StarCraft 2 for example. If you were to have the engine, but not the art, you could likely easily develop a very capable multiplayer RTS game. Heroes of the Storm was developed out of a StarCraft 2 mod[1]. As another example, Stormgate[2], made by ex Blizzard devs, is getting a whole lot of press coverage for their netcode. It stands to reason that a good engine and netcode are very real competitive advantages in the RTS space. Other game types, such as a walking sim or an adventure game will have a lot less "secret sauce" in the code and more in the art, voice acting, etc. (The Invincible[3] is great in this area) so the code/data split would likely heavily depend on the type of game. (Games can also become very messy between art, visual scripting, engine settings and code, which is what makes releasing the code separately tricky.)
My wife and I are (slowly, next to the day job) working on a Python programming/learning game and hopefully we'll manage to make a clean split between the engine and the art because it would be important for modding. However, I wouldn't feel comfortable releasing it under an open source license because it would cut off a potential source of revenue to license it to educators wanting to make their own challenges and courses. Maybe later we'll figure out that the base game makes enough money and it doesn't matter anymore, but it's really hard to predict success. As a game dev I would really like to make it possible, for example, for game archivists to do their work legally, for people to legally backup and rebuild their games for newer operating systems, or for their kids to be able to inherit their games[4], but carving out specific exceptions, especially for unknown future use cases 10-20 years down the line is exceptionally hard and I'm also not a lawyer, so for desktop the Steam Subscriber Agreement is governing our PC releases for now.
[1]: https://starcraft.fandom.com/wiki/Heroes_of_the_Storm https://starcraft.fandom.com/wiki/Heroes_of_the_Storm
[2]: https://www.pcgamer.com/an-upcoming-rts-will-incorporate-the-rollback-tech-that-took-fighting-games-by-storm/ https://www.pcgamer.com/an-upcoming-rts-will-incorporate-the...
[3]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/731040/The_Invincible/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/731040/The_Invincible/
[4]: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/05/after-you-die-your-steam-games-will-be-stuck-in-legal-limbo/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/05/after-you-die-your-st...