On the Importance of F-Droid
rocket9labs.com
F-Droid is an app store for Android where only open source applications are available for free. It provides an alternative to the proprietary Google Play Store, which is where most Android app distribution currently takes place. Because the Google Play Store is where most users go to find and install apps, this gives Google the power to exercise control over Android app developers. In this blog post, I describe the design, mechanism and results of this control from the perspective of a long-time Android app developer.
  • Captain Beyond
    35•3 months ago

    I’ll be “that guy”:

    F-Droid is a software repository, not an app store. The distinction is subtle but important. A software repository offers a community-curated collection of software packages whereas an app store is just a marketplace for software developers to offer products to end-users. A software repository serves the interests of its community first, whereas an app store is merely a means for developers to sell products to end-users.

    • @[email protected]OP
      3•3 months ago

      F-Droid is more of a marketplace for software developers than it is a set of community curated apps. The requirement for F-Droid software to be open source is just a guideline/rule like the minimum target API level on the Google Play Store. F-Droid is a neutral platform in my observations over the couple of years I have published there, and does not curate its content.

      • chebra
        16•3 months ago

        @trevor What are you talking about? If they can’t build it themselves without proprietary stuff, then it doesn’t get published. That’s not a mere “guideline”.

        • @[email protected]OP
          -1•3 months ago

          If your app doesn’t meet the target minimum API level on the Google Play Store, then it doesn’t get published. It’s just as much of a guideline, so I don’t think this is really relevant to the point of the article.

          • chebra
            6•3 months ago

            @trevor People in lemmy open-source community not seeing the relevancy of the open-source guarantee of F-Droid… SMH

      • Captain Beyond
        15•3 months ago

        There are those who believe that F-Droid’s role as a “middle man” vetting and building packages from source instead of blindly shipping builds provided by upstream makes it a security risk, because you’re trusting F-Droid in addition to (some say instead of) the upstream developer. Perhaps telling is that none of these critics can offer an alternative solution.

        Before anyone mentions Obtainium and Accrescent, these are not alternatives to F-Droid, they solve completely different problems.

        • @[email protected]English
          19•3 months ago

          It would be a single point of failure for many apps in case the curators of F-Droid were dishonest or hacked. They could insert bad things into lots of packages without having to change the public source code. But it also becomes the only point where malware or backdoors could be inserted that way, instead of having to trust every single developer to build honestly off the source code, which we’d have to do if they just stuck prebuilt binaries up there. I don’t know how rational I’m being, but it makes me trust F-Droid apps more that they build each one themselves.

          • @[email protected]
            5•3 months ago

            also worth pointing out that fdroid supports reproducible builds, which helps quite a bit with being trustable.

        • @[email protected]English
          6•3 months ago

          I personally like F-Droid’s vetting process. It’s true that updates always arrive a few days later, but you can be sure they don’t contain any malicious code. Furthermore, they specify all of the antifeatures a program has, which makes it easier to avoid them. If you want faster updates, you can always download a program through Obtanium.

          • @[email protected]OP
            1•3 months ago

            I am not an F-Droid maintainer, but as far as I know the code is not vetted by F-Droid after the initial app submission process. Updates are pulled in, built and distributed automatically. The long delay is just because there are a lot of apps to build, and F-Droid is a volunteer-run operation.

            • @[email protected]English
              5•3 months ago

              I had no idea. Thanks for telling me! In that case, im going to try to use the ones from IzzyOnDroid if avaliable

              Edit: According to their docs, they do take some special security measures and I couldn’t find a case of an app offered on FDroid which had malware.