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How much convenience do you really gain from using the Play Store instead of F-Droid? And is that convenience worth the developers of your applications receiving a smaller cut of your payment or being charged additional fees by Google? Is it worth contributing to Google's monopoly over the Android app landscape?
Those are all advantages for developers and activists. End users don't care or need to care. As an end user the only reason for keeping two stores in my phone is that one does a thing the other one doesn't, functionally. That's why Samsung can keep putting their dumb store on their phones forever but people just don't engage with it.
Now, unlike the Samsung store when I was on a Samsung phone, F-Droid is something I do use, because there is a clear use case there: Play for all the commercial apps, F-Droid for non-commercial alternatives and a stuff that Google doesn't allow on Play for whatever reason.
If F-Droid wants to make a push for being my only store, they better provide all the functionality, support, variety and convenience Play does, because Play comes pre-installed. If I can't go to F-Droid to be guaranteed to not have to deal with payments or MTX, then it better have every single thing I need. I'm talking every game, every app, every legacy piece of software. It better have the same one-click payment convenience I get from Google Pay. And it better still have a default option to search for completely free apps, or I'll have to go find a F-Droid alternative that does that for when I want to be sure I'm not getting any hidden fees with my app.
I suppose that's true, if you consider anything outside of your personal and immediate financial gain as "activism". I would like to think there are more people out there who actually care about ethical consumerism and contributing to small and independent business.
I didn't read anything in the post that suggests this is their strategy. F-Droid wants to support small developers and challenge Google's monopoly in the app store space. Nowhere does it suggest they are expecting every application on the Play Store to also be available on F-Droid, so I'm not sure why you would assume that their goal here is to completely replace the Play Store. This is about competition, not market domination.
To clarify, I'm making a two step argument: One, I will only install a second store on my phone if that store serves a specific use case I don't get from the first one (which is Play by default, since it comes preinstalled). Two, if F-Droid is going to sacrifice the clear message that it's the place for noncommercial apps, then it must carry the same apps Play does, it needs to carry ALL of them so I can make it my default store.
So I understand what you're saying, my point is that this is not a viable value proposition for me. F-Droid is positioned as the safe place for noncommercial software. If it's no longer going to be that, then it's picking the same fight with Google Play that the Samsung or Amazon stores do, and it's just as likely to lose that fight. The reason it isn't doing that at the moment isn't its moral high ground, it's that it has a clear position that doesn't overlap with Play's: noncommercial software.
I'm not sure why you think F-Droid is moving away from supporting FOSS software, though. The post made it pretty clear this is about allowing greater freedom for those developers who want to sell or monetise their work. Nowhere does it state or suggest that F-Droid will only feature paid or proprietary apps going forward. As I said in another comment, if there are filters within the F-Droid app store then there is no reason to be concerned by this news. This isn't an all-or-nothing situation where F-Droid has to sacrifice all of the things that make it great to become a direct competitor to the Play Store.
I think this train of thought fundamentally misunderstands how usability works and how positioning works. But hey, I don't own this, I don't have a stake on this and I already have F-Droid installed. At a glance it seems like a bad move that makes a thing I use less useful and more like a bunch of things I don't use. We'll see where it goes.
How so? You seem to be making a lot of assumptions about the intentions of the project without citing anything from the post itself.
My point is I don't care about the intentions of the project, I care about the piece of software that comes out the other end, regardless of whether that's intended or not. A store with a mix of commercial and noncommercial software is just an Android store, like all the other Play alternatives. A repository of non commercial software where you know all the stuff you find fits a specific set of properties is a different thing, and I don't need to read what the developers say online to feel that difference in the software.
It´s fundamentally harder to see the difference between Play and F-Droid if both have free, monetized and ad-based applications than if Play is mostly monetized and F-Droid is all noncommercial. If F-Droid steps away from that then it has a lot of homework to do and it enters a direct competition that is easy to understand: there are many stores, Play is the best one and the default, so why would I be using another one? If it was up to me, I'd even consider doing this as a separate app and keeping F-Droid as a dedicated version to remain in the position it already has, even if for developers they´re all uploading their software to the same back-end.
F-Droid now has a good answer to that. The version they´re proposing, regardless of their intentions, does not.
Does that help clarify where I´m coming from?
The intentions of the project will have a strong influence over the type of software that comes out the other end. This is why the phrase "show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome" is so widely used within the technology industry. The incentives here are to support independent developers and to challenge Google's market monopoly. Neither of those incentives inherently lead to a negative outcome for the end user.
But it's not, because F-Droid primarily hosts apps that are not available on other Android stores. Additionally, the point being made here (again, refer to the post) was that many Android developers release their software on the Play Store due to the lack of an alternative.
Again, F-Droid is not stepping away from FOSS apps. Nothing in the post suggests this is the case. If you have inside or alternative information, feel free to share it, but at this point you are just repeatedly claiming something with zero evidence to back it up.
This is highly subjective. I would argue (and I'm sure others would agree) that the quality of applications on F-Droid is actually a lot higher than on the Play Store because the developers are not driven by financial incentives. The Play Store is absolutely infested with low quality trash designed to serve ads to the user before anything else. As I said earlier, this could change if F-Droid becomes a mixture of FOSS and monetised apps and there's no way to filter out the latter. But I see no reason why there wouldn't be a way to filter between different types of apps, given F-Droid already notifies users of anti-features.
I genuinely have nothing new to add to this conversation. All my previous points stand and they either address those objections already or the caveats are self-evident.
If anything I'll say that seeing the defensiveness come together in real time is really helping me understand many recurring narratives happening around this space. I suggest we call this process "the GIMP effect".
There's only one person getting defensive in this conversation and it's the same one who is attempting to end it with some weird exit line takedown. You're not showing much faith in your original position by abandoning it so quickly.
That's a weird take, man. By that metric no online conversation can ever end.
I've made my point, I've said my piece. I'm not super emotionally invested on F-Droid's success, either. This seems like a bad move in a few different ways, and it's one that interferes with how I use the platform for the reasons I've stated. You don't want that to be the case, I get that, but I don't need your permission to feel that what's being proposed here is going to mess with how I use it.
I also don't need your permission to make the case that a store of monetized apps is a store of monetized apps and is competing with huge, polished, integrated alternatives in a way that F-Droid currently doesn't. You're mostly arguing with the kind of just-use-GIMP wishful thinking where it's feasible for people to step out of their comfort zone or make morality-driven consumption choices en masse. I don't feel I need to argue with you about it, though. It's gonna go the way it's going to go. The part that bums me out the most, as I said, is as an illustration for how self-reinforcing the niche position of FOSS can be sometimes. Otherwise, you do you.
Conversations can end, sure. Attempting to end them abruptly by suggesting the person you're having the conversation with "fundamentally misunderstands" the topic without ever actually explaining how, or by claiming they are "defensive", is certainly not the behaviour I would expect from someone who claims to not be "super emotionally invested" in the topic. Your last few replies have sounded pretty emotional to me.
I am cringing pretty hard, doesn that count as "emotional"?
I sincerely don't care enough about the fate of F-Droid to spend too long litigating the parts of this strategy that seem ill-conceived. If you think that implies hostility... well, it doesn't. Hell, I hope I'm wrong, it'd be great to have a good indie storefront on Android to use as a default. I just don't think as described this is it at all.
Otherwise, cope as you need. I have explained the bits I think you're misunderstanding, I just don't want to repeat that over and over because man, I need to have an online interaction that doesn't devolve into that at some point. And I don't want to explain why not wanting to talk to you any longer is not conceding the point, so this is the last time I'll express that, too. Cool? Cool.
Keep typing those paragraphs about how you're definitely not emotional lol