Open-source apps removed from Google Play Store due to donation links

Nobody is allowed to use Google Play's in-app billing for donations, and only organizations with a valid tax exempt status can link to an external page that lists donation options.

By requiring government registration my guess is the hope is both that the fraudsters will be caught or dissuaded and if they do make it past the government registration then when the real devs complain Google can say "take it up with the government. They mis-licensed. We just followed their license"

Basically, if you include a donation link in your app without proving non-profit status you could be committing fraud, and Google could be held equally responsible to the crimes of the app being hosted. Google also has to report non-tax exempt profits made by any app/content they host in many locations, so only non-profit groups may link to a 3rd party payment system without violating legal statutes in some countries/states.

"Examples: Donation solicitations from parties without a valid 501(c)(3) tax exempt status clearly displayed to the public; solicitations from parties without valid proof of exempt tax status or proof of registration with the relevant country's regulatory bodies and authorities; and political organizations that have registered with the Federal Election Commission (FEC)."

[1] https://gitlab.com/gdroid/gdroidclient/

Let me say that I think you're morally right, but it is probably not a reasonable choice of actions for the author and the users of the app.

And then Google get 30% of it.

Yeah...

We just need processes to learn and avoid doing mistakes twice, and shaming is a poor way to do it.

If I risked being ashamed when making decisions, I would probably avoid decisions altogether. This would be awful. The discussed decision is not even out of law.

What we can do though, is to tell people we know and love about F-Droid and suggest them to only fall back to the Play Store if they don't find what they want, and that they should be aware that by doing so, they enter the jungle and that this jungle follows Google's arbitrary rules, some of which are not in their own interests.

The website from which you, the customer, download the software often is built and managed under less controlled and more vulnerable circumstances, often with third party involvement. Any bad actor in a long chain of internal caretakers and potentially external hackers can replace the to-be-downloaded artifact HTTPS with malicious junk. Code-signing mitigates this.

But only the readers of Hacker News can recognize it. I think it's one of the most powerful argument for a walled garden. Not that I support it, but I acknowledge it's still a powerful argument.

I trust it enough to believe it won't start crypto mining in the background or connect to random servers and sending the content of my computer somewhere. For the average user it's probably the better option than downloading the top Google result and just executing it.

Because that is the majority of the users and because it's hard to find reliable information on the internet even if you're willing to do the research into this sort of thing. I'm certain there are plenty of things that you are probably not knowledgable about and don't put the time to learn about as well.

All in all, that whole "break-up" argument is just political white-knighting by wanna-be elites (ie. Warren & co).

Do they ban all donation verbiage or just IAPs that do nothing?

Edit: I'm referring to https://opensource.org/osd

Edit2: Having read round some more, it seems you possibly could sell a different version, of course you would have to offer the source code which others would be free to give away, (this is for the gpl). I don't know if the discrimination clause of the Open Source Definition would come into play though.

https://9to5mac.com/2019/09/06/apple-extends-deadline-for-ne...

As soon as you get a certain threeshold you become a monopoly, which essentialy means you controll who does business in that sector.

It should never be allowed to be a distributor as well as the owner of a marketplace.

It's the same problem with amazon marketplace and other similar things.

EDIT: Formatting

This is an old claim by now, but these platforms matter a lot today, and since we only have two of them, and they are not in direct competition (users cannot switch at will) they really should be treated as the monopoly infrastructure that they are. What that means concretely is subject to negotiation within society. In my opinion blackmailing the devs of an application that is essentially written and maintained as a service to the public, for free, by volunteers, is a shit move to say the least.

And they are in the process in doing so (partly by closing the platform through read-only system partition and expecting the app developer to sign the app through Apple means) with MacOS.

The platform is not yet closed, as the system partition can still be mounted in read-write mode and notarization can be bypassed for now. But their are clearly in the process to make these changes permanent in near future. Reason why they introduced them in Catalina.

Google could make the same choice but doesn't for some reason.

Same reasoning for forcing people to have their cars serviced by mechanics and not do their own maintenance in their backyards. Otherwise we'd have people driving cars without pipes and DIY break pads. I'd much rather have that enforced by megacorps/govt than by an infinite amount of businesses/individuals trying to game the system.

For most people a smartphone is an entertainment device, a tool at best, they don't give a single fuck about the underlying tech and they should not. Feel free to root your phone and install whatever you want, you can't ask people to become tech literate, it's your hobby/job, not their. Our job is to provide them safe tools, not teach them about tech. Look at your own life, chances are you don't even have surface knowledge of 99% of the things you use daily, and that's perfectly fine, nobody expects you to be a furniture designer, building safety inspector and car mechanic.

I know people are going to quote Heinlein here, but civilisation exists so that not everybody has to be a specialist in everything.

Do you apply that to yourself out of tech ? Are you literate in art, philosophy, astrology, history, chemistry, medicine, &c. (more than surface knowledge) ? Where do you draw the line ? Is using google maps without knowing how the GPS system works in details an issue ? What about cooking ? Do you know which chemical reactions create tastes ? Are you buying food from supermarkets, why don't you hunt and grow your own ?

> The baby boomer attitude

As if millennials+ were better. Using a pc/smartphone daily doesn't mean you're tech literate, it's a prime example of familiarity != knowledge.

To be fair, I'm less confident poking around behind the surface because what used to be relatively straight forward has become --for various reasons, few of which are legitimate in my eyes-- absurdly complicated.

I disagree on this. I have a friend who has "basic computer literacy" as in knows how to use MS Excel, KeePass, etc. And yet, she inadvertently got a virus on her laptop. It was puzzling how she could have gotten it. She doesn't visit the usual suspects of porn/gaming/gambling/etc websites. Just normal stuff like CNN, WSJ, etc. The only reason we found out about it was her email account got locked out by the ISP. Apparently, the malware found her MS Outlook email account and used a hidden background service to send a bunch of spam messages using her email profile. Understandably, the ISP monitors SMTP traffic sent from residential addresses and when it hits an unusual threshold, they lock out the account. To clean up the malware, I reformatted her laptop and got the email reset with a new password.

On the other hand, with her Apple iPhone and the locked-down walled garden, I really don't have to worry about malware to the same degree. Yes, the Apple app review process is not infallible and theoretically, she could get infected by downloading a fake bank app that steals all her money. However, the possibilities for that nightmare scenario are drastically reduced in the closed Apple ecosystem.

Even programmers, who we'd classify has uber-computer-literate compared to the general population can unwittingly get bit by malware:

Javascript programmers vulnerable to NPM package repository malware: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/12/npm_eslint/

Microsoft's uber geek expert Mark Russinovich got infected by Sony's rootkit: https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/markrussinovich/2005/10/...

What's the solution for those programmers? Educate them on how to use computers? But they're already educated.

Yes, I get the hacker ethos of not having locked-down devices but we also overestimate the ability for the general population to maintain safe computing devices. Heck, I'm a techie that programs in Xcode and I'm not confident I'm really literate on all the vulnerabilities of the iPhone. Thus, it seems unreasonable I would expect non-programmers to "just be educated" to make the App Store's curation unnecessary.

You can do whatever you want on a platform like Windows because they make their money off of selling support for their platform, and selling their own products for it.

Google and Apple do not make money selling support for their platform, and only Apple really focuses on selling products for it. But they both make money by tightly controlling their platforms, in order to to squeeze money from developers, [in the case of Google] from manufacturers, from carriers, from users' payments, and from all the data they collect about it all. They don't have to care about the customer at all, and they can just focus on engineering. It's the programmer's dream.

Their business model is a walled garden, and they pick the fruits of that garden. In the case of Google, they run the Android platform so they have a way to still make ad money if Apple denied them access to that platform. In the case of Apple, they run the Apple platform so they can make money from expensive consumer devices, and also use it to control more of the services/products we use.

So, it really doesn't have anything to do with literacy. Even if everyone were a genius, their choice is still A) don't use a smartphone, or B) use a walled-garden smartphone.

Because it's human nature to only care about details that you believe you need to know in order to manage some part of your life.

If you don't see a clear and immediate value in learning something, you won't. No matter what anyone else says or does to try and convince you, you won't.

Then you get burned by something you didn't know, and there's a 50/50 chance you'll learn about it then, and only if you're convinced that it's something YOU have to do, that can't be managed for you.

And most people resent having to learn that much.

I no longer try to convince anyone of anything tech related. And rarely answer much when I am asked, unless I can see that the person is truly interested, not just curious about some buzzword.

Except the tech is already there, and you use it with or without understanding. You use a credit card, electricity, Internet and other communications, some kind of computing device, your entire life depends on it. And IT shapes your life way more than any other tech, so it probably makes sense to get a grasp on the general concepts at least. No need to become an IT expert, similarly to how there's no need to become a Shakespeare to be literate. And yes, being tech illiterate can fuck you up very visibly and personally, for example by losing money from a stolen credit card.

And before the "android can sideload" argument, how many normal people are going to do that with all the dark pattern warnings that google displays when you try to enable the feature.

Of course, there are cases that essentially suffer from this, but for me as a user, I've got to say I'm pretty satisfied.

So "totally broken" just isn't a rational description.

This is very wordy and sounds a bit complicated, but it was simply a few extra taps and it installed. A pretty good balance of not too easy that a novice might do it by accident and still accessable.

It's not always trivial to submit new apps and ensure it compiles correctly on their build servers. Same goes for updates, which can be silently dropped due to any number of tool issues.

If you are a front or backend developer please consider investing a weekend or two helping fdroid improve their systems.

That's absolutely not true at all.

All that happens is that, the first time you try to install from such an application (or any other application other than your store, eg: the first time you try to install an apk after you download it from your browser), a settings windows appears telling you this application can't install more applications on your phone until you give it permissions. From there giving the permission is a two click matter, and you don't need to look for it the link is given. See the exemple 2 pictures (and that's the only two steps - note that the "settings" button in the first takes you directly to the second picture, aka straight to the right settings page for the correct application, no looking around needed): https://imgur.com/a/Vafqyic

Then you press back one time after giving the permission, which is the normal way to go back to what you were doing on android, and it works at expected, aka it goes back to the install screen except this time it enables the install button.

Any porn site like youporn and pornhub, or epic with fortnite, etc ... Do it this way with no major issue, because the messages are super clear, and where to click to allow it is super clear, no need to look for it.

If anything, this is almost too easy and I'm surprised there is not a bigger spread of malware through browsers using that, and I would be for it asking you to confirm your password before enabling that permission.

EDIT: it appears I missed that parent was talking about UPDATING apps, not installing.

People complain about app stores being restrictive and then you suggest only trusted people being able to distribute code that I can use? That's way worse.

I don't think this is a solution.

2. Please, make it appealing for you and others! https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroidclient

Make it mainstream. Spread the word. Install it on family devices.

How else you think mainstream will happen?

The for-profit vs non-profit distinction is immaterial to me; the distinction is between actually paying for products (e.g. buying an ingame item or support or a subscription or whatever; some sort of 'contractual' thing), and literally giving money away with no strings attached.

Google's particular funding model for their App Store is a different kettle of fish entirely - they can decide that apps beginning with the letter A pay a 90% fee and that's just how it works.

It would surprise me if that were not true globally.

A donation is definitionally a gift. If it's not due to some legal wankery, rename it, doesn't matter.

I don't believe that the app stores would cease to function or even suffer appreciably decreased profit by doing so. In-app purchases result in new features or items or something being unlocked.

Donations do not. They are gifts.

I disagree with the concept of fees for the Google and Apple play stores because they are monopolies within the platform entirely, but if they must exist, attempting to charge fees for donations is just bad form.