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Comment by rvz | Hacker News Reader

This is Google (as well as YouTube) showing once again they (and their robots) do not care and ultimately, they will never change. The Play Store is evidently hostile to free and open-source software.

> Please do not attempt to register a new developer account. We will not be restoring your account at this time.

Meanwhile on F-Droid, they welcomed Wire, an E2EE messenger. [0] That is at least much friendlier than the Play Store, but this won't be the last time I hear about Google giving no reason to terminate or de-monetize someone's account other than 'ToS violation' without pointing what was 'violated'.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30117423

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People need to stop bringing up F-Droid in response to Google supsending accounts. F-Droid does the exact same thing. If the distributor - whoever they are - don't like you, they will ban you. Your only option is self-hosting APKs (Android only).

https://old.reddit.com/r/fdroid/comments/ceyzuz/the_fdroid_d...

>Android only

Well, so is F-Droid...

I mean literally, "It's in the name"

(... and now I have EA lawyers searching for me)

> F-Droid does the exact same thing. If the distributor - whoever they are - don't like you, they will ban you. Your only option is self-hosting APKs (Android only).

Interesting. In fact, that is actually a good point. Now you put it like that, self-hosting makes EVEN more sense. Apps like Discord does it with their desktop apps and Telegram does it with their Android APKs. I completely support this.

Now. Here's a very good question:

This is one of the reasons why F-Droid banned Gab, from their own quote from [0]:

'Things like racism, sexism, verbal abuse, violent nationalist propaganda, discrimination against gender and sexual minorities, antisemitism and a lot more things become popular on such instances.'

This same reason can be applied to Telegram. So why have they not taken a 'political stance' towards removing Telegram like they have also removed Gab?

[0] https://f-droid.org/en/2019/07/16/statement.html

The same applies for most of the social platforms. Especially for those with E2EE messages. By definition, content cannot be moderated on there.

It is rather diffucult area and the decisions are often made based on by the popularity and the variety of the users on the platfom . It is easy to ban an app which is mostly used by rightwing-extremists for example, but not the app which is used by everyone. So, what is the right way?

>Your only option is self-hosting APKs

F-Droid (a program) allows you to specify your own repos. Eg: NewPipe

The thing about F-Droid is that you can add alternative repositories that allow you to host the APKs yourself without also writing an update mechanism. Hell, you can even get around the open source requirements F-Droid puts in place that way.

Every app store will try to get rid of applications that make the store's life harder, that's why the ability to add repositories is such an important (and underrated) feature.

Google is not available for Huawei phones, so self-hosted APK is a respect to their users

F-Droid is cool in theory, but it is largely unmaintaned and understaffed. If you upload a new build it may take weeks to get distributed to users.

If only there was a way to support them...

https://f-droid.org/en/contribute/

https://f-droid.org/en/donate/

https://liberapay.com/F-Droid-Data/

Yes, that's because they deeply care about what is allowed in the store. F-Droid had "privacy labels" before Apple did [0]. They do scan/review [1] submitted apps for spyware, to the extent they can with the tools available to them [2].

Often times, F-Droid volunteers go out of their way and help developers publish apps to F-Droid [3].

Besides, in my experience, once you've setup the distribution, F-Droid pretty much auto-builds and auto-publishes the updates forever, until unless the builds fail or their automated review process detects something untoward.

I'd say F-Droid is pretty cool in practice too.

[0] https://f-droid.org/en/docs/Anti-Features/

[1] Ex, see this review for an app I submitted: https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/-/merge_requests/8605

[2] https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/-/issues/2289

[3] Ex, here's F-Droid maintainers attempting to get an open-source app, Outline (a ShadowSocks client), built by Google, distributed on F-Droid: https://github.com/Jigsaw-Code/outline-client/issues/50

Somehow I think Symbian and Ovi Store had them before both of those, but so is life.

> If you upload a new build it may take weeks to get distributed to users.

Why are you talking about Apple now?

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