Hacker News Reader

Comment by jonnycomputer | Hacker News Reader

Are there no open-source weather apps on Play Store? For US weather at least we have https://www.weather.gov/documentation/services-web-api, so it doesn't seem like it would be that hard to do. Is there something about the Play Store eco-system that makes such a thing not viable or trustworthy? Seems like all you'd need is a minimalist web page doing a single http request to the api

View on HN

I suspect the main issue is getting discovered. Without filters like "no ads" or "no in-app purchases" in Play Store, it's hard to see how Google would ever organically bubble results for such an app to the top (since Google Ads is by far the most popular and there are definitely financial incentives to promote those apps over more privacy-conscious ones).

I prefer to use apps from F-Droid, but when that fails, I use a third-party search for the Play Store that has both of those filters - https://playsearch.kaki87.net/

Your broader point is right though. It doesn't benefit the app devs since 99.99% of users just use the first-party search.

If there were an open source app that was popular, the spammers would copy it and put it out there 10,000 times over, loaded down with spyware.

I generally release all of my code as public domain, but never publish the source code to an app.

The first day I got an Android phone, the first app I wanted was a flashlight app. After clicking through the permissions on some for a couple of minutes, I realized it was just going to be faster just to learn to write my own. It's just appalling that Google, the so called "master of search" won't let you filter results by permissions required.

None of my apps require more permissions than what's required, and some require none. And people give them 1 star reviews stating the "permissions screen is blank", or back when there used to be a popup with the permissions: "Warning! This app doesn't display a permissions popup!". They've literally never seen an app that doesn't require permissions.

Someone else mentioned that this app is also on the google play store.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/dev?id=479730765079191737...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com