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"Mandatory reporting of usage statistics runs contrary to one of the freedoms inherent to FOSS, that the software is for the user's freedom."

Why? You don't need to do tracking, just have a counter on the server that increases every time someone downloads the repository. What does this have to do with FOSS?

That's how Google Analytics started.

No it is not. A counter on the website was a gimmick from the early web days and google analytics had a very different purpose from the beginning.

Such a download counter is not an accurate measure of usage.

This is the discussion on implementing a popcon-style feature in F-Droid if you want to read through where the project got to: https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroidclient/-/issues/396

What other ways could you rank by popularity then?