Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hm f-droid provides privacy friendly https://fdroid.gitlab.io/metrics/ for some time now. I'm not sure what sort of "control" they have over the Play Store compared to f-droid, but I'd rather have a trusted 3rd party do the building transparently and verifyable.
F-Droid uses a package maintainer-esque process where the maintainers of F-Droid can intervene and prevent an update to an app from reaching users if it's deemed to be malicious or to add anti-features. It's of particularly high need on mobile since popular apps, even those who were originally FOSS, are sold to scummy publishers who fill it with ads and subscription schemes (oft called anti-features, since removing t…
That sounds like a feature you want when using FOSS.
Imagine distros wouldn't have been able to intervene quickly and malicious xz would be still deployed through their channels just because the authors want to.