Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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 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.
FOSS isn't really the important part for me there; it's nice, but the real value is that F-Droid is pretty much the only app store that has some reckoning on how the relationship between mobile devs and mobile customers should be far more adversarial than on any other platform due to the poor track record of mobile devs and empowers users to be able to deal with that in a way that restores some degrees of trust.
It's a fucking shame there's not an equivalent on iOS where you can just say "yeah, what you find here can be trusted" and then not have that gets polluted a year down the line. Apple used to somewhat police the App Store back in the early 2010s for similar peace of mind, but that's not the case anymore.