81–90 of 182 posts
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EU funding is the kiss of death for technology initiatives. I can confidently predict that this will go nowhere.
Yeah, public grants in the EU never work very well. However, some of the consortia members have already delivered good software. Personally, I think someone should have bought Jolla and open-sourced Sailfish and their Android VM. Perhaps turn it into a foundation, like Signal.
Wait, there is more than one?
F-Droid still has some big tasks in order to be useable for the general public, when comparing it with e.g. Google Play Store. For example, if you search it for "browser", Firefox will not show up because A) It's called Fennec B) The F-Droid search seems to be exact infix search, and Fennec's title is "Fennec F-Droid -- Browse the web", in which "Browser" does not appear, only "browse". So it doesn't find it. In gene…
I think policies[1] are blocking F-Droid more than anything from being a viable alternative. A bank will likely never release their app as open source, nor will any of the big authentication vendors. This means that you cannot completely replace the Google Play Store with F-Droid if you have to use any of these, you can only use it as an additional store, at which point many won't be bothered. [1]: https://f-droid.or…
I suppose you're right and I think it's worrying that precisely these kinds of organizations still seem to rely on security through obscurity (to some extent, not solely).
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No tracking? Providing an alternative? Not strengthening the Google-Apple duopoly on the mobile phone market? I was looking at it as a platform to publish an app on, which the open source requirement stopped dead in its tracks. I didn't have a viable open source business model for it at this time because it was a straight "customer pays money, gets software" deal with no tracking or other nonsense. As-is, F-Droid wil…
I mean, f-droid allows adding custom repositories that don't follow the main one's rules. There's a decent amount of apps that do this for one reason or another. Other apps, like for example OSMAnd, have a special f-droid build with google services removed, leading to the lack of some features like android auto support. The client doesn't support any form of purchases and I don't think it ever will. I think you'd be…
Of course it could be hard to set up in practice.
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But being open source means that one could fork AOSP. Also the Google proprietary stuff comes with the Play Services, not AOSP. So AOSP is a lot better than the alternatives, I would say. I have a different feeling about Chromium: it is open source, but through it Google gets to control the future of the Web. But Android is not a standard, it's "just" one OS, so changes made by Google in AOSP don't really impact, say…
Let me know when the efforts of Mobifree lead to something that will allow me to install mainline Linux.
F-Droid still has some big tasks in order to be useable for the general public, when comparing it with e.g. Google Play Store. For example, if you search it for "browser", Firefox will not show up because A) It's called Fennec B) The F-Droid search seems to be exact infix search, and Fennec's title is "Fennec F-Droid -- Browse the web", in which "Browser" does not appear, only "browse". So it doesn't find it. In gene…
I think policies[1] are blocking F-Droid more than anything from being a viable alternative. A bank will likely never release their app as open source, nor will any of the big authentication vendors. This means that you cannot completely replace the Google Play Store with F-Droid if you have to use any of these, you can only use it as an additional store, at which point many won't be bothered. [1]: https://f-droid.or…
I wish them success ... but with a website that looks like this I doubt their engineering efforts. https://mobifree.org (screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/TITC9bN )
What about this website indicates low quality engineering?
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In this case the software in question was a game. I have not seen any visble business models for truly open source games under the acceptable licenses for F-Droid. There are source-available games, but that would not be enough in this case. I think the main issue may be how much up-front investment games need that would never be recouped with an open source license, but I'd love to be shown an example to the contrary…
Game is its own thing indeed and I'll admit that first, I don't play much, and second, never even started thinking about business models for open source games. Maybe you could license the data for a fee and have the code as open source? Of course this is low effort and you know way better than me.
Re only code: Game engines often tie code and data together and the code without the data won't even compile in many cases, or you won't be able to produce a new dataset because documenting the required settings is a monumental task.
Finally, there is no real benefit to open sourcing a game if you want to make money. There is no complementary product or service you can sell with it. Reviewing and incorporating community fixes requires work and potentially legal review as not everyone in the modding community is also necessarily well versed in IP law. All these things need funding which is not a given if the game is open source in any meaningful way. If a game is truly open source, a less than ethical company with a bunch of cheap labor can go and undercut you, so there is an incentive to make creating an alternative build as hard as possible, defeating the entire idea of open source.
I would like to be able to release on an alternative storefront so people who want to degoogle their phones, but F-Droid's policies (most known alternative) make that impossible. (To be clear, it's a perfectly legit choice, I just wish there was a meaningful alternative to Google.)
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I think policies[1] are blocking F-Droid more than anything from being a viable alternative. A bank will likely never release their app as open source, nor will any of the big authentication vendors. This means that you cannot completely replace the Google Play Store with F-Droid if you have to use any of these, you can only use it as an additional store, at which point many won't be bothered. [1]: https://f-droid.or…
I'm not using Google play or any other services on android over 6 years now. You don't need banking apps for making transactions.
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Use droidify a alternative fork of fdroid
Droidify is so vastly superior it’s not even close. Fdroid still has the privileged extension whereas droidify and Neodroid can use Shizuku and other options. I do think that droidify is an unfortunate naming choice though.
Basing something around a Google OS isn’t really an alternative to big tech. Given the reaction I’d expect if a Microsoft Open Source project was the basis of an “alternative to big tech”, I don’t see why something with a Google pedigree should be treated differently.
And listing microG as an opensource alternative to Google services is disingenuous. It still uses the same Google servers to make requests, just the client is open.