Bible and Quran apps flagged NSFW by F-Droid

Before the topic is ironically flagged, I guess it is time to have "the talk".

Although you can construct peaceful narratives from both books, and most people are trying to do that, and I commend and appreciate their efforts immensely, fact of the matter is: you are swimming up the current.

The societies depicted in them were highly disturbed, warring tribes. The lessons from stories were harsh, often bordering on sadism. Pretty much everyone grew up with trauma if they survived.

Although you can find little nuggets of wisdom here and there about being humble and patient and not getting on a high horse, calling these books key to the universe is like pushing a camel through a needle hole.

Now should people mark "holy" book apps unsafe? maybe, but it isn't going to save children from being exposed. It will just disturb well meaning people and enrage the not so nice ones.

Hm... that seems strained. The film got an R because of visible blood/gore scenes and violence. There's nothing controversial about that at all, swap the script with an explicitly atheist one that rejects the divinity of Christ and crucifies a 100% mortal man in exactly the same way and you'd get an obvious R, because crucifixion is a violent act absent of any context.

And if you really want to go with the old testament having NSFW themes in its text (which it does), that seems like a frightenly slippery slope. If slavery and genocide are verboten, are you going to rule out Uncle Tom's Cabin or the Diary of Anne Frank too? History textbooks? Where does it stop?

I suspect your response is going to be that you think the bible is treating those subjects in an inappropriate way. Which is to say, you think it's a Bad Book and want to censor it for its meaning, not its content.

I mean, I happen to agree that it's a bad book. But... yikes, as it were. No, we don't do that.

The consistency is that the presence of a Reddit app or a Youtube app per se doesn't reveal too much about the device owner.

A Bible reader/tracker app, a Quran learning app... now that's where you enter a more sensitive area, religious beliefs are among the higher protected classes of data under GDPR.

And now there's a few potential threat sources: family members snooping through their relative's phones, border control snooping through phones (remember, apostasy is a crime punishable by death in some Muslim countries), or the worst one, random ad SDKs pulling in and distributing lists of installed APKs and pushing these to the mothership, where the data can then be hoovered up by anyone willing to pay for it, with the same result [1].

I wish I didn't need to write this, but it's not just some random Middle East theocracy going for its citizens as usual for the crime of not believing into the god of choice, we're seeing people being threatened for their faith (or lack of it) right in the United States of America, right now.

[1] https://theintercept.com/2025/05/22/intel-agencies-buying-da...

Would you like to link to the reddit app or a violent FPS game not flagged as NSFW on F-droid? I don't believe either of those actually exists.

And again, nothing was removed from the store here, only marked as NSFW.

This should have been the end of it.

> The current NSFW anti-feature definition is listed here: Anti-Features | F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository and copied below for reference:

> This Anti-Feature is applied to an app that contains content that the user may not want to be publicized or visible everywhere. The marked app may contain nudity, profanity, slurs, violence, intense sexuality, political incorrectness, or other potentially disturbing subject matter. This is especially relevant in environments like workplaces, schools, religious and family settings. The name comes from the Internet term “Not safe for work”.

> The key words here are the user. Apps should only be assigned this anti-feature if the app contains content that the user may not want publicized or visible elsewhere. Most, if not all users of Bible apps would indeed want the content of the apps to be publicized and visible elsewhere, so this anti-feature should not apply to Bible apps according to this definition.