F-droid gets many things right (e.g. verifiable builds), but it's just not usable in practice. Installing applications is a rare event, updating them is frequent, and needs to disrupt the user as little as possible. Android used to not allow alternative app stores to update apps without user interaction, but now supports this through UPDATE_PACKAGES_WITHOUT_USER_ACTION, which doesn't seem to be supported by F-droid.…
>So it's manual clicking for each update. You need to install the F-Droid Privileged Extension, or use a ROM that has it pre-installed. That way it can update apps without user interaction.
No user accounts, by design
51–60 of 147 posts
Re: No user accounts, by design
#52I try to follow this as much as possible, but at some point when providing a paid service you run into the problem that you need to track whether the user has paid for the software or not.
So even though my software does not require user accounts, it requires a serial number to activate all features. That serial number can be linked to the purchaser, so in theory my app could do really invasive tracking. (It doesn't, but my users have to rely on my word)
How can one fix this? I would love for my software to somehow anonymously check whether the user paid for it, and isn't running it on more than X devices, but I'm not sure how this could be done without revealing the users identity.
Re: No user accounts, by design
#53I've always wished that mobile app "stores" worked more like Linux package managers.
Still hopeful to get a proper Linux phone someday.
The PinePhone (Pro) and its ecosystem looks promising, no? I'd say we're closer than ever to it being a capable daily driver, certainly by the next iteration.
Re: No user accounts, by design
#54I try to follow this as much as possible, but at some point when providing a paid service you run into the problem that you need to track whether the user has paid for the software or not. So even though my software does not require user accounts, it requires a serial number to activate all features. That serial number can be linked to the purchaser, so in theory my app could do really invasive tracking. (It doesn't,…
Mullvad allows Bitcoin purchases of tokens, which can then be used as a serial for the VPN that works for the time period you've purchased. Users can change tokens any time. That's probably close to what you're already doing.
Re: No user accounts, by design
#55F-droid gets many things right (e.g. verifiable builds), but it's just not usable in practice. Installing applications is a rare event, updating them is frequent, and needs to disrupt the user as little as possible. Android used to not allow alternative app stores to update apps without user interaction, but now supports this through UPDATE_PACKAGES_WITHOUT_USER_ACTION, which doesn't seem to be supported by F-droid.…
Not really a counter point because you mention a lot of other issues with f-droid that sound valid (I haven't used it myself) - but as a tangent regarding auto updates, I disable them basically everywhere because I seem to have buggy experiences too often if I allow stuff to update all the time. I then go through the list of updates in the Play Store once a week or so and install those that I think might improve app…
> In the last handful of years there have been 2 or 3 Windows updates that either permanently erased data or caused some other insane issues.
I'm still mad about the Windows update that permanently stopped Windows from working with my Bose headphones. The headphones continued to work perfectly with anything that wasn't running Windows.
Re: No user accounts, by design
#56F-droid gets many things right (e.g. verifiable builds), but it's just not usable in practice. Installing applications is a rare event, updating them is frequent, and needs to disrupt the user as little as possible. Android used to not allow alternative app stores to update apps without user interaction, but now supports this through UPDATE_PACKAGES_WITHOUT_USER_ACTION, which doesn't seem to be supported by F-droid.…
Not really a counter point because you mention a lot of other issues with f-droid that sound valid (I haven't used it myself) - but as a tangent regarding auto updates, I disable them basically everywhere because I seem to have buggy experiences too often if I allow stuff to update all the time. I then go through the list of updates in the Play Store once a week or so and install those that I think might improve app…
>I look over and install Windows updates once a way-too-long
I thought you needed some kind of registry hacks or something to disable automatic updates since W10, can you elaborate on how you got it to stop pestering you?
Re: No user accounts, by design
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
>So it's manual clicking for each update. You need to install the F-Droid Privileged Extension, or use a ROM that has it pre-installed. That way it can update apps without user interaction.
Ah, but it looks like that means you need to be rooted?
Yes the Android OS requires you to be rooted to add the feature if your image wasn't built with the privileged extension.
Re: No user accounts, by design
#58F-droid gets many things right (e.g. verifiable builds), but it's just not usable in practice. Installing applications is a rare event, updating them is frequent, and needs to disrupt the user as little as possible. Android used to not allow alternative app stores to update apps without user interaction, but now supports this through UPDATE_PACKAGES_WITHOUT_USER_ACTION, which doesn't seem to be supported by F-droid.…
I'm OK with manual updates, I disabled autoupdates on Google Play too because I can't trust the apps to actually update them and not remove some functionality or worse.
You are right that the download / install process is very quirky. It often fails to provide the right feedback about what's going on and errors are common. Is it downloading, is it installing, did it get my touch? However I really want to install from there and not from Google.
Re: No user accounts, by design
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not really a counter point because you mention a lot of other issues with f-droid that sound valid (I haven't used it myself) - but as a tangent regarding auto updates, I disable them basically everywhere because I seem to have buggy experiences too often if I allow stuff to update all the time. I then go through the list of updates in the Play Store once a week or so and install those that I think might improve app…
> In the last handful of years there have been 2 or 3 Windows updates that either permanently erased data or caused some other insane issues. I'm still mad about the Windows update that permanently stopped Windows from working with my Bose headphones. The headphones continued to work perfectly with anything that wasn't running Windows.
Out of interest, have you tested them on win11? One of the later win10 updates broke my Bluetooth headphones (actually, Bluetooth in general became pretty buggy), but they 'magically' unbroke after the upgrade
Re: No user accounts, by design
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Note that the world's biggest content site, Wikipedia, allows anonymous edits and always has. Not really. You can't edit Wikipedia from a VPN (even with a user account!), and I think they ban most datacenters. The edits aren't really anonymous if they publicly associate with a piece of PII that, for most people, directly maps to their name and home address.
Oh? My current IP is 2601:646:4300:758:f676:3f1b:8b5:42a. Please show me how to turn that into my name and home address. Thanks!
The person y'all are downvoting is not technically incorrect if they're in the EEA, as this is exactly how GDPR treats it. Because there exists a party that can map it (your ISP), it's PII under that law. Of course this may be different in other jurisdictions.