Paid apps: no problem. If it’s good, I’ll pay.
Subscription: maybe, if it’s worth it.
Ads: F-Droid can fuck right off. If they do that, they’d be a miserable bunch of sellouts.
Yeah, as long as the payment method is FOSS, secure, and works as intended, I have no serious issue with pay-once software being introduced. There are apps from F-Droid I would pay a few dollars to use if required, and I’d be happy if it meant more and higher-quality software.
I feel like the freemium model they mention with subscriptions is just begging for F-Droid to be enshittified. F-Droid would really, really need to prove themselves with pay-once applications first for my liking before moving onto something so much more drastic.
And then ads are just a non-starter. Ads only exist to be psychologically manipulative, they’re obnoxious as fuck in the present day, they’re a privacy nightmare, and they’re a vector for malware. I would see it as a betrayal of what F-Droid does for me, and I would actively see F-Droid as being sellouts who are only marginally better than using Aurora at that point.
There are no FOSS payment methods. In fact, you’re probably lucky to find a payment processor that will handle FOSS stuff at all.
https://github.com/monero-project/monero/blob/master/LICENSE
Monero is MIT style license, so it’s FOSS
Gnu taler?
Well the problem with ads is people don’t want to pay for stuff period. And things cost money so here we are in our current state with ads being used to pay for everything online.
pretty sure the venn diagram of f-droid users and adblocking users is such a huge overlap that this may not pay off too well.
If they added ads I probably wouldn’t even notice because of ad blocker lol.
Targeted advertising is a huge no. No more of that.
Static advertising I can accept, but then who’s responsible for vetting ads? I don’t want scams displayed everywhere.
Devs definitely need ways to support themselves and sustain development. I’ve shared this screenshot from the app Secure Tether before:
I like to chip in a few bucks to my most used apps/services that are donationware, but after all the middlemen take their cut, the devs are left with peanuts. This IMO is the biggest hurdle when it comes to online monetization. A less expensive way to donate will certainly help.
Additionally, there are people who cannot or will not pay for apps, and I don’t want to exclude them from being able to use an app/service they need.
Monetization like how Reddit Gold was and how Discord Nitro is are some of my favorites. Few extra perks and cosmetic features for paying users. Free users are still able to use the main product at no cost and you can gift them Gold/Nitro if they aren’t able to purchase it themselves. I don’t know how that would translate into an app store model though.
I never expected this. What a shame.
Edit: the ads part are not an acceptable add-on for me, as someone who respects privacy and foss. I don’t know of a single foss payment processor (lmk if one exists). A lot of people here are saying “pay what you want”, but it’s that way now, with GitHub donation links; we don’t need this in the fdroid app.
Apparently they don’t understand that the F in F-Droid is for FOSS.
I’m 100% all for adding a repository with paid apps, but it’s not and shouldn’t be marketed as F-Droid.
Paid and FOSS are not mutually exclusive. You can always build packages yourself if you don’t want to pay. A well executed implementation might allow some projects to drop or reduce their play store efforts.
Paid and FOSS are mutually exclusive. Open source and FOSS aren’t.
But how, you ask? Free means having the right to do whatever you want with your copy including make copies and redistribute. Thus, how can it be free while demanding a payment before allowing usage?
That’s why I said, FOSS Droid? Nah! Open Source Droid? Knock yourself out. I’m actually looking forward to supporting some of the developers of apps I love.
One of the things you’re free to do is pay for a copy of the binary. Therefore you haven’t shown that FOSS and paid are mutually exclusive. 😁
You’re right.
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I’m a bit of a fence sitter on the actual issue, I love F-Droid as is and fear change, but I’ll say as someone who thinks they’ll release on Google Play in the general future, the thing that pisses me off most about Google Play is they have a “repetitive content policy” which disincentivizes you from releasing a full paid app and a demo app. The main issue is, I don’t want my app to categorize as “in-app purchases” if the only purchase is the “unlock full version”, because that doesn’t distinguish my app from any unethical whale-hunting casino-for-children microtransaction apps, and I don’t want my app to claim to be free if it’s just a demo.
At least, from a pro-user, communicate everything clearly, perspective, I feel that Google is compelling devs to dark-pattern-by-default on this subject.
LMK if I’m wrong about any of that.
If they become the Play store, why wouldn’t I just use the Play store?
I guess most won’t bother to read the full post and will instead react negatively to the title. Having read the entire thing I am fine with it and would be happy to see more direct competition for the Play Store. The ad thing is only a problem if the store doesn’t include a filter to easily hide ad-supported apps.
Everyone here is bummed out, but fails to see the upside.
To rival the Play Store, there needs to be an alternative package manager on Android which hosts proprietary apps.
The outcome is a decrease in Googles revenue and eases the hold they have on Android as a Play Store dependant operating system.
If F-Droid didn’t step up, Epic would be the only contender to the Play Store. At least this way we know there will be some degree of democracy.
I don’t even read this as allowing proprietary apps. They are investigating allowing different monetarisation methods for open source apps and building open source tooling to help with that.
My bad, poor choice of wording on my part.
When I’m talking about proprietary in this context, I don’t mean closed source, I mean it as in the financial sense of not being copy-left, or under any sort of licence which permits free adoption of their code.
If anything this would just give me suggestions on apks of paid apps to sideload for free
That’ll be a big nope, thanks.
Edit: 20 years from now, FDroid will be worse than the Play store and we’ll have a “new” store that functions like FDroid does currently.
Don’t wait, install Droid-ify now.
That sounds kind of ify to me.
I’m not sure I can be as pliant as others here. Being less of an activist and more of a user of convenience, if I am making PayPal payments somebody better give me a reason why I’m not just using the same store that came in by default with my phone.
How much convenience do you really gain from using the Play Store instead of F-Droid? And is that convenience worth the developers of your applications receiving a smaller cut of your payment or being charged additional fees by Google? Is it worth contributing to Google’s monopoly over the Android app landscape?
Those are all advantages for developers and activists. End users don’t care or need to care. As an end user the only reason for keeping two stores in my phone is that one does a thing the other one doesn’t, functionally. That’s why Samsung can keep putting their dumb store on their phones forever but people just don’t engage with it.
Now, unlike the Samsung store when I was on a Samsung phone, F-Droid is something I do use, because there is a clear use case there: Play for all the commercial apps, F-Droid for non-commercial alternatives and a stuff that Google doesn’t allow on Play for whatever reason.
If F-Droid wants to make a push for being my only store, they better provide all the functionality, support, variety and convenience Play does, because Play comes pre-installed. If I can’t go to F-Droid to be guaranteed to not have to deal with payments or MTX, then it better have every single thing I need. I’m talking every game, every app, every legacy piece of software. It better have the same one-click payment convenience I get from Google Pay. And it better still have a default option to search for completely free apps, or I’ll have to go find a F-Droid alternative that does that for when I want to be sure I’m not getting any hidden fees with my app.
I suppose that’s true, if you consider anything outside of your personal and immediate financial gain as “activism”. I would like to think there are more people out there who actually care about ethical consumerism and contributing to small and independent business.
If F-Droid wants to make a push for being my only store
I didn’t read anything in the post that suggests this is their strategy. F-Droid wants to support small developers and challenge Google’s monopoly in the app store space. Nowhere does it suggest they are expecting every application on the Play Store to also be available on F-Droid, so I’m not sure why you would assume that their goal here is to completely replace the Play Store. This is about competition, not market domination.
To clarify, I’m making a two step argument: One, I will only install a second store on my phone if that store serves a specific use case I don’t get from the first one (which is Play by default, since it comes preinstalled). Two, if F-Droid is going to sacrifice the clear message that it’s the place for noncommercial apps, then it must carry the same apps Play does, it needs to carry ALL of them so I can make it my default store.
So I understand what you’re saying, my point is that this is not a viable value proposition for me. F-Droid is positioned as the safe place for noncommercial software. If it’s no longer going to be that, then it’s picking the same fight with Google Play that the Samsung or Amazon stores do, and it’s just as likely to lose that fight. The reason it isn’t doing that at the moment isn’t its moral high ground, it’s that it has a clear position that doesn’t overlap with Play’s: noncommercial software.
I’m not sure why you think F-Droid is moving away from supporting FOSS software, though. The post made it pretty clear this is about allowing greater freedom for those developers who want to sell or monetise their work. Nowhere does it state or suggest that F-Droid will only feature paid or proprietary apps going forward. As I said in another comment, if there are filters within the F-Droid app store then there is no reason to be concerned by this news. This isn’t an all-or-nothing situation where F-Droid has to sacrifice all of the things that make it great to become a direct competitor to the Play Store.
I think this train of thought fundamentally misunderstands how usability works and how positioning works. But hey, I don’t own this, I don’t have a stake on this and I already have F-Droid installed. At a glance it seems like a bad move that makes a thing I use less useful and more like a bunch of things I don’t use. We’ll see where it goes.
I think this train of thought fundamentally misunderstands how usability works and how positioning works.
How so? You seem to be making a lot of assumptions about the intentions of the project without citing anything from the post itself.
We need a way to support foundational open source projects like browsers, a open source subscription platform might be the way.
Start off with apps that are already subscription like vpns.
For VPNs, though, you’re generally paying through the VPN provider, not through the app store to have access to the app itself.
It wouldn’t be too much work for a open source friendly provider to accept subscriptions via f-droid, if they wanted to do it.
I see many issues with that / for them.
But I’m not against experimenting and finding out. We maybe need some free and open monetizing options, maybe also ad platforms. That would give people some more options, instead of relying on Google and Apple all the time.
Please just make it respect user privacy, be FLOSS and categorize the Apps, so it’s clear to me what is and what isn’t licensed Free Software.
No thank you. This is a slippery slope.
