Comment by AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world on Street-Complete, like Pokemon Go but for good.

I first learned of Street-Complete here and I really like it.

It’s satisfying to walk around, complete little tasks, and get prizes, scratching a similar itch to Pokemon Go.

Stuck waiting for someone? Add opening hours for a few local businesses.

Have a long walk ahead of you? See if you can add/check house addresses as fast as you can walk.

Want to walk off a few beers before heading home? Complete some tasks in the bar street.

Its a very constructive way to “be right” on the internet.

Why does F-Droid tell me that the app has features that I may not like?

If you expand the description it will be written out for you.

It is due to being bound to a specific mapping Ecosystem and using specific non Foss middleware

Because it tracks real time location and uses the internet. Unless it’s an app like this where you explicitly want that functionality, that’s usually a sign of some sort of tracking mechanism for advertising or nefarious purposes.

That just is not what F-Droid is saying. Why would you even claim that?

It is because it has what F-Droid considers anti-features. In this case, even tho the code is open source, it seems to require a non-libre dependency to measure distances. See https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/-/issues/2627 and https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete/pull/3709#issuecomment-1039710672.

F-Droid is very strict with what it considers an anti-feature, and Android is very restrictive to properly work without at least one closed source library (thanks, Google), so I say you can ignore this, but it depends on you.

Also, openstreetmap itself is a centralized eco system, even though you could theoreticallly host one yourself.

@Danitos @AngryCommieKender @openstreetmap

IIRC that was pulled out of the app into a separate companion app (StreetMeasure) ages ago.

F-Droid is complaining about “non-changeable or non-free network service”.

It doesn’t seem to say _which_ network service this is, which I think is quite scummy behaviour TBH.

to me it looks like it’s pointing out the network “services”:

and to me it also looks like they also say what the sercives are needed for. however its in german for this device.

update:

it sounds a bit weird that according to this info not the app is uploading new informations, but westnordost.de would, which suggests that they also upload/steal your openstreetmap password to their servers instead of using the app with locally stored access credentials to do that. but this could also be just a bad wording/misunderstanding/translation thing as obviously the party where you download the quests also need to know which quests are already solved which would be the data that is uploaded to them.

@smb @openstreetmap
In my browser that can’t be expanded and clicking on it just takes you to their definition of “Non-Free Network Services” https://f-droid.org/en/docs/Anti-Features/#NonFreeNet

So they’re complaining that an OpenStreetMap app is tied to OpenStreetMap related services and hiding this in a way that makes it look worse than it is.

This dramatically lowers my opinion of F-Droid.

maybe the browser version isn’t fully complete, or there might be a thing with css, bad browser specialities, just a bug in the webpage (did you check if it does show up in page source plaintext maybe?)

i would see the warning "bound to a specific non-changeable service as a good thing, as it would promote completely-free apps like (i think) fluffy chat, which does neither depend on a specific matrix service nor on a specific push service (i.e. it uses ntfy for push when installed, and if i choosed to use my own instance it would - i think - use that instead of the default ntfy.sh) in theory everyone could run something like osm and in practice this could come in very handy in the future one day, but currently IMHO only one osm exists, so maybe its not that bad for an app to be bound to it, but its always good to know if an app is bound or free to choice, same i would like to know if its maybe multi-account (which fluffy-chat is), but single-account-apps are so very common and thus this is not seen as an anti-feature which is completely ok for me.

but also in this case here the app is not only bound to osm, but to two other non-changeable services too, thus the warning is due even if label-app-bound-to-label-service would NOT be considered an anti-feature.

@smb @openstreetmap
If I view source I get “phrase not found” on a search for “Jawg” . It also doesn’t show up in Firefox’s Inspector, which I _think_ includes dynamically loaded stuff.

Just checked Chrome and Microsoft Edge and they don’t show it either. What are you using to actually get the detail?

I wouldn’t mind F-Droid’s warning if they gave me the details, but for some reason they don’t seems to be accessible to me.

1/2

@smb

RE the update. That seems odd that they’d do that. I thought the quests were now being generated on the fly after downloading the raw data direct from OSM (previously it was an overpass query per quest IIRC).

I don’t know why they’d be bouncing uploads through a remote server when OSM already has the capacity to reject a conflict.

I don’t currently have access to something that monitors raw traffic to check.

if they changed it at some day, maybe the change wasn’t updated in f-droid afterwards. anyway, my osm account was “empty” before, because i just didn’t manage to finish my first map update try (which was in 2012 o_O ) now i’ll try again and thus they get a trust advantage based on doing good and it looks easy. trust advantage until i read or experience something bad of course, but i’ll try it these days.

Non-Free Network Services

This Anti-Feature is applied to apps that promote or depend entirely on a Non-Free network service, or any service which is impossible, or not easy to replace. Replacement requires changes to the app or service. This antifeature would not apply, if there is a simple configuration option that allows pointing the app to a running instance of an alternative, publicly available, self-hostable, free software server solution.

Because you can’t change it from using OpenStreetMap.org to an alternative self hosted site.

Everything #OpenStreetMap related is welcome: software releases, showing of your work, questions about how to tag something, as long as it has to do with OpenStreetMap or OpenStreetMap-related software.

OpenStreetMap is a map of the world, created by people like you and free to use under an open license.

Join OpenStreetMap and start mapping: https://www.openstreetmap.org.

There are many communication channels about OSM, many organized around a certain country or region. Discover them on https://openstreetmap.community

https://mapcomplete.org is an easy-to-use website to view, edit and add points (such as shops, restaurants and others)

https://learnosm.org/en/ has a lot of information for beginners too.

Street-Complete, like Pokemon Go but for good.(lemmy.world)

Non-Free Network Services

OpenStreetMap community

!openstreetmap@lemmy.ml

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