cross-posted from: https://r.nf/post/1771956

Thoughts?

156 points
*

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.

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47 points

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.

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11 points

There are no FOSS payment methods. In fact, you’re probably lucky to find a payment processor that will handle FOSS stuff at all.

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6 points
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https://github.com/monero-project/monero/blob/master/LICENSE

Monero is MIT style license, so it’s FOSS

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1 point

Love it or hate it, Bitcoin is an open source payment method.

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1 point

Gnu taler?

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1 point

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.

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12 points
*

If they were talking about Privacy-Preserving Attribution like Firefox is experimenting with supporting on MDN, that would be one thing, but it doesn’t sound like that’s what F-Droid is talking about.

Not only are privacy and data protection founding principles for both Mobifree and F-Droid, the use of tracking-based in-app advertising poses a moral dilemma as well. If someone wants to gain access to an app, but does not have the financial means to purchase it, they can use it at a different kind of price - their user data.

F-Droid is also considering ads that contain no tracking, which removes that moral dillema, IMO:

It should be mentioned that it is possible to include in-app advertising without user tracking. However the lead conversion ratio drops dramatically, so the efficacy of this approach is not nearly as high.

That’s basically what PPA is, advertising without tracking. If advertisers want to pay for it, then great.

Edit: Downvoting without responding like

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27 points
*

F-Droid is also considering ads that contain no tracking, which removes that moral dillema, IMO:

You assume everybody is okay with ads.

I’m not. My brainspace has been highjacked since I was a little kid by stupid advertisers. To this day, I remember ads for products that have disappeared decades ago and that I never gave a shit about at any point in my life.

Why are advertisers allowed to force their shit into my head?

I hate ads. I’m utterly intolerant of advertising. I hate the tracking and the malware that come with ads, but I hate ads even more. There are no moral ads. The advertisement industry is a despicable leech that needs to die.

If F-Droid springs this shit on me, I swear to god I’m gonna start having murderous thoughts…

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2 points

My brainspace has been highjacked since I was a little kid by stupid advertisers. To this day, I remember ads for products that have disappeared decades ago and that I never gave a shit about at any point in my life.

Why are advertisers allowed to force their shit into my head?

I hate ads. I’m utterly intolerant of advertising.

This. So much this.

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2 points
*

Would you pay a monthly fee for everything? YouTube Facebook Reddit random site you visit. We would need like a found in our browser and every site you visited took there chunk out or something like that. People seem to forget this stuff costs money to run.

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11 points

The first quote is taken out of context:

Not only are privacy and data protection founding principles for both Mobifree and F-Droid, the use of tracking-based in-app advertising poses a moral dilemma as well. If someone wants to gain access to an app, but does not have the financial means to purchase it, they can use it at a different kind of price - their user data.

For me this reads as them explaining and condemning that dilemma, instead of considering it as an option for F-Droid.

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8 points

Sorry, I was trying to save space, but I can see how only starting the quote in the middle of the paragraph is misleading. I edited the quote to include the context.

For me this reads as them explaining and condemning that dilemma, instead of considering it as an option for F-Droid.

IMO, it read more like acknowledging concerns around ads but not explicitly condemning it. But I’m not going to form an opinion about it until they do something, or at least make their intentions clearer.

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-4 points

Because ads in Firefox went so well…

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7 points
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ads in Firefox

That’s a common misconception. For users like myself who use uBlock Origin, Firefox supporting PPA changes nothing at all (as pointed out by the Firefox CTO). The only users who would see an ad that uses PPA are users who would otherwise see ads that use tracking.

That is why the EFF supports it.

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8 points

Did you read the linked article?

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1 point
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Deleted by creator
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79 points

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.

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4 points

This is about them offering the developers of ads they deploy in fdroid options for revenue. Not ads in fdroid itself.

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4 points

If they added ads I probably wouldn’t even notice because of ad blocker lol.

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0 points

I might uninstall F-droid today…

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58 points

No thank you. This is a slippery slope.

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13 points

Yep, fuck that noise.

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13 points

If you want devs to make apps without any monetization you’re limiting the number of devs that will develop for your platform.

Free only means you only allow passion projects that people work on as a side project or only the developers rich enough to have retired already.

Nobody who is struggling to get by can spend all their time developing a free app that has 0 monetization.

So they monetize on Google Play.

If you care about breaking Google’s control of Android you should cheer on another paid marketplace, especially one out of the clutches of Amazon.

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21 points

If you want devs to make apps without any monetization you’re limiting the number of devs that will develop for your platform.

So?

The point of fdroid is not to have evil pieces of shit injecting their apps with spyware and ads.

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6 points

Developers deserve to be paid for their time though…

Sure for many it’s nothing but a hobby and they’re happy to create something for free. But that doesn’t mean every developer needs to do the same.

And yes ads are a privacy nightmare and putting them into your app is bad. So either you only use apps from hobbyists or you pay for access (whether that be a set price for a finished product or a subscription for a service).

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12 points

F-Droid is literally just a repository. Linux manages it just fine to have repo driven “store” apps.

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7 points

Cryptomator is available on F-Droid but you still have to purchase a license to use it, although the dev has to maintain all the licensing and payment infrastructure which can be a roadblock for some.

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3 points

Free means freedom not cost.

The problem with online payments is that they compromise privacy and require use of proprietary software and centralized servers

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36 points
*

What the fuck? Did F-Droid change ownership (sell out to a hedge fund or something)? Or did I somehow time-travel to April 1, or what?

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19 points

Well, some members of F-Droid’s central board resigned nearly a year ago, citing issues that had been ongoing for a long time prior. Statement posted to Gitlab.

I’ve been slowly moving my app installations over to Obtainium ever since, and have been using NeoStore for the remaining F-Droid/Izzy installations.

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1 point

I really hope this is a poorly timed joke

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31 points

If it is a pay what you want model I am all for it. This would be similar to how elementary OS st

The problem with a fixed price is you have to always calibrate it according to the economy of the user’s geolocation. What is cheap for a person from a developed world may be unaffordable for a third world county.

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6 points

I would be totally down with a pay what you want model with most proceeds going to devs.

Basically a prompt to donate to the devs with 5-10% going to the package manager.

Some apps I’ve used are totally worth $1-$5

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3 points

Maybe it should be a pay what you want but it doesn’t charge you for a week. So you can use the app and then decide whether to up the price if it’s useful or cancel the payment if it doesn’t work for you.

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2 points

I like the delayed charge since you can’t return a donation.

Something like a default of 14 days adjustable to 0-30 or reoccurring (default annual).

This is all turning into a nice idea into an alt android package manager you can sub to repos.

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