Android is becoming more and more Googlified and most apps come with google services. Even the simplest app tracks you in some way. I love F-droid because installing an app from there is like a proof that the app has some "ethics" and will respect you and your privacy.

I think Android has been like a Trojan horse for many of us. It came as an "open and free" platform that attracted many of us, developers and users. But now is reeeeally difficult to escape from the google realm.

We need more alternatives!

Google has no reason nor interest to do that. There are several alternative stores out there, and moving to kill them would alienate several of their partners, as well as possibly open a legal case against them in some jurisdiction. On top of that, size wise, F-Droid doesn't even register for them.

Honestly, this feeling if you have it is more of a delusion of persecution than anything tangible.

> Android is becoming more and more Googlified and most apps come with google services.

That I agree, but sadly it's still one of the better timelines: google play services is an app that they can update to provide better support and services for app, and this was the solution they chose to fix the early days of "no manufacturer update their phone's OS, so new app can't rely on new features".

Is it perfect ? Nope. Is it great ? Nope. But when you have to compose in a world where manufacturer lock their phone so you can't update the OS unless they say so, it was kind of the natural path to move a many features as you could to a library like this.

> I love F-droid because installing an app from there is like a proof that the app has some "ethics" and will respect you and your privacy.

F-Droid is a "repository of free and open source" project, it has nothing to do with respecting user privacy or "having ethics". While there may be some correlation between the two, it's not a given by far.

The F-droid project itself makes a guarantee of not tracking you, and they say they try to check apps they deliver to ensure they don't have abuse of privacy built in, but they go out of their way to make it clear it's not guaranteed and that app may or may not have such abuse in their code.

> I think Android has been like a Trojan horse for many of us. It came as an "open and free" platform that attracted many of us, developers and users. But now is reeeeally difficult to escape from the google realm.

When has Android been more open than today exactly ? And I'm not saying that in a "android is becoming more and more open" way, I'm saying it has always been like this.

> We need more alternatives!

Agreed

I agree that their approach to the problem of updates was the right one. But they went too far - they also closed a vital part of OS from their partners and from users. They could have open-sourced it, but they didn't. I know it makes sense from business POV (Samsung was becoming dangerous to them), but it sucks for opensource alternatives.

helps significantly, its an implementation of playstore APIs including google maps (which you can swap out for OSM) and Google Cloud messaging.

Apps that depend on this stuff will run even without Google Play services, and as a huge bonus you wont be feeding back constant spywar.... "telemetry" data to the Google mothership.

Does wonders for your battery life and ram usage too! using microg doubled my available ram and doubled my battery life too.

I discovered microg only recently and was instantly very interested but I am a heavy user of Cast so that's a big no for me, though I'll happily jump on it once it's done (if it's possible).

It's really sad to see Boris leave, considering the amount of work he puts in. You'd go over to make a little contribution and be feeling yourself, then you look over and see Boris who's made about 9000 commits and you're immensely humbled.

a) lead dev is stepping down

b) lead dev has not groomed a successor

c) this is where I am lost. he says patches welcome... But who will merge if he has no time or has no successor?

d) No one stepped up and lead dev has stopped caring

It's not like he's irreplaceable, even if there's not currently a successor.

That's where you're wrong. Most open source projects have a single maintainer who does the vast majority of the work. It is not uncommon for them to put in 30 hours per week or more for free. In theory someone could step up and replace them - but no one ever does because that requires actual work. Maintaining a large project is a thankless task. People are constantly bitching and complaining why you haven't implemented useless feature X or fixed random bug Y for their commercial product. Github is full of self-entitled whining users who never give back to the community and expect everything for free and fixed in a timely manner.

Large open source projects being driven by unpaid volunteers is simply not viable or sustainable. All big projects (Linux, GCC, LLVM) are sponsored by the likes of IBM, Google, Facebook, Red Hat and Apple. It's the only model that works.

There are viable large volunteer projects. The way they become viable is to interpret single points of failure as damage, and to fix that damage.

That damage definitely includes relying on a single maintainer's ability and knowledge to keep the project going. There's even a term for it-- "bus factor"-- which answers the question of how many of the core developers could get hit by a bus with the project remaining healthy and maintained. If the "bus factor" is 1 and the userbase is large, that's a critical bug in maintainership.

Laptop, SSH, paper :). I wasn't a heavy mobile user in general and only got interested in cellphones when they became more PC-like. So with 3.5 years in F-Droid, I only have about 4-5 years of actual mobile phone usage. Coming from a more old-school unix environment, reverting back.

I think that answers that.

Note to downvoter: That wasn't sarcastic. That does answer that. Chaps like Boris wouldn't go from a relatively open platform like Android where they built an open source market for it and then go to a completely-walled-in garden like iOS where they don't have the power to run whatever they want.

Note: the question is what did he switch to?

Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

Jolla could be nice as well,if he could find one.