Google could make a positive impact by introducing new features that help users seamlessly fund their favourite open source apps, right from their Google accounts. GitHub has recently introduced a similar initiative called GitHub Sponsors [1].

> Taking a step back; it is pretty weird to have apps opening links to web pages that take your credit card number.

There is nothing weird about accepting payments outside of Google Play, and it is allowed if the payment does not result in buying a product that is used within the app. Buying a movie ticket, or operating an online store with a third-party payment processor are perfectly fine use cases which are allowed on Google Play.

[1] https://github.com/sponsors

The additional feature can just be text that says thanks for the money, feel free to give us more money in the future.

For instance, D-Sub is available for free on F-Droid but costs something like ~$4 on Google Play.

AndOTP is available on F-Droid, not sure about Wireguard but I'd assume so.

This is great solution to sustain the app developmant and spread the word about F-Droid!

at some point someone gonna pay for the datacenters, the wires and all these stuff needed for software distribution.

Try running your own site on your own servers and paying for the data traffic and then do the math.

30% is ok

Say app has 10MiB, 100,000 downloads is ~1TiB, 1 have a 1GiB/20GiB VPS with that monthly bandwidth which I pay $1/month.

So distributing 100,000 copies costs $1.

I'll give Google $1 for distribution of 100000 copies of my app. Fair?

Yeah, I'll give Google a bit more for payment processing, perhaps. But actual distribution costs nothing really, for most apps.

not every developer is willing to learn and spend time configuring & managing a server. that's not the same skill set.

First we're talking about the free app for a good cause, so you're already providing an app for free, so you've assumed some sacrifice for others for whatever reason, and setting up a website for it may be comparatively negligible part of the whole cost to you in terms of time.

In my case I would have already had an infrastructure and knowledge how to host things, so it might take a few minutes to put some new files up on a machine used for other projects. Additional costs being pretty much 0.

And there may be benefits (even if I didn't have the knowledge and infra) like learning something new, or now having an infrastructure and knowledge that helps you save expenses or time in the future. So that would offset the costs. You can't just look at costs alone.

I remember that being a problem in the app store for windows phones. Lots of fake apps that used the VLC name and logo, for example.

Google should be thankful in the first place that developers are making apps on their ecosystem (doubly so for open source apps), because without them, Android and the Google Play Store itself isn't worth much. It's their part of the deal to stay relevant.

Edit: I'm referring to https://opensource.org/osd

Edit2: Having read round some more, it seems you possibly could sell a different version, of course you would have to offer the source code which others would be free to give away, (this is for the gpl). I don't know if the discrimination clause of the Open Source Definition would come into play though.

> Open source developers shouldn't be forced to lock away additional functionality in their apps

I don't think functionality was what was suggested. Literally cosmetics. A nice banner that says thanks for supporting the project would likely be sufficient.

Edit: Although I agree it shouldn't be required. As a workaround it doesn't seem too bad though.

Until some morning when suddenly, they're not!

Annoying how hard it is to be independent of FAANG control.

Do they ban all donation verbiage or just IAPs that do nothing?

1: https://f-droid.org/

Doesn't Google take a whopping 30% cut of the purchase price for both in-app purchases or direct purchase of the app itself? That's a pretty big bite out of the donation.

Unless I’m mistaken, this is only possible if you’re donating to a registered charity. Many view open source as more noble, but OSS developers don’t magically get a different rule book :)

(I don’t disagree with your perspective here, but the prevailing sentiment in this thread seems to be that OSS developers should get a different rule book.)

This is not tax advice; consult a tax professional for your own personal situation.

I contribute to projects that are committed to never locking away features behind licenses or in-app purchases, because most open-source projects in that space eventually went down that route.

At the bottom of an “About” page:

Paypal: email-adress

Venmo: open-source-proj-maker

BTC/ETH: <address>

If someone is not a 501(c)3 org and just a solo person, why do donations have to go through a particular website link?

It seems like the same thing (getting money) can be accomplished without needing to use links from an app.

My immediate thought at reading the title "So sell a supporter animation that plays in an about menu".