You can go download a random, no-name app from F-Droid and be very confident it does what it says on the tin and won't be riddled with ads or spam you with notifications.
I wish there was a 'ranking' feature that periodically (maybe daily?) pulled down star/contributor numbers so you could at least look at projects that are more likely to receive continuing support and have basic hygiene like Dependabot alerts
that said, migrating off so many of the Google-native or phone manufacturer apps has been such a liberatory feeling. I do some community organizing in my free-time and am a huge FOSS evangelist in those spaces. there's so many similar values, namely anti-surveillance, and but for resistance to change and preference for hyperpalatable UX, it's such a natural fit
It "just works".
As opposed to play store apps requiring "play store services" meaning having to sign into play store. It refuses to do so on a FOSS principle so I am literally cut off from a lot of apps.
Aurora store helps but apps that "require play store services" don't work.
Not necessarily. Most apps that require Play Services should work fine even if you’re not logged into Google. You do, however, have to have the “gapps” installed. (Some apps would also actually check whether you’ve installed them from the Google Play store and not, say, Aurora, but from my experience most don’t bother.)
Also, perhaps look into microG? It reimplements the Play Services APIs, but is FOSS and only connects to Google servers when it’s necessary for some functionality (e.g. if you enable push notifications): https://microg.org/
Gapps is what exactly. I have stock android on oneplus, just don't have play store signed in.
Many apps refuse to work.
A good way to sidestep all those issues is getting your “everyday” apps from F-Droid :-) I’m only using Aurora Store for things like banking, taxi, or food delivery apps, and those are usually working great. Some banks are more trigger happy (shame on you, Revolut) while others seem to be okay. I really only miss Google Wallet.
microG folks are working on Play Integrity, but it’s an ongoing battle: https://github.com/microg/GmsCore/issues/2967
The play store results were ATROCIOUS and user hostile, forcing account creation, full screen video ads and other BS.
I remembered I had f-droid and I found a perfect, no bullshit app that does exactly what I needed and no ads.
They are a blessing when auto updates were finally possible with the official F-Droid app.
We need governments to mandate both Apple and Google to allow web installs of apps. No requirement for Apple/Google pay, Apple/Google login, or Apple/Google services.
Total freedom for users, for developers, and for competitors.
This duopoly has fucked over America and the EU by training us to think only these two companies have the right to decide what gets to be on your phone that you pay for.
They've created a moat so strong that it's impossible to compete with Android/iPhone, so the market cannot even have healthy competition.
F-Droid is not the answer. Regulation is.
And I'll have none of this fangirl/fanboy "but my grandma will fall for scams" nonsense.
Google and Amazon and all the platforms have scammy ads on their platforms. Nobody's doing anything about that.
Technology can be sandboxed, permissioned, signed, fingerprinted, attested, scanned, and blacklisted. It's easy to make this safe in the year of our lord 2026. Don't pretend we don't have a million ways to make this safe for your meemaw. She's more likely to fall down the stairs or get a scam call.
Regulate Google. Regulate Apple. Make our phones free.
Why on earth would they let anyone else participate?
Oh, and also they're rolling it back by adding additional hurdles. Directionally, they're starting to remove it.
Both the Democratic and Republican parties have lots of members who are fed up with big tech.
American labor unions are fed up with big tech and both parties are trying to court them.
She didn't "take too long," she did all she could as long as she could, and is still doing it. The problem is that she was opposed by both political parties and the administration, for whom she was a token to hand to the Bernie and AOC people so they could sell out without being called sellouts.
If Biden had promoted Khan not only would she have had vastly more success, but he would have won the election - demented or not. Instead, if you listened to his press conferences, you would have no idea that she existed. He did not support her. He was a tool for financial scammers his entire career. His tiny little state was to domestic financial scams as Ireland is to worldwide tax dodging.
> Both the Democratic and Republican parties have lots of members who are fed up with big tech.
Few members, with no power. All of the leadership is on the big tech payroll. It's the population which hates big tech, and their opinions don't matter.
https://archive.org/details/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_th...
The public are also easily movable over time and under great pressure. The public have become aggressively pro-Big Pharma and Free Trade globalists in a single generation. Libs have become militantly pro-FBI and CIA anti-Soviet warriors. They literally revived the 50's anti-Commie language to describe everything they didn't like, and worship The Lincoln Project, David Frum, and even goddamn Bill Kristol which I never thought would work. It's literally the same generation that reviled them and anyone who would tolerate them just 20 years ago.
They didn't even have to die for success of the submissiveness revolution. They just had to keep watching, and consuming. And you had to threaten their jobs, all the time.
This is not the same as being unable to affect it at all. It can very easily go from being hot garbage to being flaming toxic waste in a tornado when the only people who show up are the ones trying to steal from everyone else.
NewPipe doesn't support it :(
Many of the things you're listing are the exact things the platforms would have to be banned from doing by the regulation you're proposing because they're the mechanisms used to exclude competitors.
If you put all apps in a sandbox then they can't perform certain operations (e.g. install other apps) which inherently means they can't compete in the market for doing those things. If apps have to be signed by the platform then the signing fee becomes the vig they charge to everyone even if they're using a competing store, and both that and scanning/fingerprinting provide a mechanism to revoke competing apps under arbitrary pretexts and otherwise grief their developers and users.
Attestation is the thing you would have to ban the most because it's not just subject to abuse, its very mechanism of operation is to prevent existing apps that use it from running on a competing new system at the point in time when the new system has too few users for all the apps to explicitly add support for it, thereby preventing the competitor from getting enough users for that to ever happen.
But attestation doesn't prevent grandma from getting scammed anyway. When the scammer calls pretending to be the grandchild who needs money for an emergency, they use the official signed bank app on the attestation-passing device to transfer money to the scammer. When the scammer is using a fake bank app to steal the user's credentials, the fake app doesn't require attestation.
The actual problem here is that you want to have someone vetting apps for grandma, but you don't want the platforms to be able to insist it be them rather than F-Droid or Aurora etc. Which the platforms will try to claim is chicken and egg (how do you know you can trust F-Droid?) while hoping you don't notice that they don't actually get you out of it -- how do you know you can trust Google?
And they should still be banned from forcing apps to do it under their arbitrary judgements in order to participate on their platform. That isn't the same thing as preventing them from doing it. Some people honestly think they love walled gardens (they don't), but some people honestly need walled gardens. There should even be competing walled gardens. Let me install the best kids app store for my kids, and the best grandmas app store for my grandma.
I'm also not sure that attestation should be banned at the app store or platform level; it's a service. I'd ban it at the bank and merchant level. Attestation should be a tool for the user of the device (just like everything else on the phone they own.) They should be able to get it to attest to whatever they want to get it to attest to - if I'm a company and I issue my employees phones, I might want to make sure those phones haven't been tampered with. If I'm a parent and I issue my children phones, I might want to make sure those phones haven't been tampered with. The problem comes when arbitrary people are using it to make sure that the user hasn't tampered with their own phone since it came from some official list of blessed companies.
Let me install the best kids app store for my kids, and the best grandmas app store for my grandma. Let me be able to use attestation to make sure their phones haven't been altered since the last time I checked.
> If apps have to be signed by the platform
I'd like to get back to apps being signed by upstream, so we know they actually come from the author. I couldn't care less if the platform offers a service which verifies those signatures, and if almost everyone uses that service. That's just DNS. If your platforms service becomes hostile, there will be cheap/free competitors, just like DNS.
Just agreeing loudly. But the problem with F-Droid is that it is to be a store that has been blessed by Google in order to avoid legal questions. I know that this is not their fault, and that they hate it. I exclusively use F-Droid and don't even have a Google Play account, but if they started making decisions that I couldn't stand (they haven't, ever) I wouldn't have any alternative.
I remember the bullshit settlement of Microsoft antitrust is that they had to place a modal popup do select a default browser (that I never saw, once, in any context.) No reason why the platform's store can't be demoted to one of a number of stores other than that it is a profit spinner.
If they do it and it's enabled by default then they still get to grief their competitors because by default anyone who tries to use the competitor gets a big scary red box that deters adoption and has to jump through a bunch of hoops to get past it. It also thwarts adoption of competing signing alternatives because >90% of people will use whatever the default is even if the alternatives are at least as good.
> some people honestly need walled gardens
"Walled garden" is an Orwellian term. It's meant to imply that someone is curating what's inside it and not letting in things you don't want, and that is indeed a useful thing. But then people use the same term to mean a "garden" that locks you inside of it rather than locking bad things out. The only people who need that are small children and adults with mental illnesses severe enough to justify them having a guardian assigned to make their decisions for them.
> I'm also not sure that attestation should be banned at the app store or platform level; it's a service.
It isn't a service at all. The device contains hardware to sign the state of the device using a protected private key. Solving the problem is very simple -- you ban the device from coming with any private key already installed that the user can't freely extract. Then the root of the chain of trust is the customer's public key, not the vendor's, and whether a device is authorized comes down to whether the user's public key is authorized rather than the vendor's, which in turn makes the system vendor-agnostic.
> That's just DNS. If your platforms service becomes hostile, there will be cheap/free competitors, just like DNS.
DNS is actually a pretty terrible model because the "competition" is a fraud. There are registrars and registries and the registrars compete with each other but the registry still sets the price the registrars pay and the registries have a monopoly over every name in that TLD, so the competition can't actually get you a lower price than the monopoly registry itself sets. And the registries only compete with each other to the extent that you think that example.dental is valid substitute for example.football (no, sorry, those are both the same registry anyway) and to the extent that example.co.uk is a domain you could get instead of example.com rather than needing both. Meanwhile ICANN charges an extortionate amount to anyone who wants to become a registry and the entire system is set up to encourage squatting, to the point that the registries are now doing it themselves rather than making any attempt to impede it.
In general if you want something to work well you need to make it a protocol rather than a service. As soon as you allow a central chokepoint to exist you'll have a troll jumping out from under the bridge and trying to collect tolls.
> Regulate Google. Regulate Apple. Make our phones free.
Result: F-Droid regulated out of existence by government agencies captured by Google and Apple.
On my end the experience was more pleasant on f-droid than on Google. On f-droid I had to manually push some things, in repositories. That I solved in a week or so.
On Google end I had to verify my account. Which was not easy feat.
- had to provide my ID several times, because it got rejected multiple times
- I uploaded driving license
- the verification process was stuck
- only after help ticket google employee pushed it forward
- I had to provide many more details, also had to use banking to pay substantial amount of money
- I currently trying to create app, but it requires 14 testers, and it can still be rejected, if their involvement was too poor
I am wondering what more things Google will invent to make my life worse.
By the way my app: https://github.com/rumca-js/OfflineWebSearch