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Comment by jmascart | Hacker News Reader

Why is it so rare for mobile apps to be open source? I've skimmed the top 100 free iOS apps, and none of them (besides chrome) are open source.

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Here are a few more that my team works on:

https://github.com/mozilla-mobile

Both Firefox and Focus are in the top 100. Enjoy.

How many of the top 100 websites are open source? Sure, it's not zero, but large open source production products are rare to begin with.

Being websites they're a "view source" away? Sure a few might be obfuscated/minimized - but in general not to the point that they are very hard to learn from and experiment with...

Executables are just a hex editor away as well. Facebook.com's source is about as helpful as looking at Chrome.exe when learning to code or learn about them in any detailed way.

That's only the source of the generated document you are viewing.

Of the top 100 websites (I got tired of counting) in the USA, the obvious open source ones from a quick review are,

    4. Wikipedia
    6. Reddit
    33. Wikia
    37. Wordpress
    40. Twitch
    60. Github
    61. Reddit Uploads

I'm not counting Craigslist, though its infrastructure is documented and open source, because you can't just download the engine and run it yourself without a lot of glue. Likewise Pirate Bay. There are probably more marginal cases like that among the top.

And there are open data projects like Stack Exchange and Stack Overflow that essentially publish all their content on open source licenses and offer free download dumps. Both are top 100 sites.

Then there are the news sites available without paywall. Those are just basic blogs with photos, video, and text accessible to the public. They aren't open source; you have to pay to republish their content. But there is essentially no special software you can't match with any open source CMS at CNN or the Washington Post or HuffPo or many, many other top sites.

I'd say the solid majority of the top 100 sites don't have any special closed source software, except for the proprietary search engine projects: Google, Bing, Yahoo, their respective mail and document suite projects, and the like.

In what way is Twitch open source? They provide some tools to help you manage uploads and streams, but Twitch is very much closed source.

GitHub is also very much closed source.

Wow. I never knew that Reddit was open sauce: https://github.com/reddit/reddit That's an eye-opener! I always assumed Wikia was Mediawiki powered but apparently nope: https://github.com/Wikia I guess it's a separate entity to Wikipedia. Twitch don't appear to be open source but they do promote open source clients? https://www.twitch.tv/broadcast

IIRC not all of reddit is open source. The code that is in charge of vote fuzzing/scoring and spam is closed source.

Apple is hostile to open source. The Apple store terms of service are incompatible with GPL. And to develop applications you need to be using macOS on apple hardware and you need to purchase a developer license as well.

Apple is not hostile to open source. GPL you get wrong way around. While it is true that you need Mac, you don't need to purchase developer license to develop. Only to distribute through App Store.

> GPL you get wrong way around

What did you mean here?

> Only to distribute through App Store.

Which is a big deal, since by default iPhones are locked down and can only install things from the app store.

You can install on your own phone straight from Xcode. You don't need to pay Apple for that.

But the app will only work for 7 days before you have to re-install, unless you have an active paid developer account.

VLC got around the GPL incompatibility by dual-licensing their code with the Mozilla Public License

I don't think re-licensing under a more permissive license really counts here...

Yet almost all apps that I use are open source. OsmAnd, Firefox, Telegram, RedditIsFun, Linux Deploy, AFWall+, AdAway, Barcode Scanner, ConnectBot, Quasseldroid, some games like Lichess and Anuto TD, and a bunch of other tools that I use less frequently. Closed source is what I paid for, so fairly trustworthy as well (Spotify; Es File Explorer and Smart Audiobook Player). There are of course a few remaining ones like Google Play Store (I have F-Droid next to it) and Google Maps for traffic (use it 2-3x a month maybe).

Why don't more people use open source apps? I don't know, it's kind of weird since Android is a much bigger audience than, say, a Linux desktop. (On my laptop I don't think I use a single closed source thing anymore, at least not regularly.) I guess Android has a similar market environment as Windows instead of the open source ecosystem that surrounds Linux desktops.

I suppose it's like asking why websites are almost never open source. Why indeed?

Since an iOS device isn't a general purpose computer (you can't compile and run your own programs) many people don't appreciate the difference.

Because end-users don't care about open source, and developers like to make money instead of getting trivially cloned.

Here you go, not a popular app, but recent https://github.com/birkir/kvikmyndr-app/

React native with Firebase as realtime backend. Also has code push for OTA updates, mobx for state management, etc.

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