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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

I am not sure why it needs to be called a donation. Just let the in-app purchase unlock some cosmetics in the app like games do. You weren't going to deduct the donation from your taxes anyway.

I am curious how this ends up working out. Google takes a cut of the donations now... but the process of buying is probably easier. So maybe it will increase donation revenue, and make it easier to support free software.

(Taking a step back; it is pretty weird to have apps opening links to web pages that take your credit card number. The app store operators are right to view that with suspicion because I'm sure that for every legitimate open source project, there are a million phishing scams.)

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Open source developers shouldn't be forced to lock away additional functionality in their apps, or resort to special tricks just to be able to receive donations for their projects.

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

Completely agree. I do not want to restrict any users.

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

Would it be acceptable to Google if the only perk of buying an IAP was a little icon on the screen saying "contributor" or something?

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

it's not the verbiage it's the 30% cut that google is missing when using a donation link

Oh, I see, thanks

I don’t know much about Android, but is the Play store necessary? If it isn’t, then isn’t that independence from FAANG control?

That's like telling a convenience store owner that they're "independent" of Visa and Mastercard. Yeah sure, good luck with that.

It isn't [1] but an average Joe doesn't know about alternatives and what's worse doesn't care about them because he's not affected by Google's foul play (or at least he thinks he isn't).

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

While I see what you are saying, it doesn't need to be "locked away functionality". You could like "sell" badges. $10 """buys""" a bronze badge, $30 a silver etc, whose only functionality is to be listed in some irrelevant "thanks for your support" view.

> …are allowed on Google Play.

Until some morning when suddenly, they're not!

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

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

Is that still technically open source compatible?

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.

Better yet, just charge a dollar for the app. Link from the primary website to the app store, so people can buy the right one.

No thanks. If I'm donating to a good cause, I don't want the App Mafia taking a 30% cut. That just reinforces this bad behavior.

It's sort of a convenience fee. I agree with your App Mafia take but my guess is folks that can't be troubled to use F-Droid probably weren't going to donate in the first place.

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.

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

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

so the App Mafia is supposed to host your app for free? provide the bandwidth to download it for free ? give visibility to your app thru search in the store for free ?

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

Ok, let's do the math:

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.

Google also does the work of keeping fake versions of your app out of the store.

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.

Android is worth sh*t without any apps. I consider providing a market for apps and managing the quality of the market is their responsibility, business expense not developers.

Remember that creating a Google Play account already costs $20, so for the most people the distribution costs are far more than covered.

you completely ignore the #1 cost: human cost to setup your vps, manage it, backups and whatnot etc. you gotta take all costs into account.

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

Human cost is not really very well measurable.

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.

If they don't like free apps, then they should stop hosting free apps if they want that 30% tax so much.

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.

>> Just let the in-app purchase unlock some cosmetics in the app like games do.

> 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.

> "Just let the in-app purchase unlock some cosmetics in the app like games do."

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.

> You weren't going to deduct the donation from your taxes anyway.

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.)

And also, if you receive goods or services in exchange for your donation, you need to discount your deduction by the fair market value of those goods and services.

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

Asking consideration from a platform based heavily on OSS isn't unreasonable. Especially considering Google would benefit from the improvements those donations could spur.

> Just let the in-app purchase unlock some cosmetics in the app like games do.

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.

You might not have to actually lock anything away. It might be acceptable to "unlock" a theme that you could otherwise just install in some other way, or there might be some other workaround.

Like another poster said, unlock a text box, in the settings, or about page, or wherever, saying: "Thank you for your support!"

An easy way to let people know how to donate without links is just use plaintext on a page.

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.

>I am not sure why it needs to be called a donation. Just let the in-app purchase unlock some cosmetics in the app like games do. You weren't going to deduct the donation from your taxes anyway.

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

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