Hacker News Reader

Comment by dessant | Hacker News Reader

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

View on HN

>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.

> …are allowed on Google Play.

Until some morning when suddenly, they're not!

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com