>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.