Hacker News Reader

Comment by techntoke | Hacker News Reader

I've had no issues with F-Droid. What issues have you had?

I had enough issues with Androids over the years and switch to iPhone, I consider the slightly more "closed" ecosystem a feature, not a bug.

I work with free software too so this was a very conscious decision for me.

Run open-source software everywhere else though.

What do you think makes open platforms an issue for mobile phones and not an issue for other devices?

I don't believe this issues you're facing come from android being open, but from google's poor design decisions like granting network access to apps by default.

Apple can do open platforms right if it wanted. It doesn't have to do them poorly like google.

I was under the impression F-Droid only hosts free open source software?

That's the impression Wikipedia seems to give:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-Droid

So, for my use case: I want to run some proprietary software, F-Droid will be insufficient.

Happy to be proven wrong.

Yes, however in cases like that an app store that only distributes officially signed packages and does some scanning as well as allows community to report issues should handle issues for packages that aren't open source. Nothing stopping something like that from existing if app creators wanted to start using it.

For the official/default repos, yes.

You can add custom repositories in the fdroid app, as I understand it anyone can host a repo and put whatever they like on it.

F-droid did wade into the free speech debate in relatively recent history by banning an app. I neither condone nor condemn this action but some people (probably very few given that f-droid itself is rather fringe) were probably put off by it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com