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Comment by disiplus | Hacker News Reader

This weekend I needed to send a few PNGs by email. They were huge, so I figured I’d just grab an image compressor from the Play Store.

I checked out five different apps, each with millions of downloads. Every single one was riddled with data collection prompts and stuffed with ads.

Fine, I thought, I’ll pay to remove the ads. But the options were:

- “Free trial” that defaults into a $5/month subscription

- Or a $19 “lifetime” purchase

It’s so clearly designed to trick people into a recurring subscription for what’s essentially nothing. These apps are just wrappers around existing Android libraries. And if you check the reviews, they’re obviously bought.

This was literally the first time in a year I tried to download something from the Play Store, and the experience was so bad I just gave up and solved it faster in the browser instead.

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These apps do exactly that, but are not easy to find from the F-Droid app (I had to use a search engine to find the first one):

https://f-droid.org/packages/mobi.omegacentauri.SendReduced

https://f-droid.org/packages/com.caydey.ffshare

Oh, and also, specifically for PNG optimization: https://f-droid.org/packages/com.wrmndfzzy.atomize

Obligatory mention: ImagePipe[0]. It lets you compress pictures and edit them. You can share images to ImagePipe and it automatically shows a dialog to share compressed versions with another app (hence the "Pipe" -- it's a pipeline!)

[0]: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/de.kaffeemitkoffein.imagepip...

Here is another one: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/ru.tech.imageresizershrinker...

It also has a bunch of other features

This is why I find the thesis that Google and Apple are good stewards hilarious if not malicious. There is absolutely nothing safe about their app stores. Certainly not more safe than something like f-droid.

Are Google and Apple's stores safer than the open web? It really doesn't seem like it, in a lot of ways.

I strongly don't think they are, because the ability to be invasive to the user with a native app is much higher. There is also a stronger financial incentive to do so since payments are easy.

And that's before we consider the much stronger user control presented by the open web. I can run an extension like uMatrix and take back control of my browser. On mobile now I can't even proxy and inspect the network requests that the apps are making without resorting to insane hackery tricks.

The more these things evolve, The more against native apps I am becoming.

Importantly, I think it's much more obvious what you're doing with a web app when you upload data. There's an erroneous belief when you're using native app that the data you provide to it never leaves the device. That might be the case, but even in cases where the native app isn't just a shim to do something through a service, there's little guarantee they aren't utilizing your data for their own purposes, legally (e.g. Adobe) or not.

This isn't unique to mobile vs desktop, but from my experience people use those different device types with different levels of care. It's possible app stores play into this by giving people an incorrect sense of security about aspects of application usage and updating that they don't actually provide.

There is a cost to a centralized app store that I never hear anybody talk about, which is that due to the perception of safety, it becomes a very juicy target for anybody that wants to distribute malware (or even just exploitative apps that e.g. charge $5 a week for a flashlight). If you can get over the wall, then you get access to a very lucrative market.

My personal hypothesis is this is the reason that app stores are filled with so much trash. The app store provides a mechanism of discoverability that would otherwise never be available to such apps.

And this then leads to what you're talking about, which is the stores actually feel less safe than the open web.

I feel like this is disingenuous. I have never used F-droid, but it seems they only publish open source apps and they take the initiative selecting them.

This isn't a good app store for the majority of app developers, since they wouldn't be able to publish there out of their own accord.

It isn't an invite only club. Anyone can submit an existing application[0] and an app author can provide a metadata pack to speed up the process. They have some requirements to accept but it isn't a situation where a developer is just waiting around for the letter of invite to arrive[1].

[0] https://f-droid.org/en/contribute/ [1] https://f-droid.org/en/docs/Submitting_to_F-Droid_Quick_Star...

You can also use other repos than F-Droid's if you want to get apps from elsewhere.

But it's an open-source only club, that severely limits the sort of developer that can have their application published in that store at all.

Yes browser is a really good tool for utilities like this actually.

But also I suppose that f-droid doesn't have paid reviews or well, everything in f-droid is mostly open source, so I am curious if there are apps in f-droid that could've well suited your need.

I just search on whatever I want on duckduckgo,"open source X android app" or "open source alternativeto Y" or just directly trying to search it in f-droid too.

Not exactly end-user friendly, but this is exactly why I use Termux so much. I had the same image optimisation requirement so I just installed imagemagick via Termux and converted the images. Feels more easier to me to use standard Linux tools via Termux than go down a wild goose chase trying various bloated apps.

This is the wonderful state of the App EcoSystem that Google wants to "gatekeep" - so ppl are forced to swallow shit, tug their forelock and smile at the overlord. I wonder whether Termux will be able to renew its developer registration in the future.

Next time you can also use magic wormhole.

KDE Connect is an open source party pack of system to system tools.

Another option is to block ads using Netguard.

and GSconnect is the Gnome roll, they're interoperable and great!

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