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Comment by danpalmer | Hacker News Reader

I'm biased, but I don't think less trustworthy is a fair assessment. I think you can suggest that open source software provides a different trust model than closed source and distributed by Play, but to conclude it's less trustworthy is a real stretch.

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The vast majority of software on Google Play is absolute spyware-laden slop. There are turstworthy apps, sure, but they are drops in an ocean. F-Droid’s trustworthy-to-ad-ridden-slop ratio is pretty much definitionally lower than Google’s, by virtue of it being actually curated. That everything on it is libre and they are working hard on reproducible builds just makes it all the better.

This is a bunch of opinion though. I'm not saying I disagree, but I do think it's bad faith to state as fact what is opinion. Is Play a "walled garden" or is it not curated? It can't be both depending on what suits the argument. You may disagree with the policies, but suggesting there are no policies in favour user privacy is just false. You may think they aren't enforced sufficiently, but again this is opinion. The policies are there.

F-Droid has the benefit that it essentially doesn't have to deal with malicious actors. It's very easy to have a high quality library when there are no malicious actors.

It can be both - a walled garden full of malware, that rejects many apps which are not malware.

Sure but it's very obviously not that, so we're back to opinion and bad faith arguments.

Um, it obviously is that. Have you used it recently?

Have you just presented your opinion as a fact?

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